Bryant appears to me to be a poet of a less attractive but somewhat higher class than Longfellow. His versification is mannered, and his expressions are directly formed on European models, but his sense of style was so consistent that his careful work came to be recognisable. His poetry is a hybrid of two English stocks, closely related; he belongs partly to the Wordsworth of _Tintern Abbey_, partly to the Coleridge of _Mont Blanc_. The imaginative formula is Wordsworth's, the verse is the verse of Coleridge, and having in very early youth produced this dignified and novel flower, Bryant did not try to blossom into anything different, but went on cultivating the Coleridge-Wordsworth hybrid down to the days of Rossetti and of Villanelles. But Wordsworth and Coleridge had not stayed at the _Mont Blanc_ and _Tintern Abbey_ point. They went on advancing, developing, altering, and declining to the end of their days. The consequence is that the specimens of the Bryant variety do not strike us as remarkably like the general work of Wordsworth or of Coleridge. As I have said, although he borrowed definitely and almost boldly, in the first instance, the very persistence of Bryant's style, the fact that he was influenced once by a very exquisite and noble kind of poetry, and then never any more, through a long life, by any other verse, combined with his splendid command of those restricted harmonies the secret of which he had conquered, made Bryant a very interesting and valuable poet. But in discussing his comparative position, it appears to me to be impossible to avoid seeing that his want of positive novelty--the derived character of his sentiment, his verse, and his description--is absolutely fatal to his claim to a place in the foremost rank. He is exquisitely polished, full of noble suavity and music, but his irreparable fault is to be secondary, to remind us always of his masters first, and only on reflection of himself. In this he contrasts to a disadvantage with one who is somewhat akin to him in temperament, Walter Savage Landor. We may admit that Byrant is more refined, more uniformly exquisite than Landor, but the latter has a flavour of his own, something quite original and Landorian, which makes him continue to live, while Byrant's reputation slowly fades away, like the stately crystal gables of an iceberg in summer. The "Water-Fowl" pursues its steady flight through the anthologies, but Bryant is not with the great masters of poetry. We ascend, I think, into a sphere where neither Bryant nor Longfellow, with all their art, have power to wing their way, when we read such verses as _Musketaquit, a goblin strong,_ _Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;_ _They lose their grief who hear his song,_ _And where he winds is the day of day._ _So forth and brighter fares my stream;_ _Who drinks it shall not thirst again;_ _No darkness stains its equal gleam,_ _And ages drop in it like rain._