The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Of the poetry of these exquisite lines, the melancholy sweetness of the
sentiment, the delicate beauty of the versification, we need not say one
word, but we claim a moment's attention to their fidelity to truth, and
the accuracy of observation which they evince. The golden-rod and the
aster are the characteristic autumn flowers in that zone of our
continent in which New England is embraced, and the sunflower is a very
common flower at that season. That lovely child of the declining year,
the fringed gentian, would doubtless have been brought in with her fair
sisters, had it not been for her somewhat unmanageable name. Bryant has
written some beautiful stanzas to this flower, but in them he only calls
it a "blossom." And how fine a landscape is condensed into the two
delicious hues which we have Italicized! and yet no one ever walked into
a New-England wood on a late day in autumn without hearing the nuts drop
upon the withered leaves, and seeing the streams flash through the
smoke-like haze which hangs over the landscape.
But winter, especially our clear and sparkling New-England winter, has
its scenes of splendor and aspects of beauty; and the poet would not be
true to his calling, if he failed to recognize them.
"Come when the rains
Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice,
While the slant sun of February pours
Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach!
The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps,
And the broad arching portals of the grove
Welcome thy entering. Look! the massy
Trunks are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray,
Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven,
Is studded with its trembling water-drops
That glimmer with an amethystine light;
But round the parent stem the long, low boughs
Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide
The glassy floor."
There are many more lines equally good, but we have not space for them.
This is a description of winter as we have it here, compounded of the
elements of extreme cold, a transparent atmosphere, and brilliant
sunshine. No English poet can see such a scene, at least in his own
country: Ambrose Phillips did see something like it in Sweden, and
described it in a poetical epistle to the Earl of Dorset, which is much
the best thing he ever wrote, and has a pulse of truth and life in it,
from the simple fact that he saw something new, and told his noble
correspondent what he saw.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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