There being no doubt as to the veracity of his pictures, what shall we say of that other quality, the moral tone which pervades them? That, too, is of a kind men will not soon outgrow. It inculcates courage, patience, fortitude, trust; it springs from the optimism of one who believes in the ultimate triumph of good, not because he can prove it, but because his whole being revolts at the thought of evil triumphant. He has the stoic’s dread of flinching before any shock of misfortune, the Christian’s dread of the taint of sin. Here are two ideals, each the complement of the other, which the world cannot outgrow, and the poet who--pondering on a fringed gentian or the flight of a waterfowl, or on a rivulet bickering among its grasses--found new incitements to courage and virtue, thereby associated himself with the eternal. To interpret nature morally in this fashion, which is Bryant’s fashion, is to rise far above the level of the common didacticism of our pulpits. Professional moralists go to nature for figures of speech to furnish forth their sermons and religious verse, as they go to their kitchen garden for vegetables; but they do not enter Bryant’s world. Moreover, in painting the scenery of the Hampshire hills, and in saturating his descriptions with the moral tonic I have spoken of, Bryant became the representative of a phase of New England life which has had an incalculable influence on the development of this nation. The mitigated Spartanism amid which his youth was passed bred those colonists who carried New England standards with them to the shores of the Pacific. A Puritan by derivation and environment, Bryant was by training and conviction a Unitarian,--a combination which made him in a sense the exemplar both of the austerity which had characterized New England ideals in the past, and of the liberalism which during this century has nowhere found more strenuous supporters than in New England. On many positive grounds, therefore, Bryant’s title to fame rests; he was one of Nature’s men, he shed moral health, he uttered the ideals of a great race in a transitional epoch. His temperament, in making his poetic product small, gave him yet another hostage against oblivion. The poet who, having so many claims to the consideration of posterity, can also plead brevity, need not worry himself about what is called literary immortality. Bryant’s typical and best work is comprised in a dozen poems, the longest not exceeding 140 lines. Read “Thanatopsis,” “The Yellow Violet,” “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” “To a Waterfowl,” “Green River,” “A Winter Piece,” “The Rivulet,” “A Forest Hymn,” “The Past,” “To a Fringed Gentian,” “The Death of the Flowers,” and “The Battlefield,” and you have Bryant’s message; the rest of his work either echoes the notes already sounded in these, or represents uncharacteristic, and therefore transitory, moods.