Not less conspicuous than his excellences are Bryant’s limitations. We may say of him that, like Wordsworth, he did not always overcome a tendency to emphasize the obvious, and that, like almost all contemplative poets, he sometimes made the didactic unnecessarily obtrusive. We have all heard parsons who, after finishing their sermon, sum it up in a valedictory prayer, with a hint as to its application, for the benefit of the Lord; equally superfluous, even for mortal readers, is the moral too often appended to a poem which is well able to convey its meaning without it. In this respect Bryant resembles most of our American poets, in whom didacticism has prevailed to an extent that will lessen their repute with posterity; for each generation manufactures more than enough of this commodity for its own consumption, and cannot be induced to try stale moralities left over from the fathers. Bryant’s self-control, the backbone of a character of high integrity, prevented him from indulging in emotions which, if they be not the substance of great poetry, are the color, the glow, which give great poetry its charm. He addresses the intellect; he has, if not heat, light; and he does not, as emotional poets sometimes do, play the intellect false or lead it astray. In his versification he is compact and stately, though occasionally stiff. He came at the end of that metrical drought which lasted from Milton’s death to Burns, when the instinct for writing musical iambics was lost, and, instead, men wrote in measured thuds, by rule. That phenomenon the psychologist should explain. How was it that a people lost, during a century and a half, its ear for metrical music, as if a violinist should suddenly prefer a tom-tom to a violin? Probably the exorbitant use of hymn and psalm singing, that came in with the Puritans, helped to degrade English poetry. The spirit which expelled emotion from worship, and destroyed whatever it could of the beauty of England’s churches, had no understanding for metrical harmony. Any poor shred of morality, the tritest dogmatic platitude, if stretched thin, chopped into the required number of feet, rhymed, and packed into six or eight stanzas, with clumsy variations on the doxology at the end, made a hymn, for the edification of persons whose object was worship and not beauty. As a means to unction, mere doggerel, sung out of tune, would serve as well as anything.