away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of
June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant
gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day
that is

"simply perfect from its own resource,
As to the bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air."

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast
the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of
deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks
of himself, by anticipation, as of one

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is--that his grave is green."

Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the
yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an
entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and
the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be
associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine,
and Emerson's with the rhodora.

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there
are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as
these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_:

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;