excitement, it has enduring qualities. The spiritual
preoccupations of many a voiceless generation of New England
Puritans found a tongue at last in this late-born son of theirs.
The determining mood of his best poems, from boyhood to old age,
was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal flow of
things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists.
This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl,"
"The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The Crowded
Street," "The Flood of Years." All of these tell the same story
of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in
the same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the
thought as calmly, as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote
"The Flood of Years" at eighty-two. He is a master of
description, though he has slight gift for narrative or drama,
and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere in his
verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills in Western
Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches
kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion
have their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human
intellect or passion and belonging to another mode of being,
something "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun."

A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its
portraits of the minor figures in the literary life of New York
up to the time of the Civil War. But the scope of the present
volume does not permit sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of
Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P. Willis and Morris and
Woodworth. Some of these are today only "single-poem" men, like
Payne, the author of "Home Sweet Home," just as Key, the author
of "The Star-Spangled Banner," is today a "single-poem" man of an