60

65

70

In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure?

All that breathe

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come,
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,

The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron, and maid,
And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man,
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves

75 To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

80 Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

The thought of the poem is very simple. The contemplation of death in the light of nature reveals two facts all have died; therefore all shall die. In death we join a great multitude, and we shall be followed by multitudes. We should, therefore, meet the universal lot with fortitude and dignity. It may seem a simple lesson, but it is all that nature teaches us. The subject and its method of treatment place this poem in the class of "Elegiac" verse. It reminds us, in the general pensive tone, of Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." This serious, quiet contemplation of the sad facts of sorrow and death is one of

the characteristic features of the English poetry of the time just before Bryant; and it is of interest to see it appearing in this, perhaps the first important contribution of America to English poetry. The excellence of the poem lies in the appropriate and beautiful development of these simple thoughts. Such lines as these lift the reader out of the region of the commonplace into that of the imagination:

The hills

Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun.

Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
Through the still lapse of ages.

Lines 37-38.
Line 43.

Line 48.

Notice how the special aspect of hills and ocean appropriate to the thought of the poem is impressed upon us; and how, in line 48, the swift and unnoticed passage of time is expressed in the very sound of the letters. It is remarkable how the thought is carried back to the beginning of the race, over all the world, and forward into the future. This is accomplished by the use of suggestive phrases, such as: "Barca's desert sands," line 51; "Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound," line 53; "As the long train of ages glide away," lines 66-67. A notable characteristic is the self-control, the reserve, shown throughout the poem. The point is never pressed too hard. The temptation to expand is always successfully resisted. It is the lack of this quality of reserve which makes Barlow's verse so tedious. The true poet would always rather suggest than describe; and he will always stop when the impression he desires is made.

The poem, as has been said, is in blank verse; and as Bryant is probably our greatest master in that form, it will be well to examine the versification carefully. The first eight lines scanned will serve as an example of the whole. I mark the accented syllables with the acute accent; and in cases where the stress is divided between the two syllables of the foot, use the grave accent, leaving the unaccented syllables unmarked. The curved line marks the cesura, or point, in each line where the sense calls for a pause. The right management of the cesura, so that the sense pause shall correspond to the rhythmical pause, is very difficult in verse. If the pause occurs at the same point in each line, the effect will be unpleasantly monotonous, or singsong. On the other hand, if the pauses are too far apart, the reader has to take breath in the middle of the line, and that will sometimes spoil the musical effect. In this, as in all good verse, the rhetorical pauses come where they give variety and beauty to the rhythm. With very few exceptions each foot is a perfect iambus. The exceptions, however, are frequent enough to avoid the monotony which absolute uniformity would cause. The word "visible" in the second line occasions one exception. Here, in order to make an iambus, the syllables must be crowded together, or the second syllable slurred. It is probably better to give each syllable its full value, making with the following word, "forms," an anapest. The same is true of the word "various" in the third line. So the first word of the sixth line forms a trochee, the

stress coming upon the first syllable. Such a change not only gives variety, but emphasizes the change of thought which comes at that point of the poem.

There are some beautiful examples of assonance in "Thanatopsis." Notice the effect of the vowel sounds in lines 14, 18, 36, 53-54. In the lastmentioned especially see how the open o sounds suggest the rolling of the broad river, and the close a and e sounds the dashings of its rapids. Line 54 is also characterized by alliteration, which, though not very prominent in this poem, and certainly not obtrusive, is yet very skilfully and effectively employed. Notice how the consonant sounds are repeated in lines 31, 48, and 78.

In some cases, perhaps in many, these finer effects of assonance and alliteration are due to the instinctive choice of words, resulting from the poet's musical ear, rather than to conscious selection. Yet many of our great poets have spent hours over a single line in order to make the sound and sense more perfectly harmonize. It is interesting and instructive in this relation to notice the changes which Bryant made in "Thanatopsis" in successive editions. Thus the line already cited, "Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste," was not in the first edition. line 31 "thy" was changed to "thine," probably to avoid the unpleasant combination of vowels, "thy eternal." Lines 50-51 were worked over several times. "Pierce the Barcan wilderness," "The Barcan desert pierce," "Traverse Barca's desert sands," are the varying forms which show how the poet labored

In