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Updated: June 15, 2025
But the mind has its necessities as well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an "Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a "Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" or a "Locksley Hall."
There are moments in the life of man when he stands face to face with nature, and sees her as she is, and himself as he is, and the relation of everything in the universe. Such a moment is fixed for all time in "Thanatopsis." It would be interesting to know what authors the youthful student read with most avidity and attention.
Fond as he had been of showing his earlier effusions to his father and others, the consciousness of having done something different and greater must have come upon him at this time, for it was only by accident, six years after the writing of Thanatopsis, that his father chanced to find it and the poem now called An Inscription Upon the Entrance to a Wood, among some papers in a desk the boy had used while at home.
What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult to write a poem like "Thanatopsis" if he took time enough, building up a line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing imagination.
What she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women politicians, don't you?"
When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.
From that time forth Rembrandt was regarded by the little art world of Leyden as a prodigy. Like William Cullen Bryant, who wrote "Thanatopsis" when scarcely eighteen, and writing for sixty years thereafter never equaled it, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote "The Blessed Damozel" at the same age, Rembrandt sprang into life full-armed.
His reputation in Europe proved his originality. The fact is, American poets have been only English "with a difference." Tennyson might have written the "Psalm of Life," Browning "Thanatopsis," but who could have written "Her Letter," or "Flynn of Virginia," or "Jim," or "Chiquita"? An American, flesh and bone, and none other.
"Do you pretend that Bryant is not a poet in the grain, and that the wondrous boy, Willis, was not also 'to the manner born? Read 'Thanatopsis, or are you acquainted with it already? I hardly think you can be. Read those scriptural poems." "A very smooth school-exercise the first, no more. There is not a heart-beat in the whole grind.
The way in which he read poetry may be gathered from the following extract from a letter to one of his comrades: "By the way, what do you think of Bryant as a poet, and especially of 'Thanatopsis? For my part, my admiration knows no bounds. There is an all-pervading love of nature, a calm and quiet but still deep sense of everything beautiful.
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