Bryant
pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world--bard of the
river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents
as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders--always lurkingly fond of
threnodies--beginning and ending his long career with chants of death,
with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching
the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties--morals as grim and
eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus. While
in Whittier, with his special themes--(his outcropping love of heroism
and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses at times like the measur'd
step of Cromwell's old veterans)--in Whittier lives the zeal, the
moral energy, that founded New England--the splendid rectitude and
ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox--I must not, dare not, say the
wilfulness and narrowness--though doubtless the world needs now,
and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and
wilfulness.
MILLET'S PICTURES LAST ITEMS
_April 18_.--Went out three or four miles to the house of Quincy Shaw,
to see a collection of J. F. Millet's pictures. Two rapt hours. Never
before have I been so penetrated by this kind of expression. I stood
long and long before "the Sower." I believe what the picture-men
designate "the first Sower," as the artist executed a second copy, and
a third, and, some think, improved in each. But I doubt it. There
is something in this that could hardly be caught again--a sublime
murkiness and original pent fury.
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