1 Compare with this poem Wordsworth's 'To the Small Celandine,' and others.

Notice that Bryant addresses his verses to a distinctively American flower; as later he chooses an American bird, the bobolink, for the subject of a poem which is to be contrasted with Wordsworth's 'To the Skylark,' 'To the Green Linnet,' etc. Bryant gives the reason for this choice in a letter to his brother John, February 19, 1832: I saw some lines by you to the skylark. Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to draw your images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around you, unless you are professedly composing a description of some foreign country, when, of course, you will learn what you can from books. The skylark is an English bird, and an American who has never visited Europe has no right be in raptures about it.'

and successful warfare which he kept up at the head of a few daring followers, that they sent an officer to remonstrate with him for not coming into the open field and fighting like a gentleman and a Christian." (BRYANT.)

On the occasion of a reception given to Bryant in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1873, one of the speak ers said that the 'Song of Marion's Men' had been sung in many a Southern bivouac, and warmed the soldier's heart at many a Confederate camp-fire.' See Godwin's Life of Bryant, vol. ii, pp. 330, 331.

2 In the edition of Bryant's poems published in England in 1832, and edited by Washington Irving, this line was changed to

The foeman trembles in his camp. Considerable discussion over this change arose later in America, of which a full account can be found in Bige low's Life of Bryant, pp. 129–139.

'Tis life to guide the fiery barb
Across the moonlight plain;
'Tis life to feel the night-wind
That lifts the tossing mane.
A moment in the British camp -
A moment- and away
Back to the pathless forest,
Before the peep of day.

Grave men there are by broad Santee,
Grave men with hoary hairs;
Their hearts are all with Marion,

For Marion are their prayers.
And lovely ladies greet our band
With kindliest welcoming,
With smiles like those of summer,
And tears like those of spring.
For them we wear these trusty arms,
And lay them down no more
Till we have driven the Briton,
Forever, from our shore.

2831.

THE PRAIRIES1

50

60

1831.

THESE are the gardens of the Desert, these

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no

name

The Prairies. I behold them for the first, And heart swells, while the dilated my sight

Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they

stretch,

In airy undulations, far away,

As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,

1 See the account of Bryant's first visit to the West, in Godwin's Life, vol. i, pp. 282-286. Especially significant is a passage from Bryant's letter to Richard H. Dana: 'I have seen the great West, where I ate corn and hominy, slept in log houses, with twenty men, women, and children in the same room. . . . At Jacksonville, where my two brothers live, I got on a horse, and travelled about a hundred miles to the northward over the immense prairies, with scattered settlements, on the edges of the groves. These prairies, of a soft, fertile garden soil, and a smooth undulating surface, on which you may put a horse to full speed, covered with high, thinly growing grass, full of weeds and gaudy flowers, and destitute of bushes or trees, perpetually brought to my mind the idea of their having been once cultivated. They looked to me like the fields of a race which had passed away, whose enclosures and habitations had decayed, but on whose vast and rich plains, smoothed and levelled by tillage, the forest had not yet encroached.'