the British colonies. The bill provided for an apprenticeship system of seven years for field slaves and five years for domestic slaves, three-fourths of the time to be given to the former masters of the slaves. The bill gave 20,000,000 pounds in compensation to the planters. This bill became the "Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the industry of the manumitted slaves; and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the services of such slaves." The title of the Act suggests its main provisions. The three principles of the act were the abolition of slavery, the apprenticeship system, and compensation to the planters. Thus after a period of agitation covering almost half a century, slavery in the British colonies was no more.

Nature in Bryant's Poetry

NORMAN FOERSTER

Associate Professor of English in the University of North Carolina

Bryant's attachment to nature, like Fenimore Cooper's, was largely the result of his boyhood environment. "I was always from my earliest years," he wrote in his autobiography, "a delighted observer of external nature-the splendors of a winter daybreak over the wide wastes of snow seen from our windows, the glories of the autumn woods, the gloomy approaches of the thunderstorm, and its departure amid sunshine and rainbows, the return of spring, with its flowers, and the first snowfall of winter." Like most other poets of nature, he enjoyed her charms thoughtlessly, and for that reason all the more intensely, in his early years; and though his enjoyment deepened as time went on, he ever retained a wistful recollection of the days when spontaneity was unmixed with introspection. In the remote Berkshire country of his boyhood, where something in him responded eagerly to the loveliness and serenity of the venerable yet youthful forest, the desire to be a poet visited him early. In the presence of orchard and meadow, of brook and river, of primeval forests vast and dark, of hill upon hill stretching toward Greylock and the other mountains, he felt an incitement that he could not deny: mingled with the beauty of nature were "visions of verse and of fame":

"Each gaze at the glories of earth, sky, and ocean,
To my kindled emotions was wind over flame."

Had he spent his early years in a thronging city, his poetry, if he had written any, would doubtless have been very unlike "Thanatopsis" and "A Forest Hymn." The background of all his verse, in a sense its origin, is the great Pontusac forest. But if nature drew him to poetry, it is equally true that poetry drew him to nature. The poets, he tells us in his autobiography, fostered in him the enjoyment of nature—especially Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads caused "a thousand

springs

to gush up at once in my heart" and changed "the face of nature, of a sudden into a strange freshness and life." It is probable that Wordsworth remained his favorite poet throughout his life.

At first, political events were the main themes of his verse. As a boy of thirteen the future editor of the Evening Post published a satire entitled "The Embargo," a bitter attack on Jefferson and his peace policy. But in the second edition, printed in the next year, were included an ode to the Connecticut River and some curious verses on "Draught." By the time Bryant was seventeen years old he had read the Lyrical Ballads, and, rejecting the unemotional measures of the eighteenth century in favor of free blank verse, had found his proper means of expression: the result was "Thanatopsis," which is a view of nature as well as of death. Of the later poems that are concerned primarily with nature it would be absurd to present a list-such a list would resemble, and scarcely exceed in interest, a table of contents. In the course of a few years he had published "The Yellow Violet," "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," "To a Waterfowl," "Green River," "A Winter Piece," "The West Wind," "A Walk at Sunset," "The Rivulet," "March," "Summer Wind." And if we turn to the closing years of his long life, we find him still writing on "The Path," "The Return of the Birds," "My Autumn Walk," "Among the Trees," "May Evening." Relatively to the quantity of his verse, Bryant wrote more poems of nature than anyone else in American literature.

Of the qualities of his poems of nature, most readers of Bryant, apparently following Stedman, have emphasized the "elementary" aspect of his themes and of his mood,—his sense of earth, air, and water, as distinguished from an interest in insect, bird, and tree; and although something is said of his accuracy in detail, one receives the impression that he tended to avoid detail on account of his preference for the universal. From "Thanatopsis," his most popular poem, one might very well reach this conclusion, since in the entire poem he mentions only the oak-no other tree, and no bird or flower. But as a matter of fact, Bryant, if not often minutely descriptive, is quite as concrete as most American poets, and mentions more

species of birds, flowers, and trees than any other American poet-more than Lowell, Whittier, or even Whitman. Insects alone seemed of slight interest to him, or perhaps he regarded them as out of place in verse. Only the bee occurs with any frequency, and even in this case one suspects that the alliterative value of the word when coupled with "brooks" or "birds" or "blossoms" had something to do with the matter. Of mammals, he introduced into his poetry, like Whitman, an assortment that would suffice for a zoological garden. The deer, the squirrel, the wolf, or the panther graces almost every page; the deer, indeed, if one may judge by the number of poems in which it appears, was to him a symbol of the great forests that kindled his imagination. Birds, whose music rather than color attracted him, he used in his verse more often than any other American poet save Whitman,-in all, some thirty species, and he devoted entire poems to the song sparrow, the English sparrow, the bobolink, and a nondescript waterfowl: the last of these being the inspiration of what is probably his best poem. Of trees and flowers his knowledge, and the use of his knowledge, was still more extensive. "He was a passionate botanist," said one who knew him well. The trees of his poetry number almost thirty, and many of them— in particular the oak, the beech, the pine, the maple—are used repeatedly, the oak, for instance, occurring in some twenty poems. Lastly, the flowers of his poetry, though but a small bouquet compared with those he could name, are about fortyfive in number, and his use of them indicates a faithfulness of observation that wellnigh exceeds Thoreau's. Three-the yellow violet, the purple gentian, and the painted cup-are the themes of separate poems. Of the forty-five species it is rather odd that none, save the violet, reappear more than once or twice; when he wanted a flower, he generally used a new one-the water-lily, the dandelion, meadowsweet, and a dozen others blossom only once in the poetical work of over seventy

years.

Clearly, though a poet of the elements, of "The earth, the air, the deep,"

Bryant did not disdain to mention in his poetry the concrete details of nature, to mention them, moreover, both incessantly

Like

and accurately. And, we may add, sympathetically. other modern poets, he recognized in nature, not only a thing of beauty, but also a precious healing power, which seemed to him to stream into his spirit through the senses. Bryant's genius, after all, was by no means altogether didactic and mortuary; sensuous pleasure, despite the alleged "coldness" of his temperament, is prominent in his relation to external nature. That so little has been said of his sensuousness is due, not to its absence, but to the moral inflexibility and orthodoxy that held his senses in check. The kind of sensuousness that one observes in Whitman, and even in Thoreau, one shall find no trace of in Bryant. But that his senses did not respond with normal eagerness to the attractions of nature is refuted by "Green River," the "Inscription," and a dozen other poems. No one, I believe, has pointed out his particular pleasure in the wind, especially the mild touch of the summer wind. Nine entire poems are devoted to a conscious celebration of the wind: "The West Wind," "Summer Wind," "After a Tempest," "The Hurricane," "The Evening Wind," "The Winds," "The Voice of Autumn," "The Wind and Stream," "May Evening;" and in most of his other poems the wind is a prominent theme. "Green River" opens characteristically, "When breezes are soft." More than in anything else, he found the healing power of nature in the wind:

That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm
To thy sick heart."

He meditates on this balm in two entire poems, "The Evening Wind" and "May Evening." Bird song, the music of brooks, "and soft caress of the fresh sylvan air," he writes of his boyhood days, raised his low spirits and invited him to lose himself in day-dreams; and in "Autumn Woods" he exclaims:

"Ah! 'twere a lot too blest

Forever in thy colored shades to stray;
Amid the kisses of the soft southwest
To roam and dream for aye."

The sensuousness of such writing may lack the passion and fine excess of certain romantic poets, but it is surely pro