XXXIV The Death of the Flowers
William Cullen Bryant (b. 1794, d. 1878) was born in Cummington, Mass. He entered Williams College at the age of sixteen, but was honorably dismissed at the end of two years. At the age of twenty-one he was admitted to the bar, and practiced his profession successfully for nine years. In 1826 he removed to New York, and became connected with the “Evening Post”—a connection which continued to the time of his death. His residence for more than thirty of the last years of his life was at Roslyn, Long Island. He visited Europe several times; and in 1849 he continued his travels into Egypt and Syria, In all his poems, Mr. Bryant exhibits a remarkable love for, and a careful study of, nature. His language, both in prose and verse, is always chaste, correct, and elegant. “Thanatopsis,” perhaps the best known of all his poems, was written when he was but nineteen. His excellent translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” of Homer and some of his best poems, were written after he had passed the age of seventy. He retained his powers and his activity till the close of his life.
1. The melancholy days are come,
The saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods,
And meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove
The autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust,
And to the rabbit’s tread.
The robin and the wren are flown,
And from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood top calls the crow
Through all the gloomy day.
2. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers,
That lately sprang and stood
In brighter light and softer airs,
A beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves;
The gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds
With the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie;
But the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth
The lovely ones again.
3. The windflower and the violet,
They perished long ago,
And the brier rose and the orchis died
Amid the summer’s glow;
But on the hill, the golden-rod,
And the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook,
In autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven,
As falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone
From upland, glade, and glen,
4. And now, when comes the calm, mild day,
As still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee
From out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard,
Though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light
The waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers
Whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood
And by the stream no more.
5. And then I think of one, who in
Her youthful beauty died,
The fair, meek blossom that grew up
And faded by my side.
In the cold, moist earth we laid her,
When the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely
Should have a life so brief;
Yet not unmeet it was that one,
Like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful,
Should perish with the flowers.
DEFINITIONS.—1. Wail’ing, lamenting, mourning. Sear, dry, withered. 3. Glade, an open place in the forest. Glen, a valley, a dale. 4. Un-meet’, improper, unfitting.