After this came Caroline Downing, with her favourite bard Bryant, the poet of nature. But Bryant's song also is warm with patriotism, with faith in the future of America, and in her sublime mission. Thus, in that beautiful epic poem, “The Prairies,” in which he paints, as words can seldom paint, the illimitable western fields, in their sunbright, solitary beauty and grandeur, billowy masses of verdure and flowers waving in the wind; above these the vagrant clouds; and, higher still, the sunshine, gleaming above the vast scene, paradisaic, splendid, and rich, but silent and desolate as the desert. The silence, however, is broken. The poet hears a low humming. What is it? It is a bee, which flies forth over the flowery plain, and sucks the honey of the flowers. The busy bee becomes a prophet to the poet; and in its humming flight and its quiet activity he hears the advancing industry of the human race, which will extend itself over the prairies, transform them into a new Paradise, and cause new and yet more beautiful flowers to spring up:—
“From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice,
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn
Of sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows.”
Last of all, I come to the poems of Waldo Emerson,
small in dimensions, but great in their spirit and tone;
and read aloud a little dithyrambic poem, which is
characteristic of the individuality of the poet. Other
American poets speak to society; Emerson always merely
to the individual; but they all are to me as a breeze from
the life of the New World, in a certain illimitable vastness
of life, in expectation, in demand, in faith, and hope—a
something which makes me draw a deeper breath,
and, as it were, in a larger, freer world. Thus says
Emerson's poem:—
