man," "one mighty sepulchre." So here, he calls it
. . . one vast chamber of the dead:
A mighty mausoleum, where
Nature lay shrouded: and the tread
Of man gives out a hollow sound,
As from a tomb.
The Journey of Life is of all Bryant's published poems the one which most closely resembles Musings; in fact, it is the expression, condensed into three brief stanzas, of the same succession of thoughts and moods. To make this entirely clear one has but to quote the first two lines of each stanza,—
Beneath the waning moon I walk at night
And muse on human life . . .
The trampled earth returns a sound of fear—
A hollow sound, as if I walked on tombs . . .
And I, with faltering foot-steps, journey on,
Watching the stars that roll the hours away . . .
After Bryant had written The Journey of Life (and we know that this was in 1826), he perhaps laid aside the poem Musings, thinking that he had given the essence of it in his briefer lyric. We may be permitted,
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