BRYANT AND LONGFELLOW. 
717 
in 1848, Mr. Bryant expressed his high sense 
of its beauty in the columns of the " Evening 
Post." His friend, Richard H. Dana, of Cam- 
bridge, was disposed to think that he had esti- 
mated it too highly ; but Mr. Bryant wrote a 
letter to Dana, and thus justified his opinion : 
■v "New York, Sept. 12, 1848. 
" * * * I did not)', I aiTk sure, make any such com- 
parison of Longfellow 's ' Evapgeline ' with other Amer- 
ican poems as you have ascribed to me. What I said 
was that it had given me altogether more pleasure in 
the reading than any poem which had lately appeared, 
— than any poem which had been published within 
several years. And this is true. I have never made 
any attempt to analyze the source of this pleasure. 
The poem interested and affected me strangely. What- 
ever may be said of parts, they are all harmonized by 
a poetic feeling of great sweetness and gentleness 
which belongs to the author. My ear admits, nay 
delights in, the melody of the hexameter as he has 
managed it, and I, no doubt, expressed my satisfac- 
tion with the poem in warm terms. * * * " 
Mr. Bryant's ear may have delighted in 
Longfellow's hexameters, but we may add 
that it does not seem to have delighted in his 
own ; for when he began his translation of 
Homer's " Iliad," he began it in hexameters, 
but before long he found them impracticable, 
and he was glad to recur to what we think 
infinitely better in English, — the iambic pen- 
tameter, or blank verse, as it is called. None 
the less, Mr. Bryant's hexameters, in our judg- 
ment, limp along as readily as those of anybody 
else — even Longfellow's, which he so much 
enjoyed. Let the reader take a specimen 
from the fifth book of the " Odyssey," the 
description of Ulysses coming to the grotto 
of Calypso — a passage, by the way, which 
Pope has rendered more charmingly than 
almost any other in the epic : 
" Now, when he reached in his course that isle far 
off in the ocean, ' 
iirth from the dark-blue swell of the waves he 
stepped on the sea-beach; 
•Jnward he went till he came to the broad-roofed 
grot where the goddess 
Made her abode, the bright-hair^ nymph. In hei 
dwelling he found her ; / 
There on the hearth a huge fire glowed, and far 
through the island 
Floated the fume of frankingfense and cedar wood 
cloven and blazing. 
Meanwhile sweetly her song was heard from the 
cave, as the shuttle 
Ran through the threads from her diligent hand, 
and the long web lengthened ; 
All round the grotto a grove uprose, with its verd- 
urous shadow. 
Alders and poplars together, and summits ol sweet- 
smelling cypress. 
'Midst them the broad-winged birds of the air built 
nests in the branches, 
Falcons and owls of the wood, and crows with far- 
sounding voices, 
Haunting the shores of the deep for their food. On 
the rock of the cavern 
Qambered a vine, in a rich, wild growth, and heavy 
with clusters. 
Four clear streams from the cliffs poured out their 
glittering waters. 
Near to each other, and wandered — meandering 
hither and thither ; 
Round them lay meadows where violets glowed, and 
tlie ivy o'er-mantled 
Earth with its verdure. A god, who here on the 
isle had descended, . ' 
Well might wonder and gaze with delight on 'fne 
beauty before him." 
While speaking of Mr. Bryant, let us ex- 
press our regret to learn that he «as left no 
unpublished poem of any great length or 
merit behind him. It was generally inferred 
from the phrases "A Fragment " or " From an 
unpublished Poem," which frequently appear 
in his printed works, that he had reserved a 
magnum optis for posthumous publication : but 
such was not the case. Three times in his life 
he appears to have projected a great narrative- 
poem, but he was never successfpl in carry- 
ing out his intentions. Once, when he was still 
a young man, he conceived the plan of an 
Indian epic, the scene of which was to be 
laid in the old Pontoosuck forests, amid which 
he was bom, but he wrote only an introduc- 
tion to it, in the manner of Scott's " Lay of 
the Last Minstrel " and " The Lady of the 
Lake." A little later, about 1823, while a prac- 
ticing lawyer in Great Barrington, he began 
a romantic tale in verse, which was to be 
called " The Spectre Ship," and was founded 
on a story told by Cotton Mather, in his 
Magnalia Christi Americana," of a ship 
that sailed out of New Haven Bay, with a 
large number of returning pilgrims on ])oard, 
and was never heard of again, although the 
form of it was seen for many years afterward 
hovering about the coasts, particularly in 
stormy weather. Mr. Longfellow wrote some 
lines for " Graham's Magazine on the same 
subject,- beginning : 
' '^-lA leather's Magnalia Christi, 
, KJf the old cijlipnial time, 
b& I'ound in prose the legend 
i|it|is jhece pet down in rhyme.'" 
Mr. Bryant \finished only about two hundred 
verses, and then threw them aside. 
Writing to Mr. Dana, who was continually 
urging him to^ undertake a more elaborate 
production than any he had yet written, Mr. 
Bryant says, undes date of Great Barrington, 
July 8, 1824 : ' \^ 
" * * * You inquire whether I have written any- 
thing except what I haye\^urnished to Parsons [of the 
"United States Literary Gazette"]. Nothing at all. 
I made an engagement with him with a view, in the 
first place, to earn something in addition to the emolu- 
ments of my profession, which, as you may suppose, 
are not very ample, and ?ri the second place, to keep 
my hand in, for I was verAneat discontinuing entirely 
the writing of verses. As for semng myself about the 
great work you mention, I knowi you make the sug- 
