University of California Berkeley BRYANT AND THOREAU LJA.1HOHT HA TtfAY cfyryant and cffioreau Copyright, 1907, by THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY all rights reserved tsstO \Q ebpow-nifittmcm srlt gnoms srit labnu egfiieum ^noi istf c '.nojgnh r 9V INTRODUCTION ** s BY PROFESSOR CURTIS HIDDEN PAGE, ,,* orfw nfim gnucrf srf* ni sir aettqiue ton Deep were my musings in life's early blossom 'Mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering long, wrote Bryant in a poem first printed by the New York Review for February, 1826. Bryant had just come to New York, in 1825, to be associate editor of this newly founded magazine. He had at last decided to give up his profession of the law, which was so irk some; no longer to . . . scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen, And mingle among the jostling crowd, Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud, but to return to the "calm life" of thought and poetry *. ; ^-1 *^0 2 r n c '0n !;r**Y2*' vlffi'^ That won my heart m my greener years, Cu fUTV/sA and to have the courage to be, for better or for worse, a man of letters. This decision had been reached only after much reflection and hesitation, after many nightly wanderings ix M806901 among the mountain-woods of Great Bar- rington, after long musings under the stars. He was twenty-four or twenty-five when he thus spoke of his "greener years" as already belonging to the distant past a mood that need not surprise us in the young man who had written Thanatopsis at the age of six teen or seventeen ; and he was thirty when he finally came to this decision, which marked the turning-point in his life. These deciding years were also the most fruitful, in poetic production, of all his life. From 1824 to 1826 he wrote more than twice as many poems as in any other three years ; and among these poems are many of his most characteristic and best, such as Autumn Woods, The Lapse of Time, Mutation, Monu ment Mountain, November, A Forest Hymn, The Death of the Flowers, "I cannot forget with what fervid devotion," The New Moon, The Journey of Life, and October; and espe cially several poems of the stars, including The Hymn to the North Star, The Song of the Stars, The Firmament, and The Con- junction of Jupiter and Venus. Yet it is probable that not half the poems written dur ing these years are preserved. Bryant was al- x ways the sternest critic of his own writings. Of a series of three odes, written a few years earlier, he has included only one in his works. Of the many poems written for Miss Fair- child, before she became Mrs. Bryant, we have but one "O Fairest of the rural maids." So it may well be that in choosing for publication only what he considered his best, he rejected, in this important period, many characteristic poems which, in view of the small total amount of his work, we can ill afford to lose. Musings would seem to be one of these. Though in the case of Bryant it is particularly difficult to judge of dates by in ternal evidence so little did his thought and style change from the beginning to the end of his work, from Thanatopsis to The Flood of Years yet I feel almost safe in assigning our poem to the year 1825 ; the more so since it is a poem of Autumn, and since the comet of Encke, which he speaks of in the poem and names in his note, was visible in September and October of that year. In any case, Musings is thoroughly char acteristic of Bryant. No one but he, in the early part of the nineteenth century in Amer ica, could have written the beautiful lines xi '(; - - Was breathing incense o'er the pall Of the shrouded earth : and dark and tall . *.^ r Stood up the gray old trees. He speaks again of "tall gray trees" in The Firmament, written at Great Harrington in 1825. We find "tall and dark," again ending a line, in the Forest Hymn, also written in 1825. Indeed, Bryant seems to have realized that he had a tendency to overwork these too easily coupled adjectives; for in Monument Mountain he later changed his original read ing of 1824, "these gray old rocks," to "these reverend rocks." Nowhere has he used the phrase more effectively than in this brief tenth line of Musings, which stands out bold and alone among the longer lines. We find here also not a few other phrases that are still more distinctively characteristic of Bryant, such as "the shrouded earth," "the scarf of years," "the lovely vestal throng." The central thoughts of the poem, as well as their phrasing, may be closely paralleled in Bryant's well-known work of this period. It would seem that from the time when he wrote Thanatopsis he could hardly conceive of earth otherwise than as "the great tomb of xii 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 pub lished poems the one which most closely re sembles 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, xiii however, to prefer the more full and free and spontaneous version, and may even find it more beautiful than the other. It may lead us more gently and persuasively to the mood of quiet acceptance and aspiration which Bryant drew so often from converse with night and the stars. "The thoughtful stars," he calls them in The Firmament; he was ever their poet and devotee, and they never failed to bring him inspiration and "sweet com mune." Most of all he loved the Pleiades "the gentle sisters," as he names them here The group of sister-stars . . . the gentle seven, as he says again in a later tribute, The Con stellations. Through all his long life, devoted more to public service than to poetry, and for the most part "in city pent," he needed only to walk alone at night, And toward the eternal stars again aspire, in order to find again the memories of his youth, and the Nature-inspiration which was the inmost essence of his genius. NEW YORK, February, 1907. xiv ^. y- x MUSINGS I PASS'D on my nightly path alone; No friendly form was hovering near, No friendly voice was in mine ear, But the night wind's wailing tone. On the wide drear field no autumn bloom Look'd gay, no flowret's rich perfume Was breathing incense o'er the pall Of the shrouded earth : and dark and tall And sighing to the passing breeze Stood up the gray old trees. I pass'd on my nightly path alone And my weary feet trode faintly on: I look'd around me the desolate earth To wan and sorrowful thoughts gave birth And flung its own dark-woven stole And its damp chill breathings o'er my soul And my spirit was heavy : It is sad To look on this beautiful earth when clad In its robes of darkness; as it were But one vast chamber of the dead : xvii A mighty mausoleum, where Nature lay shrouded: And the tread Of man gives out a hollow sound, As from a tomb. I look'd around O'er the desolate earth : there was no ray Of gladness there: I turn'd away, And look'd to the glorious heavens afar, Where the stranger orb, 1 in his flaming car, Rode on his destined way: Like a proud and bloody conqueror, Bearing the banner of his war, Arrayed in his golden robes of fame, And crown'd with a victor's diadem. I look'd to the lovely vestal throng Of shining stars, and they smiled on me With a kind and gentle sympathy For I have lov'd them long: From youth to manhood I have lov'd With each pure and bright divinity To hold sweet commune: I have rov'd, In boyhood's hours of glee, And since the sombre scarf of years Was over me, full many a night Beneath their canopy of light, And felt my soul grow pure and bright 1 The comet of Encke- xviii As I gaz'd on them: And yet it cheers My spirit, when the phantom fears Of the far future darkly rise, Like storms in autumn's mellow skies, And memories of sorrow roll, Like mountain mists, upon my soul. I lov'd them all : each one had power To chase the shades of my dark hour: Each one was dear: but yet, than all That sate within Night's regal hall, As round some Sultan's haram throne Sit the bright dames, more sweetly shone, To me, my own lov'd Pleiades; When glancing through the old elm trees, That proudly rear'd their leafy dome Around my boyhood's peaceful home, As the eyes of gentle sisters, they Sent down their mild and tranquil ray. When years had roll'd and on their wings Were borne away life's blossomings, Their gentle smile, serene and calm, Came o'er my heart, a healing balm. For it brought in all the glow of truth The hallow'd memories of youth. xix INTRODUCTION THE ballad here printed for the first time, through the liberality of Mr. Bixby, is proba bly the earliest of the extant verses of the author. No date can with certainty be given it; but very likely it was written during his college life, which ended in the summer of 1837. It was during those years at Harvard that he read Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and still earlier, like many young poets, he had delighted in the easy, flowing verse of Mrs. Hemans. This ballad (perhaps the only one he ever wrote) savors of both Tasso and Mrs. He- mans. In The Service, written in 1840, are traces of this early interest in Godfrey of Boulogne and the Crusades ; and portions of The Service may have been written a year or two before it was offered to Margaret Fuller for The Dial, in 1840, and by her declined. This ballad was never offered anywhere for printing, I fancy, but cherished by some aunt or cousin into whose hands it fell, and thus preserved in the Thatcher family at Bangor, xxiii Maine, where Mr. Bixby found it in 1906, along with later verses unknown to the pub lic, which appeared in The Bibliophile So ciety's recent Thoreau publication. The poetical product of Thoreau's youth was much larger than he ever allowed to ap pear in print; nor did the whole of it fall into the hands of his literary executors, his sis ter Sophia, Emerson, Ellery Channing, Har rison Blake, E. H. Russell and myself. I name these six persons, because all of us have, first or last, had a hand in the work of presenting his writings to the public. To these might be added Mr. Henry Salt, his English biographer, who edited in London the only collection of his poems aiming at com pleteness which has yet appeared. Several persons aided Mr. Salt in this collection, notably, Mr. Blake, myself and Miss Anna Ward, of Spenser, Mass. But none of these eight persons ever had all Thoreau's verses in hand, or even within their knowledge. Sophia Thoreau may possibly be the exception, but I doubt it. F. B. SANBORN CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, January 28, 1907. xxiv GODFREY OF BOULOGNE THE moon hung low o'er Provence vales, T was night upon the sea ; Fair France was wooed by Afric gales, And paid in minstrelsy; Along the Rhone there moves a band, Their banner in the breeze, Of mail-clad men with iron hand, And steel on breast and knees : The herdsman following his droves Far in the night alone, Read faintly through the olive groves, T was Godfrey of Boulogne. The mist still slumbered on the heights, The glaciers lay in shade, The stars withdrew with faded lights, The moon went down the glade. Proud Jura saw the day from far, And showed it to the plain; She heard the din of coming war But told it not again : The goatherd seated on the rocks, Dreaming of battles none, xxvii Was wakened by his startled flocks, T was Godfrey of Boulogne. Night hung upon the Danube's stream, Deep midnight on the vales; Along the shore no beacons gleam, No sound is on the gales ; The Turkish lord has banished care, The harem sleeps profound, Save one fair Georgian sitting there, Upon the Moslem ground; The lightning flashed a transient gleam, A flaring banner shone, A host swept swiftly down the stream, T was Godfrey of Boulogne. T was noon upon Byzantium, On street and tower and sea; On Europe's edge a warlike hum, Of gathered chivalry: A troop went boldly through the throng Of Ethiops, Arabs, Huns, Jews, Greeks and Turks, to right their wrong; Their swords flashed thousand suns. Their banner cleaved Byzantium's dust, And like the sun it shone; Their armor had acquired no rust, T was Godfrey of Boulogne, xxviii 750 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARI CDD3DS130D