William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American Romantic poet and journalist.

Quotes

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The Prairies.
- The Prairies, l. 1 (1833) [1]

The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky.
- The Strange Lady, st. 6 (1835) [2]

Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine —
'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.
- The Strange Lady, st. 6

When April winds
Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
Opened in airs of June her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds
And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.
- The Fountain, st. 3 (1839) [3]

The victory of endurance born.
- The Battlefield, st. 8 (1839) [4]

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshippers.
- The Battlefield, st. 9 (1839) [5]

These struggling tides of life that seem
In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
That rolls to its appointed end.
- The Crowded Street, st. 10 (1864) [6]

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
- October. A Sonnet (1866) [7]

The rugged trees are mingling
Their flowery sprays in love;
The ivy climbs the laurel
To clasp the boughs above.
- The Serenade, st. 14 [8]

Wild was the day; the wintry sea
Moaned sadly on New England's strand,
When first the thoughtful and the free,
Our fathers, trod the desert land.
- The Twenty-Second of December, st. 1 [9]

The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions, is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without it we must fall at once into depression or anarchy. To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes.
- Editorial written in remembrance of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor and abolitionist, who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois during their attack on his warehouse to destroy his press and abolitionist materials. "The Death of Lovejoy; November 18, 1837", in Power For Sanity: Selected Editorials of William Cullen Bryant, 1829–61 (Fordham University Press, 1994), p. 78

Thanatopsis (1817–1821)

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
- l. 1

Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings.
- l. 14

The hills,
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun.
- l. 37

Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
- l. 43

All that tread,
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.
- l. 48

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
- l. 73. Note: The edition of 1821 read, "The innumerable caravan that moves / To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take".

Poems (1832)

Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race!
- The Ages, st. xxxiii (1821)

Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
And fetters, sure and fast,
Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.
- The Past, st. 1 (1828)

The groves were God's first temples.
- A Forest Hymn, l. 1 (1824)

Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised?
- A Forest Hymn, l. 16

Maidens hearts are always soft:
Would that men's were truer!
- Song: "Dost Thou Idly Ask To Hear", st. 1 (1832)

All things that are on earth shall wholly pass away,
Except the love of God, which shall live and last for aye.
- The Love of God, l. 1
- From the Provençal of Bernard Rascas

The stormy March has come at last,
With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.
- March, st. 1

But ’neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
- Autumn Woods, st. 9

The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye
Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.
- A Winter Piece, st. 3 (1821)

Thine eyes are springs in whose serene
And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.
- "Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids", st. 4 (1820)

Loveliest of lovely things are they,
On earth, that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
- A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson, st. 3 (1828)

I would make
Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit
Patiently by the way-side, while I traced
The mazes of the pleasant wilderness
Around me. She should be my counsellor,
But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs
Impulses from a deeper source than hers,
And there are motions, in the mind of man,
That she must look upon with awe. I bow
Reverently to her dictates, but not less
Hold to the fair illusions of old time —
Illusions that shed brightness over life,
And glory over nature.
- The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus

And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
- November. A Sonnet (1824)

They talk of short-lived pleasures—be it so—
pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace.
- Mutation. A Sonnet, l. 1 (1824)

Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase
Are fruits of innocence and blessedness.
- Mutation. A Sonnet, l. 9

Weep not that the world changes—did it keep
A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.
- Mutation. A Sonnet, l. 13

Oh, sun! that o'er the western mountains now
Goest down in glory! ever beautiful
And blessed is thy radiance, whether thou
Colourest the eastern heaven and night-mist cool,
Till the bright day-star vanish, or on high
Climbest and streamest thy white splendours from mid-sky.
- A Walk At Sunset, st. 2 (1821)

There is a day of sunny rest
For every dark and troubled night;
And a grief may bid, and evening guest,
Bot joy shall come with early light
- "Blessed Are They That Mourn", st. 3

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
- Death of the Flowers, st. 1 (1832)

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.
- Death of the Flowers, st. 4, ll. 23-24

Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
- To a Waterfowl, st. 2 (1815)

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
- To a Waterfowl, st. 8 (1818)

Thirty Poems (1864)

Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
- The Third of November, 1861

Translations

O Goddess! sing the wrath of Peleus' son,
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air,—
For so had Jove appointed,—from the time
When the two chiefs, Atrides, king of men,
And great Achilles, parted first as foes.
- The Iliad of Homer (1870), book i, line 1

Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man
Who, having overthrown the sacred town
Of Ilium, wandered far and visited
The capitals of many nations, learned
The customs of their dwellers, and endured
Great suffering on the deep: his life was oft
In peril, as he labored to bring back
His comrades to their homes. He saved them not,
Though earnestly he strove; they perished all,
Through their own folly; for they banqueted,
Madmen! upon the oxen of the Sun,—
The all-o'erlooking Sun, who cut them off
From their return. O goddess, virgin-child
Of Jove, relate some part of this to me.
- The Odyssey of Homer (1871), book i, line 1

About William Cullen Bryant

There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying Truth crushed to earth will rise again.
- Martin Luther King Jr., 3 Dec. 1956, as quoted in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr: Advocate of the social gospel, p. 162

[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
- Bergen Evans, in his Dictionary of Quotations

External links

Encyclopedic article on William Cullen Bryant on Wikipedia
Media related to William Cullen Bryant on Wikimedia Commons
Works related to Author:William Cullen Bryant on Wikisource
Works by William Cullen Bryant at Project Gutenberg
William Cullen Bryant on 4literature.net