[102] after him. But I, who grew up on his poetry as a boy, just before Longfellow stepped into his tracks, can testify that the diet he afforded, though sparing, was uplifting, and, though it did not perhaps enrich the blood, elevated the ideal of a whole generation. He first set our American landscape to music, naming the birds and flowers by familiar names. He first described the beauty of the “Painted Cup,” for instance, without calling it Castilleia, and he sang the snowy blossoms of the “Shad-Bush” which even Whittier called the Aronia--
When the Aronia by the riverProfessor Woodberry finely says of the Puritans, “Their very hymns had lost the sense of poetic form. They had in truth forgotten poetry; the perception of it as a noble and exquisite form of language had gone from them, nor did it come back until Bryant recaptured for the first time its grander lines at the same time that he gave landscape to the virgin horizons of the country.” 1 He alone, of all the poets, reached far enough
Lighted up the swarming shad.