Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

[103] into the zenith to touch the annual wonder of migrating wild fowl — what the fine old Transcendentalist, Daniel Ricketson, well calls “the sublime chant of wild geese” --and to bring it into human song. His merely boyish poems sent by his kindred for publication,--the Thanatopsis in particular, written at seventeen,--have perhaps never been equaled in literature by any boy of that age; his blank verse was beyond that of any American poet. His fame has not quite held its own, and the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica does not mention him at all, but his collected poems, which appeared in 1821,--in the same year with Cooper's Spy and two years after the Sketch book,--form the true beginning of our literary annals. In 1825 his verses brought him an invitation to New York which he accepted, and he became thenceforth a part of the New York influence.

It was said of Mr. Bryant by an accomplished English critic that “he partook, in an eminent degree, of that curious and almost rarefied refinement, in which, oddly enough, American literature seems to surpass even the literature of the old world.” He