ing and polishing his verses, as it were, in the white heat of passion, we learn from the piece entitled The Poet.

"Thou, who wouldst wear the name

Of poet mid thy brethren of mankind,
And clothe in words of flame

Thoughts that shall live within the general mind,
Deem not the framing of a deathless lay

The pastime of a drowsy, summer day.

But gather all thy powers,

And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave,
And in thy lonely hours,

At silent morning or at wakeful eve,

While the warm current tingles through thy veins,
Set forth the burning words in fluent strains.

*

Then, should thy verse appear

Halting, and harsh, and all unaptly wrought,
Touch the crude line with fear,

Save in the moment of impassioned thought;
Then summon back the original glow, and mend

The strain with rapture, that with fire was penned."

Mr. Bryant may be thought deficient in imagination, the master quality of the poet, because he does not suffer it to run wild and indulge in such antics as shame earth and displease heaven, but holds it in with bit and bridle, restraining it, chas tening it, and making it the servant of the intellect. He did not write many poems which would be classed as works of the imagination distinctively, but this element is everywhere intermingled with the descriptive and didactic elements. In imag ination he follows the water-fowl to its home and nest: he places himself at the north star and reports what he witnesses from that vantage ground; he goes with the evening wind on its varied mission of good. He sees with the "vision divine" far more than the eye reports in the Planting of the Apple Tree and the Sowing of the Seed. Mr. Bryant did not resemble such as Peter Bell, to whom a primrose by the river's brink, a yellow primrose was and nothing more, but rather such as the poet who created Peter Bell to whom the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts too deep for tears. As an illustra tion of this quality mark what he sees in a bare path across a

"Pursue the slenderest path across a lawn,

Lo! on the broad highway it issues forth;
And, blended with the greater track, goes on,
Over the surface of the mighty earth;

Climbs hills, and crosses vales, and stretches far,
Through silent forests, toward the evening star.

And enters cities murmuring with the feet
Of multitudes, and wanders forth again,
And joins the climes of frost to climes of heat;
Binds East to West, and marries main to main,

Nor stays till at the long-resounding shore

Of the great deep, where paths are known no more."

In the lighter play of fancy he often indulged successfully. His Robert of Lincoln is unequalled of its kind. He was not deficient in a sense of the humorous, but his graver qualities were so predominant that he rarely attempted it in verse and then to the surprise and impatience of the public. Mr. Bryant's poetry is as remarkable for what it excludes as for what it includes. At the time of his death some writer said of him that he was not a great journalist, after the pattern of Mr. Greeley or Mr. Raymond, but seemed chiefly to concern himself about what should not go into his paper. It was high praise though not so intended. Undoubtedly he was scrupulously careful about what he put forth to the public. In his poems you will find little that is conventional, little that is put in to fill a place, little that is redundant, something it may be that is deficient, but absolutely nothing that is carelessly written. Every word was weighed and chosen. He never regarded a piece of work as finished but was ever seeking to add some final touch to bring it nearer to perfection. In successive editions of his works you will find a single word changed and changed again. But above all you will find in his poems nothing that is impure, nothing to shock the most delicate moral sense, and little, if anything, to offend the most fastidious taste. On the other hand they are characterized by a lofty, moral and religious tone. The poet was a preacher also as his puritan nature required. Indeed the degree of moralizing indulged in would be offensive did it not spring so naturally from the subject and were it not felt to be the spontaneous expression of the poet's heart. His Christian faith was pro

nounced but not obtrusive. He wrote only a few hymns and strictly religious pieces, but the religious element is incorporated in the whole body of his poetry, as it was in the substance of his character. It gave to his latest days a calm serenity and cheerful courage and sustained him as he approached "the belt of darkness where the Life that is touches the Life to come." In The Two Travellers, written in his eighty-first year, he represents himself as holding his way with steady steps, with firm though weary tread, into the slowly gathering night, with lifted eye, and brow serene, cheering himself with the thought that "ere long he shall sleep, to rise, refreshed and strong, in the bright day that yet will dawn." We need not attempt to fix the precise place of Mr. Bryant among American poets. The future will determine it. We predict that his fame will endure; and that, should another Raphael arise to paint an American Parnassus, conspicuous among the slender group upon its topmost height will be the venerable and picturesque figure of William Cullen Bryant.

ARTICLE IV.-THE AVESTA AND THE STORM-MYTH.

Ormazd et Ahriman, leurs origines et leur histoire. Par JAMES DARMESTETER. Paris. Librairie Franck.

Ir is now more than a century since the sacred writings ascribed to Zoroaster were brought to light by Anquetil-Duperron, yet little is known, at this late day, about the inner meaning and genesis of the religious movement which produced them. This is due not merely to the darkness in which the beginnings of all creeds are veiled, but also to more immediate reasons, not the least of which is the following: Only a very small part of the Avesta dates from the early and aggres sive stage of the faith, and the very peculiarities which denote. the antiquity of that scanty portion have rendered its interpretation little more than guess-work; so it is still left in the hands of the student of languages, who, well equipped as he may be for his special duties, is less fitted for, and less interested in, the fleeting and more delicate phenomena of the religious sentiment. Still, the work of dissection is nearly at an end, and the once diverging theories of interpretation are slowly drifting in one direction; and when the philologists leave the ground, it is time for the student of religions to enter the field. When the work which we propose to discuss appeared, headed with alluring promises of light to be cast upon the origins of the Iranian gods, and heralded by some as holding the most progressive views of the Avesta, we hoped with reason that the hour had come for reading openly in those obscure and sacred characters; our hopes rested on a misunderstanding the work meets our longing for disclosures respecting Zoroaster's religion by denying the existence of both the religion and its apostle.

M. Darmesteter, its author, has no small claim on our consideration known by certain brief but suggestive studies in Iranian mythology, he is, moreover, the chosen interpreter of the Avesta in the collection of sacred writings planned by Max Müller. This choice, a quasi-official recognition of his scholarship, is

not belied by the more external merits of our work: this latter is brimming with erudition; the style, impetuous and fulgent at times, is often terse, and always clear; while the attractive symmetry of the plan gives a high impression of the author's literary abilities. To be sure, much of the smoothness of his gait is due to his marching triumphantly amidst his arguments, without heeding or even mentioning opposite views. This, however, is a peculiarity of his method, for nothing can be plainer than his conclusions: Ormazd and Ahriman are twins, born at a distance of several centuries; one, the good principle, deriving immediately from the supreme Asura, the Aryan god of the infinite and luminous heaven; while Ahriman is no other than the dark demon of the clouds, magnified on Iranian soil, traced in black from the bright outline of his antitype. And what those theses leave untouched, stands in the boldest relief in the body of the work: our book is an open and forcible attempt to apply the doctrine and processes which go by the name of evolution to the Mazdeic faith, in order to prove that the dualism of the Avesta has its roots in the conceptions of an anterior, Indo-Iranian period, and that both Zoroaster and his gods were born out of the atmospheric myths.

It is not the first time that the stormy gods of the clouds have been made to father a whole scheme of myths: the attractiveness of the researches instituted by Kuhn, in his "Descent of Fire," and by M. Müller, in his first studies in comparative mythology, have made them numerous followers, who have turned our folklore, nursery tales, and popular floras into a monotonous reiteration of the same fire-myth. Yet, even supposing those researches to be too hasty or sweeping, their authors were, at least, experimenting in anima vili, on acknowledged fables; there was parity from type to copy. But our author attempts more: dealing with what was thought to be one of the exponents of the highest beliefs of man, with a religion, he applies the same levelling process to it as to idle legends. This process is utterly inadequate; and its use must awaken the suspicion that M. Darmesteter belittles the purer elements of Mazdeism, or else entertains a most unbounded faith in the transmutableness of vile metals into sterling gold.