Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1883 — How-Bryant Wrote It. [ARTICLE]

How-Bryant Wrote It.

On the 15tlv of December he went over to the place [Plainfield] to make the necessary inquiries. He says in a letter that he felt as he walked up the hills very forlorn and desolate indeed, not knowing what was to become of him in the big world, which grew bigger as he ascended, and yet darker with the coming on of night. The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies; and, while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt admiratibn, a solitary bird made wing along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it was lost in the distance, asking himself whither it had come and to what far home it was flying. When he went to the house where he was to stop for the night his mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he wrote those lines, as imperishable as our language, “The Water-fowl.” The solemn ’tone in which they conclude, and which by some critics has been thought too moralizing, He who from zone to zone Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight. In the long way that I must tread alone, WUI lead my steps aright, was as much a part of the scene as the flight of the bird itself, which spoke not alone to his eye, but to his soul. To have omitted that grand expression of faith and hope in a divine guidance would have been to violate the truth of the entire vision. FVom Godwin’s “ Life .”