PREFACE.

WE now present to our readers the poems of William Cullen Bryant, who has achieved, in his own country, a popularity as far spread as her Prairies, and taught America-whose education 18 nursed by the older and deeper glories of the land from whose bosom her children sprang-to be proud, and justly-of a poet of her own. It is quite true, that the beautiful New World has furnished Bryant with sisterhood and brotherhood, in the land of poetry, every way worthy of companionship with his own popularity; and that such spirits as Willis, Mrs. Sigourney, and many more, have helped him to give to the song of the younger country, the same tone of breadth, richness, and freedom, which had already been communicated to its prose fiction and history, by the Coopers and Washington Irvings of its rising day.

Miltons and Shakspeares have not sprung from the only half-tilled soil of the mighty continent;