Toward the close of it he was in great demand
for public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech
dedicating a statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when
Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness caused a fall
which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just seventy
years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on
"The Embargo."
Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous
excitement, it has enduring qualities. The spiritual
preoccupations of many a voiceless generation of New England
Puritans found a tongue at last in this late-born son of theirs.
The determining mood of his best poems, from boyhood to old age,
was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal flow of
things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists.
This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl,"
"The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The Crowded
Street," "The Flood of Years." All of these tell the same story
of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in
the same mighty stream of human existence.
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