Sourced

• Vainly the fowler's eye
  Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
  As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
  Thy figure floats along.
  • To a Waterfowl, st. 2 (1815)

• He who, from zone to zone,
  Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
  In the long way that I must tread alone,
  Will lead my steps aright.
  • To a Waterfowl, st. 8 (1818)

• Thine eyes are springs in whose serene
  And silent waters heaven is seen;
  Their lashes are the herbs that look
  On their young figures in the brook.
  • Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids (1820)

• Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
  Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
  A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
  Or curb his swiftness in the forward race!
  • The Ages, st. XXXIII (1821)

• Oh, sun! that o'er the western mountains now
  Goest down in glory! ever beautiful
  And blessed is thy radiance, whether thou
  Colourest the eastern heaven and night-mist cool,
  Till the bright day-star vanish, or on high
  Climbest and streamest thy white splendours from mid-sky.
  • A Walk At Sunset, st. 2 (1821)

• The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye
  Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.
  • A Winter Piece, st. 3 (1821)

• The groves were God's first temples.
  • A Forest Hymn (1824)

• Ah, why
  Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
  God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
  Only among the crowd and under roofs
  That our frail hands have raised?
  • A Forest Hymn

• They talk of short-lived pleasures—be it so—
  pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
  Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
  The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
  And after dreams of horror, comes again
  The welcome morning with its rays of peace.
  • Mutation. A Sonnet (1824)

• Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase
  Are fruits of innocence and blessedness.
  • Mutation. A Sonnet

• Weep not that the world changes—did it keep
  A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.
  • Mutation. A Sonnet

• And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
  Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
  • November. A Sonnet (1824)

• Loveliest of lovely things are they,
  On earth, that soonest pass away.
  The rose that lives its little hour
  Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
  • A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson, st. 3 (1828)

• Thou unrelenting Past!
  Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
  And fetters, sure and fast,
  Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.
  • The Past, st. 1 (1828)

• The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
  Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
  • Death of the Flowers (1832), st. 1.

• The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
  And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
  • Death of the Flowers (1832), st. 4, lines 23-24.

• Maidens hearts are always soft:
  Would that men's were truer!
  • Song: Dost Thou Idly Ask To Hear, st. 1 (1832)

• These are the gardens of the Desert, these
  The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
  For which the speech of England has no name—
  The Prairies.
  • The Prairies, l. 1 (1833)

• The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,
  As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky.
  • The Strange Lady, st. 6 (1835)

• Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine -
  'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.
  • The Strange Lady, st. 6

• When April winds
  Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
  Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
  Opened in airs of June her multitude
  Of golden chalices to humming-birds
  And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.
  • The Fountain, st. 3 (1839)

• The victory of endurance born.
  • The Battlefield (1839), st. 8.

• Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
  The eternal years of God are hers;
  But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
  And dies among his worshippers.
  • The Battlefield (1839), st. 9.

• These struggling tides of life that seem
  In wayward, aimless course to tend,
  Are eddies of the mighty stream
  That rolls to its appointed end.
  • The Crowded Street, st. 10 (1864)

• And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
  And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
  • October. A Sonnet (1866)

• Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
  Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
  Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
  With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
  • The Third of November, 1861. Thirty Poems. Appleton, New York. pp. 112-115. (1864)

• The rugged trees are mingling
  Their flowery sprays in love;
  The ivy climbs the laurel
  To clasp the boughs above.
  • The Serenade, St. 14

• Wild was the day; the wintry sea
  Moaned sadly on New England's strand,
  When first the thoughtful and the free,
  Our fathers, trod the desert land.
  • The Twenty-Second of December, st. 1

Thanatopsis (1817-1821)

• To him who in the love of Nature holds
  Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
  A various language.
  • l. 1

• Go forth under the open sky, and list
  To Nature's teachings.
  • l. 14

• The hills,
  Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun.
  • l. 37

• Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
  • l. 43

• All that tread,
  The globe are but a handful to the tribes
  That slumber in its bosom.
  • l. 48

• So live, that when thy summons comes to join
  The innumerable caravan which moves
  To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
  His chamber in the silent halls of death,
  Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
  Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
  By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
  Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
  About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
  • l. 73. Note: The edition of 1821 read, "The innumerable caravan that moves / To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take".

About William Cullen Bryant

• [Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
  • Bergen Evans, in his Dictionary of Quotations

Attributed

• The stormy March has come at last,
  With winds and clouds and changing skies;
  I hear the rushing of the blast
  That through the snowy valley flies.
  • March. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• But ’neath yon crimson tree
  Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
  Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
  Her blush of maiden shame.
  • Autumn Woods. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).