If Bryant had left blanks for the rhyming words, the reader would have no trouble filling in the correct word. Compare this poem to one of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems to see just how bad it is.
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As you might expect, the maid in our poem is a far better person because she dwelt in "untrodden ways.".
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"A Forest Hymn".
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Bryant, as you can probably see, was much better when he use blank verse, but he still cannot resist unnecessary poetic adjectives such as "lofty vaults" and "barky trunks." According to the poem the forests were the original churches, something like natural gothic cathedrals in which the great trees create a natural sublimity. Although the speaker addresses God and Father as creator, the idea is not Christian; we experience God, the poem suggests, through the nature created by God. This is somewhat like the Emerson's idea in Nature that Nature is a projection of Soul. According to Emerson, Nature is the only way we can directly experience Soul (God), since our only experience of reality is via the senses. Beginning with line 74 we find this sentiments: "Written on thy works I read/ The lesson of thy own eternity.".
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"The Two Graves".
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This is another poem about death (see "Thanatopsis"), but the focus is on the obscure graves of a husband and wife forgotten by time and overgrown so that one might never notice them. Their lot is different from those buried neatly in kept graveyards, for these artificial settings suggest the separation of the human dead from the living nature. The two graves in question, however, have been taken over by nature; there is no separation. Nature, as Bryant tells us in "A Forest Hymn," is permanent; it constantly renews itself and reminds us of the eternal God that made it. Thus Bryant's speaker why we should imagine that eternity lies somewhere other than earth:.
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'Tis said that when life is ended here,.
The spirit is borne to a distant sphere;.
