Show Thanatopiii > P By Charles Dudley Warner I knew it by heart when I was a very t small boy and as I went about repeating J it it used to interpret for me Bryants feelings for nature the nature that I saw and the noble pathos of life It seemed to be a secret which I shared with the pcet I remember well how shamefaced I wag once when a cousin of mine exposed me Unbeknown to me he had stood near me one evening when I was milking one of the cows and heard me repeat Thana topsis It must have been sufflciehtly ludicrous the spectacle of a barefooted scrap of a boya boy not more thaa 3 years younger than the other boyhej he wrote the poem seated on a m stool and declaiming those Immortal JJ to the cow I do not know how he m aged the stately rythm of that bi verse to the Intermittent sounatng stream In the pail Very likely he did not and that was one of the reasons why he was accused of drying up the cows he milked I wondered then and I wonder now where Thanatopsls came from How did It come Into the mind ot a boy In those remote hills away from the suggestions sug-gestions of the real world Did the hills teach him and the forests and the brooks and the clouds Was it industry and application that made this poem I think my friends that we shall have to fall back on that mysterious something some-thing the possibly supernatural suggestion sugges-tion that we call genius |