. . . Was breathing incense o'er the pall
Of the shrouded earth: and dark and tall . . .
Stood up the gray old trees.
He speaks again of "tall gray trees" in The Firmament, written at Great Harrington in 1825. We find "tall and dark," again ending a line, in the Forest Hymn, also written in 1825.
Indeed, Bryant seems to have realized that he had a tendency to overwork these too easily coupled adjectives; for in Monument Mountain he later changed his original reading of 1824, "these gray old rocks," to "these reverend rocks." Nowhere has he used the phrase more effectively than in this brief tenth line of Musings, which stands out bold and alone among the longer lines. We find here also not a few other phrases that are still more distinctively characteristic of Bryant, such as "the shrouded earth," "the scarf of years," "the lovely vestal throng."
The central thoughts of the poem, as well as their phrasing, may be closely paralleled in Bryant's well-known work of this period. It would seem that from the time when he wrote Thanatopsis he could hardly conceive of earth otherwise than as "the great tomb of
xii
