In ease and
grace of versification they resemble Longfellow, but in thought they are
more like Emerson or Goethe. Consider this opening from "The Riddle":
"Ye bards, ye prophets, ye sages,
Read to me, if ye can,
That which hath been the riddle of ages,
Read me the riddle of _Man_.
Then came the bard with his lyre,
And the sage with his pen and scroll,
And the prophet with his eye of fire,
To unriddle a human soul.
But the soul stood up in its might;
Its stature they could not scan;
And it rayed out a dazzling mystic light,
And shamed their wisest plan.
Yet sweetly the bard did sing,
And learnedly talked the sage,
And the seer flashed by with his lightning wing,
Soaring beyond his age."
This is sonorous. It has a majesty of expression and a greatness of
thought which makes Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" seem weak and even
common-place. The whole poem is pitched in the same key, and Cranch never
equalled it again, excepting once, and then in a very different manner.
Rev. Gideon Arch, a Hungarian scholar, philologist, and exile of 1849,
said of his "Endymion" that there were Endymions in all languages, but
that Cranch's was the best. To resuscitate it from the oblivion into
which it has fallen, it is given entire:
"Yes, it is the queenly moon
Walking through her starred saloon,
Silvering all she looks upon:
I am her Endymion;
For by night she comes to me,--
O, I love her wondrously.
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