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

These lines open William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis,” written when he was very young (in his late teens) and first published in 1817, later revised for inclusion in his 1821 collection. Bryant, a leading early American Romantic poet, drew heavily on the era’s reverence for the natural world as a moral and spiritual teacher. In “Thanatopsis” he frames a meditation on death by first establishing Nature as a companion and guide: for those who approach her with love, the landscape becomes a medium of meaning rather than mere scenery. The passage sets the poem’s contemplative tone and prepares the reader for Nature’s consolations about mortality.

Bryant suggests that Nature “speaks” differently depending on the listener’s disposition: the person who loves Nature and seeks “communion” with her forms can perceive a “various language” of symbols, moods, and lessons in woods, fields, and skies. The quote elevates attentive perception into a kind of spiritual practice—Nature is not inert matter but a communicative presence. In the larger argument of “Thanatopsis,” this responsiveness becomes crucial: Nature’s many “voices” can soothe grief, correct human pride, and place individual death within a vast, continuous order. The lines also exemplify Romantic personification, turning landscape into a moral interlocutor.