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“ To make this entirely clear one has but to quote the first two lines of each stanza,—
Beneath the waning moon I walk at night
⁠And muse on human life . . .
The trampled earth returns a sound of fear—
⁠A hollow sound, as if I walked on tombs . . . ”

“ And I, with faltering foot-steps, journey on,
⁠Watching the stars that roll the hours away . . .
After Bryant had written The Journey of Life (and we know that this was in 1826) , he perhaps laid aside the poem Musings, thinking that he had given the essence of it in his briefer lyric. We may be permitted, however, to prefer the more full and free and spontaneous version, and may even find it more beautiful than the other. It may lead us more gently and persuasively to the mood of quiet acceptance and aspiration which Bryant drew so often from converse with night and the stars. ”

“ 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
man," "one mighty sepulchre." So here, he calls it
. . . one vast chamber of the dead:
A mighty mausoleum, where
Nature lay shrouded: and the tread
Of man gives out a hollow sound,
As from a tomb.
The Journey of Life is of all Bryant's published poems the one which most closely resembles Musings ”