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Cornell University 
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 The original of this book is in 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924074580675 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 074 580 675 
 
In compliance witii current 
 
 copyright law, Cornell University 
 
 Library produced this 
 
 replacement volume on paper 
 
 that meets the ANSI Standard 
 
 Z39.48-1992 to replace the 
 
 irreparably deteriorated original. 
 
 1996 
 
IN MEMORY OF 
 
 William Cullen Bryant. 
 
 Born, 1794 -Died, 1878. 
 

 
 y f C^OCC'-Ci^^^'-^ — -t^^^-L-i^v^ ^-^i^-n^j cui^L^L^^ 
 
 r 
 
THAN A TOPS IS. 
 
 By William Cullen Brtaxt. 
 
 To him who in the love of nature holds 
 Commnnion with lier visible forms, she speais 
 A various language ; for his gayer hours 
 She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
 Au(3 eloquence of beauty, and she glides 
 Into his darter musings, with a mild 
 And healing sympathy, that steals away 
 Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts 
 Of the last bitter hour come like a blight 
 Over thy spirit, and sad images 
 Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall. 
 And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, 
 ilake thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart; — 
 Go forth, unto the open sky, and list 
 To nature"'s teachings, while from all around — 
 Earth and her waters, and the depths of air — 
 Comes a still voice — Yet a few days, and thee 
 The all beholding sun shall see no more 
 In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground. 
 Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, 
 Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist 
 Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim 
 Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again. 
 And, lost each human trace, surrendering up 
 Thine individual being, shaltthou go 
 To mix for ever with the elements, 
 To be a brother to the insensible rock 
 And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain 
 Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak 
 Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. 
 
 Yet not to thine eternal resting-place 
 Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish 
 Couch more magnificent. Thou shaltlle down 
 With patriarchs of the infant world— with kings, 
 The powerful of the earth— the wise, the good, 
 Fair forms, andhoary seers of ages past. 
 All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills 
 Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, — the vales 
 Stretching in pensive quietness between; 
 The venerable woods— rivers that move 
 In majesty, and the complaining brooks 
 
 That make the meadows green; and poured round all. 
 
 Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste, — 
 
 Are but the solemn decorations all 
 
 Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, 
 
 The planets, all the infinite host of heaven. 
 
 Are shining on the sad abodes of death. 
 
 Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread 
 
 The globe are but a handful to the tribes 
 
 That slumber in its bosom. — Take the wings 
 
 Of morning, pierce the Barcan wTlderness, 
 
 Or lose thyself in the continuous woods 
 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, 
 
 Save his own dashiugs — yet the dead are there: 
 
 And millions in tbos3 solitudes, since first 
 
 The flight of years began, have laid them down 
 
 In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone. 
 
 So Shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw 
 
 In silence from the living, and no friend 
 
 Take note of thy departure ? All that breathe 
 
 Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh 
 
 When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care 
 
 Plod on, and each one as before will chase 
 
 His favorite phantom; yet aU these shall leave 
 
 Their mirth and their employments, and shall come 
 
 And make their bed with thee. As the long train 
 
 Of ages glide away, the sons of men. 
 
 The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes 
 
 In the full strength of years, matron, and maid, 
 
 And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man — 
 
 Shall one by one be gathered to thy side. 
 
 By those, who in their turn shall follow them. 
 
 So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
 The innumerable caravan, which moves 
 To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
 His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
 Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night. 
 Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
 By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave. 
 Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
 About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEjY BRYAMT died on Wednesday 
 June IMh, 1878^ at twenty-five minutes before six 
 o'cloch in the morning. The articles collected in this 
 booh ivere printed in the Jfew Yorh EVENING POST on 
 and soon after that day. 
 
So live, that when thy Bummons comes to join 
 The innumerable caravan, which moves 
 To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
 His chamber in the silent halls of death. 
 Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night. 
 Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
 By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave. 
 Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
 About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 
 
 The ending of a life so full of years, of obsei'- 
 vation and of experience as Mr. Bryant's, before 
 we consider tlie special character and particular 
 field of its influence, and aside altogether from 
 such considerations, impresses us with the re- 
 martable continuance and scope of that influence. 
 This life lasted but sixteen years less than a cen- 
 tury. We may always say of such a reach of 
 time that it is crowded with events of high im- 
 portance to mankind; but the events of the nine- 
 teenth century, in their stirring interest, in tlie 
 rapidity with which they have worked out re- 
 sults which usually are remote and slow, in the 
 wonderful advancement of the race which they 
 have signalized and effected, are without a par- 
 allel. To say of a single life that it was contem- 
 poraneous with all of these events is profoundly 
 suggestive. The mention of a few of them will 
 emphasize the suggestion. 
 
 When Mr. Bryant was born France had not 
 come out of her terrible revolution. He watched 
 in his youth the career of the first Napoleon. 
 He attained manhood in the year of the battle of 
 Waterloo. He studied, coincidently with its 
 development, the growth of Great Britain after 
 that significant event, in power, in wealth, in in- 
 fJueuce, in the political liberality upon which 
 these were founded. He witnessed the triumph 
 among the English people of those principles of 
 commercial freedom and of institutional and ad- 
 ministrative reform with which he was in full 
 sympathy, and to whose advocacy he gave his ear- 
 lier and later energies with perfect faith in their 
 final victory also among the American people. 
 
 His life M'as co-equal almost mth that of the re- 
 public of the United States. The Constitution 
 was born only a few years before himself. The 
 strug-gles of its youth were contemporaneous 
 with those of his own. He shared in the excite- 
 ments and discussions which attended its applica- 
 tion and interpretation. He helped to form tlie 
 public opinion which supported and firmly estab- 
 lished it. He had written that whicli alone would 
 make his name endure as long as the English 
 tongue when the war of 1812 began. He was 
 familiar with the history while it was making of 
 the great parties of the countr}'. He announced 
 the birtli of some of them and he recorded their 
 death. Participating in the contest of the Federal- 
 ists and the old Republicans, lie was in the thick 
 of the fight between the Democratic and Whig 
 parties which succeeded. He was active and 
 indomitable in the long battle for the denational- 
 izing of slavery and the nationalizing of freedom, 
 which was at last carried to a triumphant 
 conclusion by the Eepublican army, among 
 whose generals none were more conspicuous 
 than he. During the fifty years and more of 
 his journalistic work we might say of him, in 
 respect to the portentous events which have 
 moulded the political character of the republic, 
 and determined its political destin}', what he 
 would have shrunk from saying of himself. All 
 of these things he saw, and a great part of them 
 he was. If we measure his life with the more 
 modern history of letters, its continuance will 
 appear no less striking. His first and best 
 known poem was written two years before Sir 
 Walter Scott began that series of novels which 
 made the name of "Waverley" immortal. He 
 had reached middle age when Dickens and 
 Thackeray began to write, and he was still in the 
 plenitude of liis intellectual power when the pen 
 dropped forever from their fingers. It would be 
 easy to enlarge the list of contemporaneous 
 names — names which have become classical in 
 
8 
 
 literature, or names which recall brilliant prom- 
 ises never fulfilled and reputations as ephemeral 
 as they were dazzling. The boundaries of Mr. 
 Bryant's life mark on the one side the first signs 
 of literary life on this continent, and on the other 
 side whatever of worth or celebrity American 
 literary work has secured. Nor are they less 
 broadlj- inclusive in respect to the arts and sci- 
 ences. His hand might have traced, from day 
 to day, as the events occurred, the most remark- 
 able achievements of research and invention. 
 
 We saj', then, that this life is impressive, first 
 of all, because of the striking way in which it 
 connects us with the lives of past generations. 
 It presents to us the activities of the ceutury. 
 When we find embodied in it influences as 
 marked, as beneficent, as wisely directed to pure 
 and elevated ends, as the}^ were long in their 
 continuance, we fairly measure this remarkable 
 life. Its story has been many times told ; yet, 
 seldom is a story less necessary to be told, be- 
 cause seldom is a life more familiar to the public. 
 Quiet in his tastes, unostentatious in his habits, 
 Mr. Brj-ant 3'et lived largely in tlie general eye, 
 because his specialties of work brought him into 
 wider notice than almost any of his contempo- 
 raries. It is a trite tiling to say that the poet of 
 a people is the intimate of the people; that he 
 enters iuto the innermost sanctuaries of their 
 hearts and homes. How pre-eminently Mr. Bry- 
 ant was the poet of his people is told in another 
 place. The subject need not here be dwelt upon. 
 It is enough to say that the people are curious 
 concerning these intimates of theirs; they in- 
 quire closely into the personality of their poets ; 
 and so it happens often that the men who write 
 the songs of a nation are better and more widely 
 known than the men who fight its battles, or the 
 men who make its laws, or the men who admin- 
 ister its government. 
 
 But it was not only as a poet that Mr. Bryant 
 dwelt continually in the eye of his people. To 
 the gracious gift of expression in the highest of 
 the arts, and to the retired pursuits of the stu- 
 dent and the scholar, he joined those of the 
 active, working journalist. These occupations 
 might at first seem to be inconsistent; but they 
 were uot actually so in the case of Mr. Bryant. 
 His poems offer no hint, suggest no suspicion. 
 
 of the capacity, still less of the taste, for the 
 sharp collisions, the always beginning and never 
 ending strife and competition of the newspaper. 
 Yet we suspect that, great as was his delight in 
 the exploration of all the stores of ancient and 
 modern learning, joyful as was the labor with 
 whicli he committed to the world noblethoughts 
 and fine fancies in exquisite settings of verse, he 
 found the liveliest and the most enduring satis- 
 faction in the work of the journalist. At all 
 events, it is this part of his work which is most 
 interesting to newspapers — which concerns es- 
 pecially the newspaper whose honored head he 
 has been for more than fifty years, and which, 
 for that time, has held a chief place in his 
 thoughts. Mr. Bryant was a newspaper man 
 and something more. That is to say, while he 
 had a relish for the keen encounters of daily 
 journalism and was well equipped for them, while 
 he had a quick eye for the present and passing 
 aspects of things and a ready hand to turn them 
 to account, he regarded the newspaper not mere- 
 ly as a vantage ground from which to shoot foUy 
 as it flies — though he could do that upon occa- 
 sion with incisive and unerring shaft. He knew 
 that iu the columns of the newspaper could be 
 done ranch of the work which the statesman does 
 in the legislative hall and in the executive coun- 
 cil chamber. He resolved to do some of this 
 work ; and he did a great deal of it. So, in the 
 controversies of the day, in the attacks and de- 
 fences and criticisms and retorts, which were even 
 more plentiful in the newspapers of the past than 
 in those of the present, he kept a serious and cer- 
 tain purpose steadily in view. The daily dis- 
 cussions — which sometimes are held to be valu- 
 able onlj' because thc}^ serve to get to-day's news- 
 paper out in readable fashion — were employed bj' 
 Mr. Bryant to strengthen and support fixed con- 
 victions, to bring public opinion into line with a 
 bod}' of principles, and to hold it there. Accord- 
 ing to one theory of journalism, to-day is the 
 whole of life, and to let to-morrow take care of it- 
 self is a part of newspaper religion. It cannot 
 be denied that the practice of this theory is 
 effective. To treat what is uppermost to-day 
 simpl}' because it is uppermost, without caring 
 what may be uppermost to-morrow; to fix the 
 reader's attention to-day, no matter upon what. 
 
and no matter where his attention may be to- 
 morrow — to do this certainly is to make an en- 
 tertaining newspaper, if not a useful one. This 
 was not Mr. Bryant's theory. To him to-day was 
 by no means the whole of life, and he was not 
 disposed to let to-morrow take care of itself. On 
 the contrary, to-day was chiefly valuable to him 
 so far as it provided for to-morrow. That is to 
 say, he used the newspaper conscieutiously to ad- 
 vocate views of political and social subjects 
 which he believed to be correct. He set before 
 himself principles whose prevalence he regarded 
 as beneficial to the country or to the world, and 
 his constant purpose was to promote their pre- 
 valence. He looked upon the journal which he 
 conducted as a conscientious statesman looks 
 upon the official trust which has been com- 
 mitted to him, or the work which he has 
 undertaken — not with a view to do what 
 is to be done to-day in the easiest or most 
 brilliant way, but so to do it that it may 
 tell upon what is to be done to-morrow, and all 
 other days, until the worthiest object of ambition 
 is achieved. This is the most useful journalism ; 
 and, first and last, it is the most effective and 
 influential. 
 
 Mr. Bryant's political life was so closelj' 
 associated with his journalistic life that they 
 must necessarily be considered together. He 
 never sought public office ; he repeatedly refused 
 to hold it. He made no eflfort either to secure or 
 to use influence in politics except through his 
 newspaper, and by his silent, individual vote at 
 the polls. The same methods marked his political 
 and his journalistic life. He could be a stout 
 party man upon occasion, but only when the 
 party promoted what he believed to be right 
 principles. "When the party with which he was 
 accustomed to act did what according to his 
 judgment was wrong, he would denounce and 
 oppose it as readily and as heartily as he would 
 the other party. He was as independent in his 
 politics as he was in his newspaper. If he had 
 adopted the cause of a political organization 
 whose platform embodied what he believed to be 
 sound doctrine, he would let the party go as 
 soon as it let the doctrine go, or as soon as the 
 doctrine had lost its vital force. Party names 
 never deceived him. He refused to be bound 
 
 merely by them ; and he was quick to detect 
 when the name ceased to be descriptive, when it 
 had become a mere skeleton from which tlie 
 sinews and flesh and life-blood had fallen awa}-. 
 He was one of the first of the old Democrats to 
 discover that his party was no longer wliat its 
 name implied; that calling itself Democratic it 
 did violence to the very notion of what is 
 democratic, as he believed, by upholding and 
 defending human slavery. He was warm to 
 welcome any new party which promised to make 
 the really democratic doctrine of libertj' the rule 
 of the nation. So he was one of the first of the 
 original Republicans to see and to say, when the 
 war was over and slavery was abolished, that 
 the Republican party could not maintain itself 
 upon the exhausted questions which had called 
 it into being, and which it had discussed at the 
 polls and on the battlefield with overwhelming 
 success ; that it must prove its right to exist by 
 keeping abreast of tlie times, and by its intelligent 
 treatment of living subjects of paramount im- 
 portance. In a word, Mr. Br3'ant's course in 
 politics and in journalism was governed by a re- 
 gard not so much for names as for things ; not so 
 much for a present and partisan triumph as for 
 the final prevalence of the right, as it was given 
 him to see it. 
 
 Mr. Bryant's work and its methods 
 indicate distinctly the points of a strong 
 and clear character. With an abiding 
 sense of right, duty and responsibility, he 
 applied the rule which it imposed rigidly to 
 others, but he accepted it as fully for himself. 
 Dominated by conviction and by an 
 indomitable will in carrying out the purpose to 
 which it directed him, he was as severe in 
 his intellectual and moral modes as in his lit^ 
 erary taste. But this severity was not incon- 
 sistent with a simplicity and a geniality and a 
 freshness equally remarkable. His own stern 
 integrity and his impatience with the lack of 
 integrity in other persons did not interfere with a 
 delicate respect for their rights, but seemed 
 rather to quicken his sensibilities. Nor, as his 
 readers well know, did this severity check his 
 broad and deep sympathy with all tender im- 
 pulses and his warm and instinctive care for all 
 forms of human joy and human suffering. 
 
10 
 
 This, perhaps, is not the place to speali par- 
 ticularly of the personal traits of Mr. Bryant 
 which were revealed to those fortunate ones who 
 enjoyed the rare privilege of close intercourse 
 with him. The time seems fit, while his grave 
 is still unclosed, only to exjjress, in the few and 
 moderate words which would have been most 
 tasteful to him, the sense which no words could 
 adequately express of the wide gap in the world 
 immediately about him which his departure has 
 left. The hand whicb so often filled this column 
 rests from its long and beneficent labor. The 
 catastrophe is always familiar yet never familiar. 
 Death, no matter how watched and expected, 
 tates us by surprise at last. Death, which has 
 
 been waited for eighty-three years, has come un- 
 awares — suddenly, )'et fittingly and in a time 
 fully ripe. As the Nature whose loving com- 
 panion and faithful translator he was tenderly 
 led him to the close by a descent so smooth and 
 gradual that it scarcely was suspected, he real- 
 ized with singular completeness and felicity the 
 tranquil consummation i)romised, in the words 
 with which he himself has clothed the ver«e of 
 the Greek poet, to the wise Ulysses : 
 
 ** So at tlie last thy deatli shall come to tliee, 
 . . . . and gently take thee off 
 In a serene old age that ends araong 
 A happy people." 
 
THE STORY OF BRYANT'S LIFE. 
 
 By ax Editorial Associate. 
 
 The Amerieag schoolboy, studying the past 
 history of his countrj'^ from a book and its cur- 
 rent history from the newspapers, is often struck 
 by the contrasts presented by the opening and 
 the closing scenes of the century following the 
 declaration of peace between the United Colonies 
 and Great Britain. The earlier years seem to 
 his fresh ycung mind a period of Arcadian tran- 
 quility, jarred by none of the fierce shocks of 
 partisan political warfare, marked by the reign 
 of noble motives in men's hearts, buoyant with 
 the hopes of youth, and charged almost to surfeit 
 with the spirit of brotherly love. He would 
 doubtless be astonished could he look over om- 
 shoulder at a. little twelve-page pamphlet, print- 
 ed on coarse paper and brown with age, in which 
 a schoolboy like himself, writing as the first 
 quarter of a century was about drawing to an 
 end, has embalmed in verse his gloomy forebod- 
 ings of the future of the infant republic. 
 
 The title-page of the first edition of this work 
 reads as follows ; 
 
 THE EMBARGO; 
 
 Ob, Sketches or the Times. 
 
 A SATIEE. 
 
 By a Toutti of Thirteen. 
 
 Boston : 
 
 Pkisted foe the Pohchasebs. 
 
 1808. 
 
 The poem, which is in rhymed pentameters 
 evidently modelled after Pope's, shows that hu- 
 man nature is very much alike, the world over 
 and the ages through, and that a popular govern- 
 m eut — place it in what era of the earth's history 
 
 you -will — is bound to know something of the 
 strife of factions. It begins as follows : 
 
 " Look where we will, and in whatever land, 
 Europe's rich soil, or Afric'e barren sand, 
 "Where the wild savage hunts hia wilder prey. 
 Or art and science pour their brightest day. 
 The monster, VicCy appears before our eyes. 
 In naked impudence, or gay disguise. 
 
 " But quit the meaner game, indignant aiuse. 
 And to thy country turn thy nobler views ; 
 Bl-fated cUrae ! condemned to feel th' extremes 
 O a weak ruler's philosophic dreams ; 
 Driven headlong on to ruin's fateful brink, 
 "When wiU thy country feel — when will she think 1 
 
 "Satiric Muse, shall injured Commerce weep 
 Her ravish'd rights, and will thy thunders sleep ; 
 Dart thy keen glances, knit thy threat'ning brows, 
 Call fire from heaven to blast thy country's foes. 
 Oh! let a youth thine inspiration learn — 
 OhI give htm 'words that breathe and thoughts that 
 
 burn !' 
 
 "Curse of our nation, source of countless woes. 
 From whose dark womb nnreckou'd misery flows : 
 Th' Embargo rages, like a sweeping wind, 
 Fear lowers before, and famine stalks behind." 
 
 In the last couplet quoted above we reach 
 the root of our young patriot's plaint. The em- 
 bargo of 1807, laid on the shipping in American 
 ports at the instance of President Jefi'ersou to 
 counterbalance Napoleon's Berlin and Milan de- 
 crees and the British orders in councU, had agi- 
 tated the country more than almost any govern- 
 mental measure since the adoption of the Consti- 
 tution ; and the young poet, whose home was in 
 a community where hostility to the administra- 
 
12 
 
 tion was most rank, could scarcely have escaped 
 infection. 
 
 After tracing the evils which Jefferson's policy 
 would bring directly upon 
 
 ** Commerce, that bears the trident of the main, 
 And Agricdltuse, empress of the plain," 
 
 the "Youth of Thirteen" proceeds to show what 
 a great danger threatens the republic as an indi- 
 rect result: 
 
 "How foul a blot Columbia's glory stains! 
 How dark the scene ! — infatuation reigns ! 
 For French intriguej which wheedles to devour, 
 Threatens to fix us in Napoleon's power ; 
 Anon within th* insatiate vortex whirr d. 
 Whose wide periphery involves the world. 
 
 " Oh, Heaven defend ! as future seasons roll, 
 These western climes from Bonaparte's control ; 
 Preserve our freedom, and onr rights secure. 
 While truth subsists and virtue shall endure I 
 
 " Columbians, wake 1 Evade the deep-laid snarel 
 Insensate I Shall we ruin court, and fall. 
 Slaves to the proud autocrator of Gaul ? 
 Our laws laid prostrate by his ruthless hand. 
 And independence banished from our land !" 
 
 Further on he pays his compliments to Mr, 
 Jefferson in the following strain: 
 
 "And thou, the scorn of every patriot name. 
 Thy country's ruin and her council's shame ! 
 Poor servile thing! derision of the brave! 
 Who erst from Tarleton fled to Carter's cave ; 
 Thou, who, when menac'd by perfidious Gaul, 
 Didstprostrate to her whisker'd minion fall ; 
 And when our cash her empty bags supply'd. 
 Didst meanly strive the foul disgrace to hide ; 
 Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair. 
 Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair. 
 Go, search with curious eye for homed frogs. 
 Mid the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs ; 
 Or, where Ohio rolls his turbid stream. 
 Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme. 
 Go, scan, Philosophist, thy * * * charms. 
 And sink supinely in her sable arms ; 
 But quit to abler hands the helm of state. 
 Nor image ruin on thy country's fate." 
 
 As the embargo was removed in 1809 and the 
 excitement throughout the country subsided, as 
 Napoleon did not reduce the United States to 
 subjection, and as the President did not resign, 
 we can afford to smile at this bit of poetic exco- 
 riation, as its author was wont to in after years. 
 Before laying the poem aside, however, we must 
 find a place for one more quotation, descriptive 
 
 of a phase of political life in our land of freedom 
 which has suffered little change in the course of 
 time: 
 
 "E'en while I sing, see Faction urge her claim. 
 Mislead with falsehood, and with zeal inflame ; 
 Lift her black banner, spread her empire wide. 
 And stalk triumphant with a Fury's stride. 
 She blows her brazen trump, and at the sound 
 A motley throng, obedient, flock around ; 
 A mist of changing hue o'er all she flings, 
 And darkness perches on her dragon wings I 
 
 " As Johnson deep, as Addison refin'd. 
 And skill'd to pour conviction o'er the mind, 
 Oh.might some patriot rise ! the gloom dispel. 
 Chase Error's mist, and break her magic spell ! 
 
 "But vain the T\ish, for hark! the uiurmuriug 
 
 meed 
 Of hoarse applause from yonder shed proceed ; 
 Enter and view the thronging concourse there. 
 Intent, with gaping mouth and stupid stare ; 
 While, in the midst, their supple leader stands. 
 Harangues aloud, and flourishes his hands ; 
 To adulation tunes his servile throat. 
 And sues, successful, for each blockhead's vote." 
 
 This poem attracted general notice, and called 
 forth even from the staunchest democrats a word 
 in commendation of its literary strength. Doubts 
 as to its authorship, however, were freelj* ex- 
 pressed, and a leading review of that day gave 
 them written form in its columns. A few months 
 later a second edition appeared, with the follow- 
 ing "Advertisement" prefixed: 
 
 " A doubt having been intimated in the Monthly 
 Anthology of June last, whether a youth of thir- 
 teen years could have been the author of this 
 poem — injustice to his merits the friends of the 
 writer feel obliged to certify the fact from their 
 personal knowledge of himself and his family, as 
 well as his literary improvement and extraor- 
 dinar}' talents. They would premise, that they 
 do not come uncalled before the public, to bear 
 this testimony. They would prefer that he should 
 be judged by his works, without favor or affec- 
 tion. As the doubt has been suggested, they 
 deem it merely an act of justice to remove it — 
 after which they leave him a candidate for favor 
 i n common with other literary adventurers. 
 Tliej^ therefore, assure the public, that Mr. 
 Bryant, the author, is a native of Cummington, 
 in the County of Hampshire, and in the month of 
 November last, arrived at the age of fourteen 
 j^ears. These facts can be authenticated by many 
 of the inhabitants of that place, as well as by 
 several of his friends who give this notice ; and 
 if it be deemed worthy of further inquiry, the 
 
13 
 
 printer is enabled to disclose their names and 
 places of residence, 
 "February, 1809." 
 
 This edition bears on its title page the full 
 name, William Cullen Bryant, which here makes 
 its first mark upon the history of American liter- 
 ature. The name, but not the genius. Before 
 the publication of "The Embargo," its youthful 
 author had contributed poems to the newspapers 
 in 1 he neighborhood of his home, many of which 
 would bear the test of criticism to-day as the 
 work of a much older writer. Some of these, 
 and also some verses written expressly for the 
 volume, appear in company with *' The Embargo" 
 In its second dress. The list includes " The 
 Spanish Revolution," " The Contented Plough- 
 man," and an ** Ode to Connecticut River" all 
 written in 1S08; "The Reward of Literary 
 Merit," " Drought,*' and several clever poetical 
 " Enigmas " in imitation of the Latin, written in 
 1807; and a '" Translation from Horace" (Lib. I, 
 car. XXIL), "\\"ithout date. These most not be 
 hastily set down, however, as the work of a pre- 
 cocious child craving to see his name in print 
 and to hear himself talked about; in a very 
 modest way Master Bryant had been pursuing 
 his calling for years, either anonymously or under 
 signatures not likely to identity him. One of his 
 early etiorts we find in the Hampshire Gazette — a 
 newspaper published in Northampton, Mass — for 
 the 18th of March, ISO'?. It is signed simply 
 " C. B.," but the editor has prefixed to it this 
 title and note in one : " A Poem, composed by a 
 lad of twelve years old, to be exhibited at the 
 close of the winter school, in presence oi the Mas- 
 ter, the Minister of the Parish, and a number of 
 private gentlemen." We print the poem in full : 
 " When the dire strife with. Britain's pow'r unfurled 
 War's bloody banners over half the world. 
 Affrighted science cast a backward look, 
 Clapt her broad pinions and the states forsook. 
 But freedom soon resum'd her ancient sway 
 And rising Learning pour'd imperfect day : 
 Columbia saw and bless'd the glorious light, 
 But fate's dark clouds half hid it from the sight. 
 Now these dispell'd, much brighter days arise. 
 And purer splendors greet unclouded eyes ; 
 How strangely alter'd from our fathers* days, 
 These modern times, the subject of my lays ! 
 O ! may some remnant of their virtue still 
 Glow in our hearts, and mould our wav'ring will I 
 Small the provision then, for learning made ; 
 
 Few were the schools established for its aid. 
 But now they rise, increasing o'er the state. 
 And smiling Science lifts her eye sedate. 
 Thanks to the master, whose instructions kind. 
 By slow gradation has inform'd the mind ; 
 Who for our cares was often forc'd to go 
 Through heaps, high-pil'd, of ever drifting snow. 
 In fleecy storms and cold descending rains, 
 When chilling breezes swejit across the plains ; 
 Who, though he gave some salutary wounds. 
 Drove not correction to its utmost bounds. 
 Thanks to the preacher whose discernment true, 
 Upholds rehgion to the mental view ; 
 Uufolds to us instruction's ample page, 
 Rich with the fruits of every distant age ; 
 Pours simple truths, by love divine refln'd, 
 With force resistless on the youthful mind. 
 Thanks to the gentlemen assembled here. 
 To see what progress we have made tbia year. 
 In learning's paths, our footsteps to Efurvey, 
 And trace our passage up the sloping way. 
 And thanks to Heaven, the first and best of all, 
 The auditor of ev'ry humble call — 
 That (tho' a few have fall'n behind the rest,) 
 So much improvement has our studies blest. 
 And since I am to serious thoughts inclined, 
 Now to the scholars I'll address my mind ; 
 A word or two, in which myself may bear 
 If not a greater, yet an equal share. 
 My comrades 1 tho' we're not a num'rous train, 
 'Tis doubtful whether we shall meet again ; 
 For death's cold hand may aim th' unerring blow, 
 And lay, with heavy stroke, the victim low ; 
 From this firail state, th' unbody'd eoul will fly, 
 And sink to hell, or soar above the sty. 
 Then let us tread, as lowly Jesus trod. 
 The path that leads the sinner to his God ; 
 Keep Heaven's bright mansion ever in our eyes, 
 Press tow'rds the mark and seize the glorious prize. 
 " CuMMiNGTON, February 19, 1807." 
 
 History furnishes few parallels to the case of 
 Bryant, the boy poet. Chief among these rank 
 Tasso, who at nine years of age wrot« his " Lines" 
 to his mother ; Cowley, who at ten years finished 
 his "Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe;'' 
 Pope, who was twelve years old when he finished 
 his *' Ode to Solitude," and Chatterton, whose 
 " Hymn for Christmas Day was ended at the 
 same age. A well-known man of letters, writing 
 of the early but healthy development of Bryant's 
 genius, justly says: " His first efforts betray no 
 symptoms of a forced, hot-bed culture, but eeeni 
 the spontaneous growth of a prolific imagination. 
 They are free from the spasmodic forces which 
 indicate a morbid action of the intellect, and flow 
 in the polished, graceful, self-sustaining tranquil 
 
14 
 
 7 
 
 ity which is uauallj' the crowning attainment of a 
 large and felicitous experience." It is worthj' of 
 note in this connection that, of the small circle 
 (if poets who are known to have begun compos- 
 ing in boyhood, Br3'ant was the only one whose 
 powers remained unimpaired long past the age 
 allotted to man as the term of his natural life. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon habit of mating much of the 
 home and its surroundings leads us, in studying 
 the career of a noted man, to inquire what were 
 the associations of his boyhood ; it will be of in- 
 terest, therefore, to glean such facts as we may 
 concerning the household in the quaint old 
 gambrel-roofed dwelling in Cummington, Mass., 
 in which William Cullen Bryant first saw the 
 light on the third day of November, 1794. 
 
 The founder of the Bryant family in this 
 country was Stephen Bryant, who came from 
 England in the Mayflower about the year 1640. 
 His grandson Dr. Philip Bryant, who was born 
 in 1732, practiced medicine in North Bridge- 
 water, Mass. ; be married Silence Howard, a 
 daughter of Dr. Abiel Howard, of West Bridge- 
 water, Mass., who bore him nine children. One 
 son, Peter, born in iMl, succeeded him in his 
 profession. At that time lived in Bridgewater 
 Mr. Ebenezer Snell, whose daughter Sarah, a 
 comely maiden with blue eyes and light-brown 
 hair, won the young doctor's heart. Upon Mr. 
 Snell's removing his family and effects to Cum- 
 mington, Peter Bryant followed him thither, 
 established himself in practice, and in 1792 led 
 to the altar the bride of his choice. 
 
 Dr. Bryant is described as having been of 
 medium height, broad shouldered, and with a 
 well-knit frame ; he toot great pride in his mu.s- 
 cular strength, and would exhibit it by such 
 feats as lifting a barrel of cider from the ground 
 into a cart over the wheel. His manners were 
 uncommonly gentle and reserved, and his dispo- 
 sition serene, yet he was very fond of society. 
 His election to the Massachusetts House of Rep- 
 resentatives for several terms, and afterward to 
 the State Senate, gave him a cause for visiting 
 Boston very often, and associating with the cul- 
 tured literary circle whom he met there. When 
 not engaged in legislative matters, too, he would 
 mate it a point to attend the annual meeting of 
 the Medical Society, which was held in Boston, 
 
 and the letters written to his wife during these 
 intervals of recreation breathe a spirit of the 
 purest enjoyment. His fondness for hjimorous 
 composition of all sorts, and for amusing verses in 
 particular, was a marted trait, and for the gratifi- 
 cation of this taste he was enabled to draw on the 
 literature of two languages, having passed a 
 part of his early lifeontlie Isle of France, acting 
 as surgeon of a merchant ship. In dress the 
 doctor was always scrupulously neat; he follow- 
 ed the Boston fashions, moreover, witli enough 
 care, even in his village home, to give an ob- 
 server the impression that he was a city gentle- 
 man visiting the country for a holiday jaunt. 
 
 Mrs. Bryant, who was a lineal descendant of 
 Miles Standish's lieutenant, John Alden, was a 
 woman of great force of character, which mani- 
 fested itself in her dignified bearing and in the 
 unyielding quality of such convictions as she 
 saw fit to express. Her loathing for a druntard 
 was equalled only by her detestation of a liar. 
 In all her household management she displayed 
 an energy which indicated as clearly as did her 
 physical features the stoct from which she had 
 sprung. Like most women in her day, her 
 school education extended no further than the 
 ordinary English branches, and all the tnowl- 
 edge she possessed beyond that point was the 
 result of reading, an occupation in which she 
 toot great pleasure. The fruit of her union 
 with Dr. Bryant was a family of seven children, 
 the subject of our stetch being second in the 
 order of birth. 
 
 Thus much for the home associations of 
 Bryant's youth. Of a part of these, and of many 
 other incidents of the child-life of that period, he 
 has given us a cliarming picture in an article 
 printed in St. Nicholas for December, 1876, 
 under the title, " The Boys of My Boyhood :" 
 
 " The boj's of the generation to which I belonged 
 — that is to say, who were born in the last years 
 of the last centurj- or the earliest of this — were 
 brought up under a system of discipline which 
 put a far greater distance between parents and 
 their children than now exists. The parents 
 seemed to tliink this necessarj' in order to secure 
 obedience. They were believers in the old max- 
 im that familiarity breeds contempt. My own 
 parents lived in the house with my grandfather 
 and grandmother on the mother's side. My grand- 
 fatlier was a disciplinarian of the stricter sort. 
 
15 
 
 aod I can hardly find words to express the awe 
 in which I stood of him — an awe so great as 
 almost to prevent anything like affection on my 
 part, although he was in the main kind, and, cer- 
 tainly, never thought of being severe beyond 
 what was necessary to maintain a proper degree 
 of order in the family. 
 
 " The other boys in that part of the country, my 
 school-mates and play-fellows, were educated on 
 the same system. Yet there were at that time I 
 some indications that this very severe discipline 
 was beginning to relax. With my father and 
 mother I was on much easier terms than with my 
 grandfather. If a favor was to be asked of my 
 grandfather, it was asked with fear and trembling ; 
 the request was postponed to the last moment, 
 and then made with hesitation and blushes and a 
 confused utterance. 
 
 " One of the means of keeping the boys of that 
 generation in order was a little bundle of birchen 
 rods, bound together by a small cord, and gene- 
 rally suspended on a nail against the wall in the 
 kitchen. This was esteemed as much a part of 
 the necessary furniture as the crane that hung in 
 the kitchen fireplace, or the shovel and tongs. It 
 sometimes happened that the boy suffered a fate_ 
 similar to that of the eagle in the fable, wounded 
 by an arrow fledged with a feather from his own 
 vnng ; in other words, the boy was made to gath- 
 er the twigs intended for his own castigation. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " The awe in which the boys of that time 
 held their parents extended to all elderly per- 
 sons, toward whom our behaviour was more than 
 merely respectiul, for we all observed a hushed 
 and subdued demeanor in their presence. To- 
 ward the ministers of the gospel this beha- 
 vior was particularly marked. At that time, 
 every township in Massachusetts, the State 
 in which I lived, had its minister, who was 
 settled there for life, and when he once came 
 among his people was understood to have entered 
 into a connection with them scarcely less lasting 
 than the marriage tie. The community in which 
 he lived regarded him with great veneration, and 
 the visits which from time to time he made to the 
 district schools seemed to the boys important oc- 
 casions, for which special preparation was made. 
 When he came to visit the school which I attend- 
 ed, we all had on our Sunday clothes, and were 
 ready for him with a few answers to the questions 
 in the ' Westminster Catechism.' He heard us 
 recite our lessons, examined us in the catechism, 
 and then began a little address, which I remem- 
 ber was the same on every occasion. He told us 
 how much greater were the advantages of educa- 
 tion which we enjoyed than tliose which had 
 fallen to the lot of our parents, and exhorted us 
 to make the best possible use of them, both for 
 our own sakes and that of our parents, who were 
 ready to make any sacrifice for us, even so far as 
 
 to take the bread out of their own mouths to give 
 us. I remember being disgusted with this illus- 
 tration of parental kindness, which I was obliged 
 to listen to twice at least in every year. 
 
 " The good man had, perhajjs, less reason than 
 he supposed to magnify the advantages of educa- 
 tion enjoyed in the common schools at that time. 
 Reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, with a 
 little grammar and a little geograpli}^ were all 
 that was taught, and these by persons much less 
 qualified, for tlie most part, than those who now 
 give instruction. Those, however, who wished 
 to proceed further took lessons from graduates of 
 the colleges, who were then much more numerous 
 in proportion to the population than they now 
 
 " Drunkenness, in that demure population, was 
 not obstreperous, and the man who was over- 
 taken by it was ' generally glad to slink out of 
 sight. 
 
 " I remember an instance of this kind. There 
 had been a muster of a militia company on the 
 church green for the election of one of its officers, 
 and the person elected had treated the members 
 of the company and all who were present to 
 sweetened rum and water, carried to the green in 
 pailsfull, with a tin cup to each pail for the con- 
 venience of drinking. The afternoon was far 
 spent, and I was going home, with other boj"s, 
 when we overtook a young man who had taken 
 too much of the election todd3-, and, in endeavor- 
 ing to go quietly home, had got but a little way 
 from the green when he fell in a miry plaee and 
 was surrounded by three or four persons, who 
 assisted in getting him on his legs again. The 
 poor fellow seemed in great distress, and his new 
 nankeen pantaloons, daubed with the mire of the 
 road, and his dangling limbs, gave him a most 
 wretched appearance. It was, I think, the first 
 time that I had ever seen a drunken man. As I 
 approached to pass him by some of the older 
 boys said to me, " Do not go too near him, for if 
 you smell a drunken man it will make you drunk." 
 Of course I kept at a good distance, but not out 
 of hearing, for I remember hearing him lament 
 his condition in these words: ' Oh dear, I shall 
 die!" 'Oh dear, I wish I hadn't drinked any!' 
 ' Oh dear, what will my poor Betsey say ? ' What 
 his poor Betsey said I never heard, but I saw him 
 led off in the direction of his home, and I con- 
 tinued on my way with the other boys, impressed 
 with a salutary horror of drunkenness and a fear 
 of drunken men. 
 
 ***** 
 
 "From time to time, the winter evenings, and 
 occasionally a winter afternoon, brought the young 
 people of the parish together in attendance upon 
 a singing-school. Some person who possessed 
 more than common power of voice and skOl in 
 modulating it, was employed to teach psalmody, 
 
Ifi 
 
 and the boys were natiirallj^ attracted (o liis school 
 as a recreation. It olten happened tliat the tenoher 
 ■was an cntlmsiast in his vocation, and thundered 
 fortli the airs set down in tlie music-books with a 
 lervor tliat was contao;ious. A few ul tliose who 
 attempled to learn psalmody were told that they 
 liad no aptitude lor the art, and were set aside, 
 hut that did not prevent their attendance as 
 hearers of the otiiers. In those days a set ot" 
 tunes were in fashion mostly of New Ens'land 
 origin, which have since been laid aside in 
 obedience to a more fastidious taste. They were 
 in quick time, sharply accented, the words clearly 
 articulated, and often running into fugues in 
 whicli the bass, the tenor, and the treble chased 
 each other from the middle to the end of the 
 stanza. I recollect that some impatience was 
 manifested when slower and grayer airs of church 
 music ^yere introduced bj- the choir, and I won- 
 dered why the words should not be sung in 
 the same time that thej- were pronounced in read- 
 ing. 
 
 "The streams which bickered through the nar- 
 row glens of the region in wliich I lived were 
 much better stocked with trout in those days 
 than now, for the country had been newlj- opened 
 to settlement. The boys all were anglers. I 
 confess to having felt a strong interest in that 
 ' sport,' as I no longer call it. I have long since 
 been weaned from the propensitj- of which I 
 speak ; but I have no doubt that the instinct 
 which inclines so manj- to it, and some of them 
 our grave divines, is a remnant of the original 
 wi'd nature of man. Another 'sport,' to which 
 the young men of the neighborhood sometimes 
 admitted the elder boys, was the autumnal squirrel 
 iiuut. The j-oung men formed themselves into two 
 parties equal in number, and fixed a day for the 
 shooting. The party which on that day brought 
 down the greatest number of squirrels was de- 
 clared the victor, and the contest ended with 
 some sort of festivity in the evening. 
 
 « )ir » W * 
 
 " For tlie bo3's of the present day an immense 
 number of books have been provided, some of 
 them excellent, tome mere trash or worse, but 
 scarce any are now read which are not of recent 
 date. The question is often asked, What books 
 had they to read seventj- or eighty j-ears siuoe ? 
 They had books, and some of great merit. There 
 was * Sanford and ]\lerton,' and 'Little Jack;' 
 there was ' Robinson Crusoe,' with its varia- 
 tions ' The Swiss Familj' Robinson ' and ' The 
 New Robinson Crusoe;' there was a Mrs. Trim- 
 mer's ' Knowledge of Nature,' and Berquin's 
 lively narratives and sketches translated from 
 (he Frencli ; there was 'Philip Quarll,' and 
 Watts's ' Poems for Children,' and Bunj-an's 
 ' Pilgrim's Progress,' and Mrs. Barbauld's 
 writings, and the 'Miscellaneous Poems' of 
 Cowper. Later we had Mrs. Edgworth's ' Pa- 
 
 rent's Assistant' and ' Evenings at Home.' All 
 these, if not luimcrous, were at least often read, 
 and the frequent, reading of a few good books is 
 tliouglit to be at least as improving — as useful in 
 storing tlie mind and teaching one to thinl; — as 
 the more cursory reading of many. Of elemen- 
 tary books tlicre was no lack, nor, as I have 
 already intimated, any scarcity of private in- 
 structors, princi|ially clergymen, educated at the 
 colleges." 
 
 As a lad, William Cidlcn Bryant early dis- 
 played a taste for reading and study. The strong 
 vitality ho inherited from both father and mother 
 made it possible for him to indulge this liking 
 without the harm that might have followed in 
 the case of a punier frame ; and at an age when 
 most boys are still content with their fairy tales 
 he was drinking in the grand romances of anti- 
 quity from their original springs, fostering a 
 lighter fancy with the epigrammatic verse of 
 Queen Anne's era, and even turning into metre 
 and rhyme such thouglits as the beauties of na- 
 ture or the stirring events of his own day raised 
 in his mind. The imitation of Pope's poetic 
 method which is so marked in some of these 
 youthful compositions may be accounted for by 
 the influence of the father's taste upon the son's. 
 To the fact that Dr. Bryant did direct his boy's 
 attention to poetry in early life we have the tes- 
 tinionj- of those familiar lines in the " H3'mn to 
 Death:'- 
 
 " For he is in his grave who taught mj youth 
 The art of veree, and in the bud of life 
 Offered me the Muses." 
 
 More useful yet, however, both to himself and 
 to the world which was afterward to profit 
 bj- it, was another department of knowledge 
 opened to the lad through this companionship. 
 Dr. Br\-ant's scientfic attainments were not lim- 
 ited to an acquaintance with the phials and 
 retorts of his laboratory. In the open fields he 
 was equally at home ; and his son. in twilight 
 strolls along the country roads, and talks at noon- 
 day under the big trees near the homestead, drew 
 from him those first lessons in botany which were 
 so expanded by later research as to embrace the 
 whole field of organic but inanimate nature. 
 
 Tlie year after the second publication of " The 
 Embargo," the country having become more 
 
17 
 
 tranquil, Master Bryant contributed to the Hamp- 
 shire Gazette the following poem : 
 
 THE GENIUS OF COLUMBIA. 
 
 Far in th.e regions of the west, 
 
 On throne of adament upraised. 
 Bright on whose polished sides impressed, 
 
 The Sun's meridian splendors blazed, 
 
 Columbia's Genius sat and eyed 
 
 The eastern despot's dire career ; 
 And thus with independent pride. 
 
 She spoke and bade the nations hear. 
 
 " Go, favored son of glory, go '. 
 
 ** Thy dark aspiring aims pursue I 
 " The blast of domination blow. 
 
 " Earth's wide extended regions through I 
 
 " Though Austria twice subjected, own 
 " The thunders of thy conquering hand, 
 
 " And tyranny erect her throne, 
 " In hapless Sweden's fallen land! 
 
 " Yet know, a nation lives, whose soul 
 
 " Regards thee with disdainful eye ; 
 •* Undaunted scorns thy proud control, 
 
 *' And dares thy swarming hordes defy; 
 
 " Unshaken as their native rocks, 
 
 " Its hardy sons heroic rise; 
 " Prepared to meet thy fiercest shocks, 
 
 " Protected by the favoring skies. 
 
 " Their fertile plains and woody hills, 
 " Are fanned by freedom's purest gales I 
 
 " And her celestial presence fills 
 *' The deepening glens and spacious vales." 
 
 She speaks; through all her listening bands 
 
 A loud applauding murmur flies; 
 Fresh valor nerves their willing hands, 
 
 And hghtfi with joy their glowing eyes ! 
 
 Then should Napoleon's haughty pride 
 Wake on our shores the fierce affray ; 
 
 Grim terror lowering at his side. 
 Attendant on his furious way ! 
 
 With quick repulse, his baffled band 
 Would seek the friendly shore in vain. 
 
 Bright justice lift her red right hand. 
 And crush them on the fatal plain. 
 
 Cummington, January 8, 1810. 
 
 W. C. B. 
 
 This was followed, two years later, by another 
 patriotic effusion. In introducing it, the editor 
 of the Oazette remarks that it is " from the pen 
 of Mr. William C. Bryant, eon of Doctor Bryant, 
 of Cummington" — a note of identification that 
 calls up a smile, now that Doctor Bryant, rather 
 
 than his son, shines by reflected light. Follow- 
 ing is the poem: 
 
 AN ODE 
 
 Fob the Foueth of Jult, 1812. 
 
 Tune, "Ye Gentlemen of England, &c." 
 
 The Birth Day of our nation 
 
 Once more we greet with smiles; 
 Nor falls as yet our hapless land, 
 
 A prey to foreign wiles. 
 Yet still increasing dangers wake. 
 
 The Statesman's pious fear; 
 The whirling vortex of our fate 
 
 Sweeps near, and still more near; 
 The dreadlul warning, whispered long 
 
 In louder tones we hear. 
 
 Far on a rock of ocean, 
 
 A generous Eagle sleeps; 
 The winds are mustering all their rage. 
 
 To whelm him in the deeps. 
 Above, around, the blackening clouds 
 
 Their gathering volumes pour; 
 Collected thunders, o'er his head 
 
 Await the sign to roar. 
 Oh ! wake him from that fated sleep 
 
 Above the storm to soar. 
 
 Lo, where our ardent rulers 
 
 For fierce assault prepare ; 
 While eager "Ate" waits their beck 
 
 To " slip the dogs of war." 
 In vain against the dire design, 
 
 Exclaims the indignant land ; 
 The unbidden blade they haste to bare. 
 
 And light the unhallowed brand. 
 Proceed I another year shall wrest 
 
 The sceptre from your hand ! 
 
 Should Justice call to battle 
 
 The applauding shout we'd raise ; 
 A million swords would leave their sheaths, 
 
 A million bayonets blaze. 
 The stern resolve, the courage high, 
 
 The mind untam'd by ill. 
 The fires that warmed our Leader's breast 
 
 His followers* bosoms fill. 
 Our Fathers bore the shock of war. 
 
 Their Soks can bear it still. 
 
 The same ennobling spirit 
 
 That kindles valor's flame. 
 That nerves us to a war of right, 
 
 Forbids a war of shame ; 
 For not in Conquest's impious train 
 
 Shall Freedom's children stand ; 
 Nor shall, in guilty fray, be raised 
 
 The high-souled warrior's hand ; 
 Nor shall the Patriot draw his sword 
 
 At Gallia's proud command. 
 
IS 
 
 No ! by our Fatheb's Ashes, 
 
 And by their sacred cause, 
 The Gaul shall never call ua slaves, 
 
 Shall never give us laws ; 
 Even let him from a swarming fleet 
 
 Debark his veteran host, 
 
 A LrVIKG WALL OF PATRIOT HeAKTS 
 
 Shall fence the froTiVuiug coast — 
 A bolder race than generous Spain, 
 A better cause we boast. 
 
 Insulted Sons of Freedom I 
 
 Who fear all succor past, 
 Who celebrate — a solemn train — 
 
 This day — perhaps the last. 
 Though shut from hope the Peasant mourns, 
 
 The ruined Tradesjnan weeps ; 
 Though scowls oppression round our shores. 
 
 And danger stallis the deeps, 
 Yet one there is to mark our wrongs. 
 
 The God that never sleeps. 
 
 Ye need r.o loud monition 
 
 To warn you to the strife. 
 To fire you in the eternal cause 
 
 Of Liberty and Life ; 
 For, dark in each indignant eye. 
 
 The jMxjse can well explore 
 The fijna resolve, which proudly tells 
 
 That faction's beign is o'ee. 
 Which tells — the Man that gives us laws 
 
 Shall give tis laws no moeeI 
 
 One more poem appeared in the Hampshire 
 Gazette before Bryant reached years of maturity, 
 and we print it, as we have printed its predeces- 
 sors, for the purpose, first, of tracing the devel- 
 opment of the poet's genius and the increase of 
 his technical skill ; and second, of presenting to 
 the public some works of his that have never 
 before been collected, and that will be cherished 
 for their author's sake as tenderly as the fruits 
 of his later and better thought. It may be of 
 interest, moreover, to note in this connection the 
 fact that the lines which follow were composed 
 at least a year and a half after the first draft of 
 the world-renowned ** Thanatopsis " had been 
 laid away in his portfolio for revision and cor- 
 rection : 
 
 ODE 
 
 FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1814. 
 By Wm. C. Bryant. 
 
 Amidst the storms that shake the land. 
 
 The din of party fray, 
 And woes of guilty war, we meet 
 
 To hymn this sacred day. 
 For all that breathes of ancient worth 
 
 Our lingering hope reveres ; 
 Each print of freedom's sacred steps, 
 Each trace of happier years. 
 
 Our skies have glowed with burning towns. 
 
 Our snows have blushed with gore, 
 And fresh is many a nameless grave. 
 
 By Erie's weeping shore. 
 In sadness let the anthem flow, — 
 
 But tell the men of strife. 
 On theu' own heads shall rest the guilt 
 
 Of all this waste of Ufe. 
 
 But raise, to swell the general song. 
 
 Our notes of holiest sound ; 
 And bless the hands which rent the chain 
 
 The struggling world that bound. 
 Lo! Europe wakes the sleep of death — 
 
 Her pristine glories warm ! 
 The soul of ancient freedom comes 
 
 And fills her mighty form! 
 
 Well have ye fought, ye friends of man, 
 
 Well was your valor shown; 
 The grateful nations breathe from war, — 
 
 The tyrant lies o'erthrown. 
 Well might ye tempt the dangerous fray. 
 
 Well dare the desperate deed: 
 Ye knew how just your cause — ye knew 
 
 The voice that bade ye bleed. 
 
 To thee the mighty plan we owe 
 
 To bid the world be free; 
 The thanks of nations, Queen of Isles ! 
 
 Are poured to heaven and thee, 
 Yes! — hadst not thou, with fearless arm. 
 
 Stayed the descending scourge ; 
 These strains, that chant a nation's birth. 
 
 Had haply hym.ned its dirge. 
 
 But where was raised our country's hand 
 
 Amidst that dreadful strife? 
 Where was her voice, when Hope grew faiut, 
 
 And freedom fought for life ? 
 Oh ! bitter are the tears we shed, 
 
 Columbial o'er thy shame! 
 A stain the deluge could not cleanse 
 
 For ever blots thy fame. 
 
 Nor to avenge a nation's wrongs 
 
 Does power demand our aid ; 
 The sword is bared— but angry Heaven 
 
 Frowns on the accursed blade. 
 The men who snatched it from the sheath, 
 
 A fearful curse withstands ; 
 The blood of innocence is red 
 
 Upon their guilty hands. 
 
 Still, to defend our country's shores. 
 
 We hasten to the field. 
 And should the foe invade— our ranks 
 
 May fall, but never yield. 
 
19 
 
 Tlie dJiy, that sees the victory their*8. 
 
 Shall look on many a grave: 
 Our veteran fathers taught their sons 
 
 To guard the soil they gave. 
 
 Come to thiue ancient haunts, and bring 
 
 Thy train of happy years, 
 Oh, Peace ! the sunshine of thy smile 
 
 Shall dry a nation's tears ! 
 From hill, and plain, and ocean's verge. 
 
 White with the unwonted sail. 
 Shall burst a boundless shout of joy. 
 
 Thy reign renewed, to hail I 
 
 DuriDg the period covered by tlje three poems 
 last in order we have the briefest possible record 
 of Bryant's life and occupations. We know, how- 
 ever, that he left school and entered Williams 
 College, in Williamstown, Mass., in 1810. Noth- 
 ing in his career as a student seems to have 
 marked him as a man destined to be famous in 
 after years, although he was distinguished for 
 aptness and industry in the departments of clas- 
 sical learning and in polite literature generally. 
 He did not finish the prescribed course, but took 
 an honorable dismissal in 1812, and began the 
 study of the law. Three years later he was admit 
 ted to the bar, and opened an office in Plainfield, 
 Mass. This situation proving too retired, he re- 
 moved to Great Barrington, and after an interval 
 of pretty active practice, was ma^le a Justice of 
 the Peace. TTia earliest official act, outside of the 
 routine duties of the court, was the marriage of 
 Major Robbins, a well-known citizen of Great 
 Barrington, to Miss Tobey. Both bride and groom 
 were members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 
 and entertained pronounced views respecting the 
 character of the marital contract ; and, there be- 
 ing no clergyman of their own denomination 
 within reach, they preferred a purely civil cere- 
 mon3" to the intervention of a dissenting minister. 
 The circumstances of the wedding were related 
 to the writer of this article by Major Robbins in 
 1877, with as much distinctness as if it had oc- 
 curred but yesterday ; both the male members 
 of the essential trio having at that time passed 
 the allotted age of man by more than a half- 
 score of years, in excellent health and in full pos- 
 session of their mental faculties. 
 
 While living in Great Barrington, Mr. Bryant 
 was himself married to Miss Frances FairchUd of 
 that village, a woman who possessed to an un- 
 
 common degree the finer graces of her sex. Their 
 union, which lasted for nearly half a century, was 
 attended witli all the happiness that flows from 
 temperaments differing enough to supplement 
 each other, congeniality of tastes, chivalrous de- 
 votion on the one side and generous appreciation 
 on the other ; and the death of his wife, in the 
 summer of 1S66, dealt Mr. Bryant a blow from 
 which he never recovered. 
 
 A tradition exists in connection with his mar- 
 riage which exemplifies m an amusing manner 
 the poet's extreme modesty. It seems that he 
 was then acting as village clerk, one of the duties 
 of the post being the " reading of the banns'' in 
 church for three successive Sundays when a wed- 
 ding was to take place among the congregation. 
 Unable to bring his courage to the point of facing 
 his fellow-worshippers with the announcement of 
 his approaching nuptials, Mr. Bryant wrote out 
 the necessarj' notice in due form, and pinned it 
 on the church door instead. Thus the story runs. 
 How much of it is strictly true we have no means 
 of determining; it answers the purpose, never- 
 theless, of illustrating a fact which those who 
 knew its subject best will vouch for, namely, that 
 the impassive exterior which misled many ob- 
 servers to believe the heart beneath it cold, was 
 oulj' the result of an unconquerable diffidence. 
 
 Letters written by Catherine Sedgwick give 
 us a pen portrait of the young la^vyer and 
 amateur poet of that period. One is dated at 
 Stockbridge on the 17th of May, 1820: "I 
 wish," says Miss Sedgwick, " you would give 
 my best regards to Mr. Sewall, and tell him that 
 I have had great success in my agency. I sent 
 for Mr. Bryant last week, and he called to see 
 me on his return from court. I told him Mr. 
 Sewall had commissioned me to request some 
 contributions from him to a collection of hymns, 
 and he said, without an3^ hesitation, that he was 
 obliged to Mr. Sewall, and would with great 
 pleasure comply with his request. He has a 
 charming countenance, and modest but not bash- 
 ful manners. I made him promise to come 
 and see us shortly. He seemed gratified; 
 and if Mr. Sewall has reason to be obliged 
 to me (which I certainly think he has) 1 am 
 doubly obliged by an opportunity of secur- 
 ing the acquaintance of so interesting a man." 
 
20 
 
 " We have a great deal of pleasiire," she 
 writes again from New York about two years 
 afterward, " from a gUnipse of Bryant. I never 
 saw him so happy, nor half so agreeable. 1 
 think he is ver3- much animated with liis pros- 
 pects. -Heaven grant that tliey may be more 
 than realized. I sometimes feel some misgivings 
 about it ; but I think it is impossible tliat, in tlie 
 increasing demand for native literature, a man of 
 his resources, who lias justly the Jirst reputalion, 
 should not be able to command a competcncj'. 
 He has good sense, too, good judgment and mod. 
 oration. * * « jje seems so modest that 
 every one seems eager to prove to him the merit 
 of which he appears unconscious. I wisli j'on 
 had seen him last evening. Mrs. Nicholas was 
 here, and half a dozen gentlemen. She was am- 
 bitious to recite before Bryant. She was very 
 becomingly dressed for the grand ball to wliicli 
 she was gtiing, and, wrought up to her liighest 
 pitch of excitement, she recited her favorite 
 pieces better than I ever heard her, and con- 
 cluded the whole, without request or any note of 
 preparation, by ' The "Water-fowl ' and ' Thana- 
 topsis.' Bryant's face ' brightened all over,' was 
 one gleam of light, and, I am certain, at the 
 moment he felt the ecstasy of a poet.'" 
 
 We must once more go back a little, in order 
 to bring down all the threads of our narrative to 
 the point where they unite at the entrance of 
 their hero upon his publ'c career as a man of let- 
 ters. In 1812, while still a student at Williams 
 College, Bryant devised the poetic scheme which 
 later took the form of " Thanatopsis," and spread 
 his fame throughout the world. Local tradition 
 represents him as actually composing the poem 
 wliile seated on a rock in a lovely ravine known 
 as Flora's Glen, on the outskirts of Williamstown. 
 There is reason to suspect that much of this story 
 is apocryphal, and the fact that the rock is still 
 pointed out to visitors by way of proof weighs 
 but little in the balance of belief. It is true, how- 
 ever, that the poem owes its inception to the in- 
 fluences of that beautiful spot upon the mind of a 
 youth peculiarly susceptible to impressions from 
 Nature in her nobler moods. For nearly four 
 years the work lay in its author's portfolio, un- 
 touched save for purposes of occasional correc- 
 tion ; then it was sent to the North American Re- 
 
 viciD with so modest a note of introduction that 
 its authorsliip was left in considerable doubt. 
 
 The Rcvimi at tliat day was conducted by a 
 number of 3'oung literary gentlemen, united under 
 the name of the North American Club. A coin- 
 niittee of publication managed tlie business affairs 
 of tlie periodical, while two members, Richard II. 
 Dana and Edward Tyrell Clianning, had the 
 editorial department in charge. Dana read 
 " Thanatopsis" carefully wlien it was submitted, 
 and turned it over to his associate with the re- 
 mark tliat it coidd not possibly be the work of an 
 American. There was a completeness, an artistic 
 finish about it, added to tlie grandeur and beautj' 
 of the ideas, to which, in his opinion, none of our 
 native writers had attained. Channing, and others 
 of the club tlirough whose hands the manuscript 
 was passed, concurred in this view. One day, 
 while the poem was still under consideration, 
 Dana received intelligence at his Cambridge home 
 that the m3-sterious author was a member of the 
 Massachusetts State Senate, whicli was then in 
 session. Throwing everytliina; else aside, the 
 editor seized his hat and cane and set out for 
 Boston on foot. Arrived at the State House, he 
 sought the Senate Chamber, and had pointed out 
 to him the person he was looking for — a tall, 
 middle-aged man, with u business-like aspect. 
 Plainly, this was not the author of " Thanatopsis," 
 and without waiting for an introduction, he 
 started for home again in great disappointment. 
 The mistake on the part of his informant was tlie 
 result of a similarity of names between the poet 
 and the Senator ; but it soon led, \>\ aroundabcnit 
 course, to the identification he desired, and a cor- 
 respondence was opened wliich brouglit the two 
 3-ouDg men into those relations of friendship and 
 respect which each has cherished through life. 
 
 " Thanatopsis " appeared in the North Ameri- 
 can Review in 1816. In the next year it was 
 followed by the " Inscription for an Entrance into 
 d Wood," written in 1813. After that Bryant 
 contributed prose papers from time to time ; and 
 it was chiefl3' through the influence of Dana and 
 his coadjutors that he was invited in 1S21 to de- 
 liver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
 at Harvard College. The response to this invita- 
 tion was the well-known didactic poem, •' The 
 Ao-es." _In the same year a collection of Bryant's 
 
'il 
 
 writings was made, ancl publislied in a small vol- 
 ume of forty-four pages at Cambridije. 
 
 Before taking leave of this period it may be 
 worth noting that Mr. Dana was among the earli- 
 est of the race of critics to oppose the arbitrary 
 conclusions of Jeffrey, and give to Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge the position of men of genius and 
 great poets. His views were in so little accord 
 with those of most of his associates in the North 
 American Club that he was relieved of the edit- 
 orship of the Review, and Edward Everett was 
 installed ip his place. Some time later Mr. Bry- 
 ant reviewed Dana's " Idle .VIeu," and sent the 
 manuscript to Mr. Everett, who " respectfully 
 declined " it. But the end was not yet ; Everett 
 was himself succeeded by Sparks, who was 
 friendly to Dana, and who, when the latter's 
 "Buccaneer" was published, wrote straightway 
 to Mr. Bryant, reminding him that the time for 
 his revenge had arrived. Accordingly an early 
 number of the Review contained an able criticism 
 of the " Idle Man ■" and the " Buccaneer,'' in 
 which the author of both books received the 
 meed of credit for which a petty spite had kept 
 liim waiting so long. 
 
 When "The Ages" appeared, in IS2), a very 
 commendatory notice of it was printed in the 
 New York American, a periodical edited bj' 
 Charles King, afterward President of Columbia 
 College. The article was from the pen of Gulian 
 C. Verplanck, a leading spirit in the literary soci- 
 ety of NcW York, who had written two or three 
 excellent addresses for the Historical Society of 
 this city, and was known as a wit through his 
 political satire, " The Bucktail Bards." Mr. Ver- 
 planck used frequentl}- to visit the house of Mr. 
 Henry D. Sedgwick, about whose fireside the lit- 
 erary men of that day, including Hillhouse, Dun- 
 lap, Halleck, Percival, Cooper and others less 
 known to fame, were wont to assemble from time 
 to time. Mr. Sedgwick, who was a warm admirer 
 of Bryant, longed to secure the presence of his 
 favorite in this charmed circle; and to him, per- 
 haps, more than to any other person, New York 
 owes her possession of the great poet and jour- 
 nalist for the best part of his life. With Ver- 
 planck's assistance, Mr. Sedgwick procured for 
 Bryant the co-editorship of the projected New 
 Voi-k Review and Athenceum Magazine, his associ- 
 
 ate being Henry J. Anderson, afterward Pro- 
 fessor of Mathematics in Columbia College. This 
 was in the winter of 1824-5 ; and on the arrival 
 of the despatch containing the announcement in 
 Great Barrington, our young lawyer closed his 
 musty tomes with a sigh of relief, turned over 
 his briefs to a brother attorney, and set his affairs 
 in order with all speed for a removal to the city. 
 In view of the later relations sustained by Mr. 
 Bryant to this journal, the following paragraph 
 from the Evening Post of April 21st, 1825, pre- 
 sumably written by Mr. William Coleman, the 
 editor-in-chief, is of no little interest : 
 
 " Nem York Review and Atheneum Magazine. — 
 Yesterday a person called on me to solicit a sub- 
 scription to a periodical work under this title ; 
 and on looking at the prospectus I perceived it 
 was to be a continuation of the Atlantic Maga- 
 zine, to be conducted by Henry James Anderson 
 and William CuUen Bryant, under this new 
 name. I therefore did not hesitate a moment to 
 enrol mj-self among the number of those who en- 
 gaged to patronize this undertaking. We have, 
 from its early appearance, taken a more than 
 common interest in the success of the Atlantic 
 Magazine, which early gave promise of becoming 
 a useful, able, and even elegant vehicle for the 
 improvement of literarj' taste, and the advance- 
 ment of sound doctrines in the science of political 
 economy, and of just and acute criticism;— nor 
 have our expe<;tations been disappointed. We 
 now anticipate still additional excellence, from 
 the well-known talents of the gentleman now as- 
 sociated with the former editor; and from 'the 
 co-operation (which is alluded to in the pros- 
 pectus,) of several gentlemen, amply qualified to 
 furnish the departments of Intelligence, Poetry 
 and Fiction.' With such encouragement, we 
 cannot consent to compound for anything short 
 of a decided supei'iority in the various walks of 
 letters. If it is what it ought to be, and what 
 we expect it will be, to suppose it can want the 
 most liberal, and indeed splendid patronage, 
 would be a libel on the more refined of our cit- 
 izens." 
 
 In glancing over the body of this number of 
 the livExiNG Post, wc cannot pass without re- 
 mark some of its striking features, indicative of 
 the condition in which Mr. Bryant found jour- 
 nalism on his first entry into New York in the 
 capacity of editor, and suggesting the wonderful 
 changes that took place during his long career. 
 Here, for example, are extracts from English 
 newspapers of the 24th of March ; news from 
 the State Legislature in Albany as late as the 
 
22 
 
 Igth of April; a dispatch from Halifax, N. C, 
 dated April Sth, announcing that " a main of 
 cocts -will be fought at Northampton Court 
 House on Jlonday next ;" an editorial rebuke to 
 a contemporarj- -svhich had insinuated that the 
 EvENixo Post possibly manufactured a news- 
 letter that appeared in its columns the evening 
 before; and the advertisements of stage-coach 
 lines between New York and Buffalo, Philadel- 
 phia and other points North, West and South. 
 The spirit of partisanship in national affairs so 
 seriously deplored in "The Embargo," seems to 
 be manifesting itself now in State matters ; and 
 the EvENixG Post calls one of its neighbors 
 sharply to account for rejoicing over the probable 
 rejection by the State Senate of the Governor's 
 nomination of a resident physician for New York 
 City, adding : " What can be more absurd, more 
 repugnant to common sense, than to permit pol- 
 itics to have an influence over rational men when 
 the health and safety of the community is con- 
 cerned." 
 
 In the Evening Post of the 11th of June, 
 1825, appears Fitz Greene Halleck's poem 
 " Marco Bozarris," with the simple signature 
 " H." The facts that Mr. Bryant was in some 
 way connected with the first publication of this 
 poem, and that it was printed in the Evening 
 Post shortly after its composition, have misled 
 many persons to believe that it was written for 
 this journal originally. The first editorial par- 
 agraph, however, of the number in which the 
 stirring lyric occurs, will at once disabuse the 
 reader's mind of that impression, and show just 
 how much of a foundation in truth it had ; 
 
 TJie Neio York- Hevieio and Atheneum Magazine, 
 — We have had l3"ing on our desk for some time, 
 the first number of this work, and have, from 
 day to day, intended, in compliance with our 
 feelings, and a strong sense of duty, to express 
 our opinion of its superior merits at some 
 length, by way of urging it upon our readers 
 to show a liberal patronage on the first buddings 
 of a flower which gives promise that it will be 
 an ornament to our city. We have not time to 
 do this now ; we will, therefore, only say, that 
 its poetic department is supported in a style that 
 extorts our ujifeigued and unqualified admiration. 
 As a specimen, we extract, tliis evening, an 
 effusion of the loftiest character, entitled Marco 
 Bozarris, the eminent beauties of which do not 
 lie upon the surface, but with which, on every 
 
 new reading, we are charmed, and also sur- 
 prised, that they had escaped us on a former 
 perusal. We shall take an early opportunity to 
 give another piece from this number, entitled 
 J^itfairii'g Island— oxia of the sweetest pictures 
 that a highly cultivated fancy ever drew." 
 
 A later number of the Evening Post fulfilled 
 the promise of this closing sentence, and copied 
 Mr. Bryant's " Song of Pitcairn's Island," with 
 its modest signature " B." 
 
 The galaxj- of talent engaged in this literary 
 enterprise, though it included such bright, par- 
 ticular stars as WQlis, Dana and Bancroft, be- 
 side Halleck and Bryant, could not save It from 
 tlie fate which has swallowed up many another 
 setting out with the brightest prospects. Mr. 
 Bryant ard his associate did not continue their 
 labors many months ; and in the Evening Post 
 of the 17th of March, 1826, we find a card, 
 copied from the latest number of the New York 
 Literary Gazette, and signed by James G. Brooks 
 and George Bond, announcing the union of the 
 two periodicals, conducted by them respectively, 
 in one, to bear the joint name. The New York 
 Literary Gazette and AmeHcan Atlieneum. In 
 July of the same year this magazine was con- 
 solidated with the United States Literary Gazette, 
 the lesser title being sunk in the greater, and in 
 September the United States Literary Gazette lost 
 its identity in turn and became the United States 
 Heview, with simultaneous publication in New 
 York and Boston. 
 
 In 1826, Bryant was invited to share with 
 Coleman the editorship of the Eventsg Post, and 
 soon made his utterances a matter of political 
 and social consequence. 
 
 The story of his long connection with the 
 newspaper press, and the course which his own 
 sheet followed during that period, will be told In 
 its proper place. We may remark here, how- 
 ever, that his notion of the educational aspects 
 of journalism extended to the forms of literary 
 expression as well as to the collection of facts 
 and the moulding of public opinion. On the 11th 
 of May, 1S2Y, the Evening Post contained the 
 following editorial paragraph, which there is 
 every reason to ascribe to its late chief: 
 
 " Affectations of Expression. — We are tired of 
 the afiectations which are often to be met with 
 in some of our newspapers, and cannot but ex. 
 
23 
 
 press a hope that they will be totally discarded, 
 since they cannot be justified — such, for instance, 
 as 'over' a signature, in the AVashington news- 
 papers ; ' consolate,' in those of Kentucky ; ' was 
 being built,' a late innovation of some English 
 authors, and copied here ; ' the Misses Gilling- 
 ham,' in several publications. These are all that 
 offer themselves at this time, and ought to be cor- 
 rected, as being neither correct English nor 
 pleasant to the ear, nor expressive of any new 
 idea." 
 
 This was but the beginning of a half century's 
 crusade against inelegance and inaccuracy in the 
 use of our mother tongue. Outside of the line of 
 his professional duty he sometimes wielded his 
 literary pruning knife, and, as an example of the 
 good use he made of It, we may quote this letter, 
 which was sent to a young man who asked for a 
 criticism upon an article he" had written : 
 
 " My young friend, I observe that you have 
 used several French expressions in your letter. I 
 think if you will study the English language 
 that you will find it capable of expressing all the 
 ideas that you may have. I have always found 
 it so, and in all that I have written I do not recall 
 an instance where I was tempted to use a foreign 
 word but that, on searching, I have found a bet- 
 ter one in my own language. 
 
 " Be simple, unaffected ; be honest in your 
 speaking and writing. Never use a long word 
 when a short one will do as well. 
 
 " Call a spade by its name, not a well-known 
 oblong instrument of manual labor ; let a home 
 be a home and not a residence ; a place, not a lo- 
 cality, and so on of the rest. When a short word 
 ^vill do you will always lose by along one. You 
 lose in clearness ; you lose in honest expression 
 of meaning ; and, in the estimation of all men 
 Avho are capable of judging, you lose in reputa- 
 tion for ability. 
 
 " The only true waj' to shine, even in this false 
 world, is to be modest and unassuming. False- 
 hood may be a thick crust, but in the course of 
 time truth will find a place to break through. 
 Elegance of language may not be in the power of 
 us all, but simplicity and straightforwardness 
 are." 
 
 Beside his regular journalistic duties, Bryant 
 found time to do a good deal of literary work. 
 He was associated with Verplanck and Robert C. 
 Sands in editing the Talisman, a very success- 
 ful annual, during the years from 1827 to 1830. 
 He also contributed two stories, entitled respec- 
 tively " Medfield" and "The Skeleton's Cave" 
 to the " Tales of the Glauber Spa," a compi- 
 lation including in its list of authors Messrs. 
 
 Paulding, Leggett and Sands, and Miss Sedg- 
 wick. In 1832, the literary circle with which he 
 was most intimately connected was broken by 
 the death of Sands, and Verplanck and Bryant 
 jointly edited his works. 
 
 In the same year a complete edition of Brj'ant's 
 poems was published in New York, and Mr. 
 Verplanck, who was acquainted with Washington 
 Irving, then Secretar3' of the American Legation 
 in London, sent a copy to the latter, with a private 
 note requesting his patronage in introducing the 
 young poet to the British jiublic. Irving under- 
 took the task with an almost affectionate interest, 
 although his literary ward was quite unknown to 
 him. With the little volume of verses in his 
 pocket, he traversed the streets of London seek- 
 ing a publislier. Murray was visited in due 
 course. He ran his thumb over the edge of the 
 pages, glanced at a line here and another there, 
 paused a moment over a stanza that caught his 
 eye with some familiar name, and then handed 
 the book back. " Thank you, no," he said, with 
 a polite smile. " Poetry does not sell at present ; 
 I don't think I can use this." Murra}' was a man 
 who always had monej' to invest in a work that 
 showed any promise of success, and a less per- 
 sistent advocate than Irving would have left his 
 presence with a sinking heart. Not so Geoffrey 
 Craycn, Gent. To his credit be it said that 
 when he could not get what he wanted he resolved 
 to take the next best thing ; and after a tedious 
 hunt he hit upon a, bookseller in Bond street, 
 named Andrews, who looked askance at the ven- 
 ture, but agreed to go into it if Irving would put 
 his own name on the title page of the book as 
 editor. The offer was accepted under the im- 
 pression that the editor's duties would be merely 
 nominal. Delusive hope ! The loyal Briton had 
 got his types almost ready for the press, when 
 he drove in hot haste to Mr. Irviog's house 
 one morning, and requested a moment's inter- 
 view. 
 
 "This will never do, sir !" he cried, with some 
 warmth. •' We cannot sell a dozen copies in all 
 England if this stands as it is now. It would be 
 as much as my trade is worth to let such a thing 
 go out of my shop I " 
 
 Irving, much astounded at the excitement 
 manifested by his visitor, followed the latter's 
 
24 
 
 index finsjer with his eye, and read the line on 
 wliich it rested — 
 
 " Tho British soldier trembles" — 
 in the " Sony of Marion's Men." 
 
 " There, sir," continued Mr. Andrews, in the 
 triumphant tone of a man who has carried con- 
 viction to the mind of an adversarj' in debatfi, 
 " what do j-ou thinlv of that '? '' 
 
 " AVell.'' said Irving, " what do 3'OU suggest?" 
 
 " You must alter it, sir ; 3-0U must cut out either 
 the 'British soldier,' or the 'trembles' — I don't 
 care wliicli. There are the seeds of war in the 
 line as it stands, and I would rather destroy the 
 whole edition than put my name on it as it is 
 now." 
 
 Irving could ill conceal a grimace of amuse- 
 ment at the mountam that had grown up in this 
 patriot's mind from so little a molehill ; but his 
 merriment changed to indignation when the 
 bookseller piclced out three or four other lines 
 which could possibly be tortured into a slur 
 upon British bravery, and demanded that they 
 also be "edited" with severity. After an ex- 
 tended colloquy, a compromise was reached, 
 Irving agreeing to remodel — 
 
 " Tlie Britisll soldier trembles — " 
 so that it should read — 
 
 " The foeman trembles in his camp — " 
 
 and to make an insignificant alteration in anoth- 
 er place, in deference to the supposed sensitive- 
 ness of the Britisll public a half century after 
 JIarion's men had beaten their swords into 
 ploughshares and resumed the arts of peace. 
 
 This first London edition was dedicated bj' 
 Irving to Samuel Rogers, the poet, in a note, 
 sa3"ing that, during an intimac}' of some vears' 
 standing, the writer had remarked the interest 
 which Rogers had taken in the rising fortunes 
 and cliaracter of America, and the disposition he 
 liad to foster American talent, whether in litera- 
 ture or art ; "The descriptive writings of Mr. 1 
 Brj-ant," the note goes on. "are essentially ' 
 American. They transport us into the depths of 
 the solemn, primeval forest — to the shores of the 
 lonely lake — to the banks of the wild, nameless | 
 stream, or the brow of the rocky upland, rising 
 like a promontory from amidst a wide ocean of 1 
 foliage ; while they shod around us the glories 1 
 
 of a climate fierce in its extremes, but splendid 
 in all its vicissitudes." The volume was gener- 
 ously reviewed b^' John Wilson in Blackwoods 
 .Vai}a:iiie, and from tliat day Bryant had a Euro- 
 pean reputation. 
 
 In 1S25 the Sketch Club was founded in New 
 York, as a social reunion of artists and ama- 
 teurs. Among its original members were Mor.se, 
 Verplanck, Weir, Huntington, Ingraliam, Wall, 
 Durand, Cumniings, Inman, Verbrn3-ck, Agate 
 Cole and Gourlie. To several of these, and also to 
 sundry members of the Academ}- of Design, 
 Bryant sat for his portrait. Morse's painting 
 was preserved in the Academy's collection ; In- 
 mau's was engraved for the Democratic lievicm, 
 and one by Gray went into the possession of tlie 
 New York Historical Society. This was not 
 the onlj' encouragement given to art by the 
 young poet and journalist. Wben the Academy 
 of Design was in its infancy-, one of its duties 
 was the support of a series of lectures on various 
 subjects pertaining to art, partly for the benefit 
 of its own members, but more particularl}' for 
 the advantage of persons who were studying art 
 as an occupation for life; and Bryant delivered 
 a course on Greek and Roman M3-thology — the 
 fruits of the deep research in classic lore which 
 began with his school days, had continued with 
 unabated interest up to that time, and found a 
 fitting conclusion, wlien the scholar was well on 
 toward eighty j-ears of age, in the translation 
 of Homer's immortal epics. Although a con- 
 noisseur in art, Brj'ant never owned a very large 
 collection of pictures or statuary, enjoying the 
 study of a painting or a marble quite as mucli 
 in the possession of a friend as if it ornamented 
 his own drawing-room. 
 
 Soon after Brj-ant came to I\"ew York, Cooper 
 went to Europe and travelled for some years. 
 When he returned he selected Cooperstown, N. 
 Y., for his home, so that in his later life he and 
 Brj-ant saw little of each other. Then occurred 
 that battle of words between the novelist and 
 the newspaper press which some of our older 
 readers will doubtless recall, in which Mr. 
 Cooper exhibited a good deal of unnecessary 
 spleen. Brj-ant, though conducting a journal 
 which was looked to as an authority in matters of 
 literary news and criticism, forbore to take any 
 
25 
 
 part in the quarrel, loyalty to his friend on the 
 one side and to his adopted profession on the 
 other disposing him to maintain a dignified 
 sih^nce. 
 
 Mr. Coleman's death, in 1829, left Mr. Bryant 
 in sole editorial control of the Evening Post, and 
 he shoi'tly after engaged as an assistant William 
 Leggett, a young journalist of some reputation 
 for both industrj- in the routine duties of his pro- 
 fession and a rather aggressive advocacy of any 
 cause wliich had awakened his interest. Having 
 been made a zealous freetrader and democrat by 
 his chief, this gentleman became one of the pro- 
 prietors of the journal. This left Mr. Bryant free 
 to think of some other things beside daily labor 
 at the desk, and in 1S34 he sailed for Europe with 
 his family, intending to pass a few years -in liter- 
 ary study at the foreign capitals, and superintend 
 the education of his children. He travelled ex- 
 tensivelj' for two years in France, Italy and Ger- 
 many, and was enjoying his recreation to the ut- 
 most when news reached him from America that 
 Mr. Leggett was ver}- ill. Returning home with 
 all haste, he arrived in New York just in time to 
 clieck the Evexing Post in a career of adversity, 
 brought upon it by the unnecessary vehemence 
 with which its temporary conductor thrust sun- 
 dry unpopular opinions of his own in the faces of 
 its readers and advertisers. Convinced by this 
 experience that what one wants done well he 
 must do himself, and having to unravel, tediously, 
 the entanglements into which his partner had led 
 their journal, Mr. Bryant made no further at- 
 tempt at a tour of the old world till 1845, though 
 in the meantime he visited various parts of his 
 own country, including Florida and the Valley of 
 the Mississippi. 
 
 On his second voyage to Europe he was ac- ; 
 companied by his friend, Mr. Charles M. Leupp, i 
 a wealthy merchant of this city and a connois- 
 seur and patron of the fine arts. Edward Ever- j 
 ett, who was then the American minister at the 
 court of St. James, gave a breakfast in his honor, j 
 at which were present Thomas Moore, Kenyon, 
 and Samuel Rogers. A friendship sprang up at 
 once between Rogers and Bryant, which lasted 
 until the death of the former. It began when 
 Bryant remarked to the older poet that he had 
 brought a letter of introduction to him which he 
 
 would have the honor to present, and was inter- 
 rupted by a kindlj' wave of the hand and tlie 
 reply, " It is quite unnecessarj'. I have long 
 known you tlirough j'our writings." These 
 cordial words were followed by an invitation to 
 breakfast with Rogers, which was promptly ac- 
 cepted ; and at his friend's board he made the 
 acquaintance of Poole, the author of " Paul Pry," 
 Sir Charles Eastlake and Richard Moiicton 
 Milnes, now Lord Houghton. 
 
 When he was about leaving England after this 
 visit, Rogers bade him farewell with no little 
 emotion, saying that they would never meet 
 again. On his return a few j-ears later he re- 
 minded Rogers of this. " I remember it," was the 
 answer; "I have no business here; but I shall 
 not staj- long." This was indeed their last in- 
 terview. 
 
 It was not till after his second sojourn 
 in Europe that Mr. Bryant set about 
 the improvement of his newly purchased 
 country house at Roslyn, L. I., now known 
 as " Cedarmere." The building %vas put 
 up in 1787 by Richard Kirlr, a Quaker, whose 
 taste was satisfied with a simple square structure 
 containing a number of large rooms. Under a 
 later owner a portico was added, adorned with a 
 heavy cornice and columns. When Mr. Bryant 
 came into possession of the property, he took 
 away these sombre ornaments and filled their 
 places with a lattice-work for training vines 
 upon, threw out baj- windows on either side, and 
 added some irregular outbuildings. Thus it 
 remains. Of late years, its owner has divided 
 his summers between Roslj-n and Cummiugton, 
 entertaining his city fi'iends, and taking an 
 active part in both places in all the village enter- 
 prises whicli look to the moral or intellectual cul- 
 ture of the people. Voice and purse have always 
 been enlisted without difficulty in aid of any 
 movement to better the condition of his " fellow 
 townsmen" of a season, as the public institutions 
 endowed by him in both places will testify. 
 
 The Atlantic was crossed for the last time in 
 the year 1867, but not until a more thorongli 
 acquaintance with the eastern half of this coun- 
 try and with Cuba had been gained by a long 
 and careful personal survey of them. 
 
 Each of the foreign tours mentioned in this 
 
26 
 
 sketch lias borue a'.juudant fruit for tlie public. 
 Letters were sent from every important jDlace to 
 the E VEXING Post, and many of these were after- 
 ward gathered into boolcs for preservation ; but 
 even more practical results may be found in the 
 first 8ug£jestion of a great park for this city, a 
 project conceived bj' Mr. Bryant during his 
 earliest travels abroad, and tailing shape, after 
 many modifications, in the Central Park as we 
 now have it. The site which commended itself 
 to him at first was Jones's Woods; but this 
 seemed for some reasons ineligible, and was re- 
 linquished in favor of a point more easy of access 
 from all parts of Manhattan Island. 
 
 The nickel cent in our coinage owes its origin 
 to a desire of Mr. Bryant's, after his first visit to 
 Germany, to replace the old fashioned copper 
 cent witli something more nearly resembling the 
 kreutzer. 
 
 In the course of his long career as a jour- 
 nalist and man of letters, the subject of this 
 sketch was frequently called upon to de- 
 liver addresses in memory of distinguished 
 persons with whom he had been associated. The 
 funeral of Cole, the artist, in 1848, was probably 
 the first occasion of this sort. Four years later 
 he delivered a discourse on the life and writings 
 of James Fenimore Cooper, and in 1860 paid a 
 like tribute to the departed Irving. At the ded- 
 ication of the Morse, Shakspeare, Scott, Goethe 
 and Halleck monuments in the Central Park, also, 
 he was a prominent speaker. His last effort, as 
 our readers know, was in honor of Mazzini, the 
 Italian statesman. 
 
 Beside the editions of his poems which have 
 already been named in this article there was one 
 entitled "The Fountain and Other Poems," pub- 
 lished in 1842; and another in 1844, under the 
 title, " The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems." 
 In 1846 all his poems were collected and printed 
 in Philadelphia in handsome style, with illustra- 
 tions by the artist Leutze. In 1855, a two vol- 
 ume edition appeared; in 1863, the "Thirty 
 Poems" latest produced by his pen; in 1870, his 
 translation of the Iliad, and in 1871, the Odys- 
 sey; and in 1876, a very fine illustrated edition 
 brought his poetical works down to that date. 
 His letters from foreign parts have appeared 
 under the titles, "Letters of a Traveller" and 
 
 " Letters from Spain," with the exception of those 
 written from Mexico in the winter of 1871-2- 
 The latest prose work which bears his name is 
 a "History of the United States," now in course 
 of publication. 
 
 Though often solicited, Mr. Bryant steadily re- 
 fused to accept any public office higher than that 
 of Justice of the Peace, save tlie purely honorary 
 one of Presidential Elector in 1360. He was once 
 offered a place on the Board of Regents of the 
 University, but declined it. Presidents Lincoln 
 and Grant are said also to have mentioned his 
 name in connection with important foreign mis- 
 sions, but he could not be induced to permit the 
 nomination to come before the Senate. 
 
 Retiring in disposition even to the point of 
 bashfulness, he avoided notoriety of all sorts, 
 and until within comparatively recent years fled 
 from every danger of " lionizing." When he 
 was at last forced to submit to the popular de- 
 mand and appear as the chief figure on occasions 
 of social importance, he used to surprise all ob- 
 servers by the diffidence with which he met the 
 well-intended but often effusive advances of 
 strangers, and the jo}- he would manifest at com- 
 ing again into the narrow circle of personal 
 friendship and out of the noise of the crowd. 
 
 In 1864, the Century Club, of which he was 
 one of the earliest members, celebrated the seven- 
 tieth anniversary of his birth with a festival, the 
 proceedings of which were published in a little 
 volume. In 1874, the entire press of the country 
 united with the citizens of I^ew York in another 
 birthday celebration, whose chief outcome was 
 the presentation to the aged poet, two years af- 
 terward, of a beautiful silver vase, now in the 
 possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
 
 On these occasions were quoted by many a 
 tongue and pen the well-known lines of Halleck's, 
 as beaulifull}' true to-day as when their author 
 first committed them to paper : 
 
 " Bryant, whose songs are thoughts that bless 
 The heart--its teacher and its joy. 
 
 As jMothers bleud with their caress 
 
 Lessons of truth and gentleness 
 And virtue for the listening boy. 
 
 Spring's lovelier flowers for many a day 
 
 Have blossomed on his wandering way. 
 
 Beings of beauty and decay. 
 
 They slumber in their autumn tomb; 
 
 But those that graced his own Green River 
 And wreathed the lattice of his home. 
 Charmed by his song from mortal doom. 
 
 Bloom on, and will bloom on forever." 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 By Edmund Claeence Stedman. 
 
 I. 
 
 The general pause and hush, in this reanimate 
 season, show ns how deep and positive is the 
 feeling created by the loss of such a man as 
 William CuUen Bryant. Not a feeling of unex- 
 pectedness, though it we;l might be — -for so live 
 and free from decrepitude his old age has seemed, 
 that we thought a deity more potent than Aurora 
 had bestowed upon him the gift of immortality 
 without decay. Not of sorrow, for he lived be- 
 yond the usual range of life, and long has been 
 among us like one already transfigured. Not the 
 feeling which arises when some man of rank, 
 office, entanglement in great affairs, suddenly has 
 passed away ; no vast disturbance in matters of 
 national or civic moment is caused by his de- 
 parture, nor of this could it be said that we found 
 our lares shivered on the hearth — 
 •' The roof-tree fallen,— all 
 Tliat could affriglit, appall I " 
 
 Yet the position of Bryant was absolutely 
 unique, and his loss is something strange and 
 positive. No other man could die for whose 
 sake might be revived so aptly that Indian meta- 
 phor of the sound of the fall of a great oak in the 
 still forest. He stood alone ; in some respects an 
 incomparable figure. He grew to be not only a 
 citizen, journalist, thinker, poet, but the beautiful, 
 serene, majestic ideal of a good and venerable 
 man. The purpose of this article is to seek for 
 a general estimate of his literary character and 
 services. With these, and the acts of his life, the 
 public is familiar as with the pictures of an open 
 
 gallery. A hundred pens are transcribing the 
 record. His countrymen long have delighted to 
 honor him, one and all. But every life, grand or 
 little, has in the end a meaning, an essential 
 quality of its own. To discover this, with the 
 passing of such a writer as Bryant, the offices of 
 the critic are called forthwith into service. He 
 is at his post, and of counsel for the inheritors ; 
 since, when poets and thinkers die, they, like the 
 Cffisars, make the people at large their heirs. 
 
 And in the present exercise of his office, the 
 critic, however sudden the call, well may be more 
 clear and settled in j udgment than when regard- 
 ing others whose work was long since ended. For 
 the writer we now mourn has been before the 
 world from a time near the beginning of the cen- 
 tury, and so changeless through all changes that 
 in estimating the poet just dead we really are 
 judging the poet of fifty years ago, and scarcely 
 are attempting to forecast the verdict of time 
 upon his gift and its manifestations. 
 
 ir. 
 
 Howsoever this and that writer may differ be- 
 tween themselves as to the measure of Bryant's 
 faculties, and of Bryant the man, one thing is 
 sure : — no ordinary personage can gain and re- 
 tain to the last so extraordinary a hold upon 
 human interest, affection, reverential esteem. 
 Others, endowed with length of years, have had 
 their rise and decline, outlasting tliemselves, and 
 finding occasion to declare with Cato Major, " It 
 is a hard thing, Romans, to render an account 
 before the men of a period different from that in 
 
28 
 
 which one has lived !" But here was one wlio, 
 by tliat subtle process through which certain men 
 come at tlie end even more fully to their own, 
 steadily grew to be the individual emblem of our 
 finest order of citizenship, possibly its rarest ami 
 most acceptable type. This, as constantly was 
 evident, became impressed even upon coarse and 
 ordinar}^ persons, singly or associated in office, — 
 8carcel3- judges, one would think, of such a mat- 
 ter, but accepting without cavil the popular con- 
 ception and the estimate of the thouglitful and 
 refined. 
 
 Now, there is sound reasoning at the base of 
 ever3' sustained opinion of this sort. What 
 thing gave Bryant just this shade of special emi- 
 nence ? Not alone that he was a wise, good, 
 virtuous man ; not that he was a patriot, in the 
 deepest and broadest sense ; not that he was a 
 journalist, however strong and notable ; not 
 merel}' that he was a clear and vigorous writer or 
 original sayer and thinker ; nor even because he 
 was a serene and reverend old man, most sound 
 of body and mind. True he was all these, and 
 in their combination occupied a rank e.vcelled by 
 none and attained only by the excepted few. But 
 beyond and including all these he was a poet. 
 To the lasting praise and glory of the art of 
 song it may be said that being an American of 
 those distinguished attributes, the superaddition 
 of the poetic gift made him a bright particular 
 star. Above all, then, it is as a poet that we 
 should observe and estimate him. In what did 
 the quality and limitations of his poetic genius 
 consist ? 
 
 Yet again, in order justly to answer this ques- 
 tion, he must be studied not only as an American 
 poet who represents his country and his lime, 
 but as a man who represents himself. With re- 
 spect to the former, he cannot hut represent 
 them. But the critic is wrong who asserts that 
 a poet can do no more. He can mould them, 
 ccrtainl}' can anticipate them and even prophesy 
 of their future ; furthermore, he may express his 
 own nature and originality in a way differing 
 from theirs, in some fashion to which they have 
 not yet attained. 
 
 And in this wise first seeking a key to his 
 poetic value, we say that he had grown to be a 
 most satisfying type of our ideal citizen, joining 
 
 for us the traditional gravity, purity and patri- 
 otic wisdom of tlie forefathers with the modern- 
 ness and freshness of our own day. His life, 
 public and private, was in exact keeping with 
 his speech and writings. We often say of a poet 
 or artist that he should not be judged like other 
 men by his outward irrelevant mark or liabitude ; 
 tlint to see his best, his truest self, 3-ou must read 
 his poem or study his paintings But in reading 
 Br^'ant's prose and verse, and in observing the 
 poet himself, our juflgments were the same. Al- 
 ways he held in view libertj-, law, wisdom, piety, 
 faitii ; his sentiment was unsentimental; he never 
 whined or found fault with condition or nature ; 
 he was virile but not tyrannical ; frugal, but not 
 too severe ; grave, yet full of shrewd and kindly 
 humor. Absolute simplicity characterized him. 
 Ethics were always in sight. He was a stoic in 
 the generous. Christian meaning of the term, his 
 bearing in our modern life being somewhat com- 
 parable to that of Antoninus in the antique. He 
 was, indeed, an " old man for counsel ;" what he 
 learned in youth from the lives and precepts of 
 Washington, Hamilton and their compeers, that 
 he taught and practised to the last. His intel- 
 lectual faculties, like his physical, were balanced 
 to the discreetest level, and this without abasing 
 his poetic fire. His genius was not shown by the 
 advance of one faculty and the impediment of 
 others ; it was the spirit of an even combination, 
 and a fine one. 
 
 It seemed as if it was with a gracious and in- 
 stinctive sense of the fitness of things that he 
 latterlj' bore his picturesque and stately part in 
 the festivals and processions of our social life. 
 To this extent he was conventional, but he 
 made conventionalism itself imaginative and the 
 renewer of thought and art. 
 
 m. 
 
 Here, then, has gone from us a minstrel who, 
 in appearance, more than others of a strictly 
 Ij-rical genius, was the very semblance of the 
 legendarj' bard of Gray : 
 
 " The poet stood 
 (Loose his beard and hoary hair 
 Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air). 
 And with a master's hand and prophet's fire, 
 Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre I" 
 
29 
 
 Look at the extent of the period through which 
 he flourished. He began in the early springtime 
 of Wordsworth, and long outlived new men like 
 Baudelaire and Poe. The various epochs of his 
 career do not afi^ect this examination of its pro- 
 duct, which, after his escape from the manner of 
 Pope, was of an even quality during seventy 
 years. In this he was fortunate and unfortunate. 
 The former, because his early pieces were so 
 noteworthy that, in the dearth of American 
 poetr}'', they at once became home classics for a 
 homely people ; they passed into the few school 
 readers then compiled, and one generation after 
 another learned them admiringly by heart. At 
 this time, even though composed in the latter- 
 day fashion and of equal merit with Bryant's, an 
 author's pieces might not obtain for him such 
 recognition of fame. But his genius, owing to 
 this otherwise good fortune, worked "under re- 
 strictions from which it never was measurably 
 freed. These we presently shall consider. Mean- 
 time it again may be noted that his poetic career 
 had neither rise, height, nor decline. He formed 
 certain methods wholly natural to him in early 
 youth, and was at once as admirable a poet as 
 he ever afterwards became. Throughout his 
 prolonged term of life he sang without haste or 
 effort and always expressed himself rather than 
 the varying theories of the time. 
 
 From the outset he was in full sympathy with 
 the aspect, feeling and aspirations of his own 
 land and people. His tendency and manner were 
 determined during the idyllic period of this Re- 
 public, when nature, and the thoughts which she 
 suggested, were themes for poets, rather than the 
 dramatic relations of man with man. His senti- 
 ment was affected by the meditative verse of 
 Cowper and Wordsworth, who rose above didac- 
 ticism, or made it etherial and imaginative b}- 
 rare poetic insight. Emerson said of Bryant, 
 when the Century Association met to celebrate 
 the latter's seventieth year, " This native, origi- 
 nal, patriotic poet I say original : I have heard 
 him charged with being of a certain school ; I 
 heard it ^vith surprise, and asked, what school ? 
 For he never reminded me of Goldsmith, or Words- 
 worth, or Byron, or Moore. I found him alwa3-s 
 a true painter of the face of this country, and of 
 the sentiments of his own people.'' This is finely 
 
 said, and in a sense true ; yet there can be little 
 doubt that in some respects Wordsworth was the 
 master of his j'outh. All pujjils must acknowl- 
 edge masters at the beginning, but Murillo was 
 Murillo none the less, although he ground colors 
 for Castillo and studied with Velasquez. Bryant, 
 it is true, ground his colors in the open air. His 
 originality consisted in deriving from his studies 
 a method natural to his own genius and condi- 
 tion. And it is of interest to recall that the elder 
 Dana describes him as saying that, " upon open- 
 ing Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to 
 gush up at once in his heart, and the face of Na- 
 ture of a sudden to change into a strange fresh- 
 ness and life." Certainly he was not cradled into 
 poetry by wrong, nor perturbed by the wild and 
 morbid passions of a wayward youth. We can 
 imagine him a serious and meditative lad, direct- 
 ed by the guidance of a scholarly father, well 
 versed in the favorite poets of that day. Pope, 
 Thomson, Akenside, Cowper — and at first accept- 
 ing them as models ; finally, obtaining for him- 
 self the clues to a true perception of nature, and 
 with his soul suddenly exalted by a sense of her 
 " something far more deeply interfused." 
 
 His blood was stirred by the landscape, 
 throughout the changing year, of the pastoral 
 region of Massachusetts in which he had his 
 growth. Three of Hugo's works illustrate the 
 three grand conflicts by which man progress- 
 es to his enfranchisement — conflicts with na- 
 ture, tyranny and society. From the second 
 of these opponents our fathers fled to a new 
 continent, choosing to found a nationality, and 
 entering upon that primeval conflict with nature 
 which to an already civilized people is not 
 without its compensation. It results, like a quar- 
 rel between generous lovers, with a betrothal of 
 the one to the other, and of such an alliance 
 Br3'ant was our high-priest. The delights of 
 nature, and the awe and mystery of life and 
 death, withdrew him from the study of the indi- 
 vidual world. Thus he became a philosophic 
 minstrel of the woods and waters, the foremost 
 of American landscape-poets. In the contact 
 with primeval nature, man signalizes his victories 
 by educating and rendering more beautiful his 
 captive; she, in turn, gains a potent influence 
 over him, for a long while driving her rivals from 
 
30 
 
 his heart, and compels him in his art and song to 
 express her features and her inspiration. There- 
 fore the first enduring American school of paint- 
 ing was a landscape school, and only at this 
 moment are we groping our way to an idyllic, 
 then to a more dramatic, method in art. 
 
 There is a sweet analogy between the poetry 
 of Bryant and the broad, cool canvas of the 
 founders of our landscape school — the works of 
 Durand, Cole, Kensett, Inness, various as thej' 
 may be in depth, tranquility, or imaginative 
 power — such a harmony as exists between the 
 soil, the climate, the fauna and the flora of an 
 isothermal zone. There can be no doubt that 
 Bryant, who at once became eminent in his 
 special walk, therein has excelled, has outlasted, 
 and will outlast, all his compeers and follow- 
 ers. Others group together details, compose 
 with true enthusiasm, but are deficient in tone, 
 sentiment, imaginative receptivity. Tone is the 
 one thing needful to a true interpretation of 
 nature. Thoreau felt this when he wrote in his 
 diary; " I have just heard the flicker among the 
 oaks on the hillside ushering in a new dynasty. 
 * * Eternity could not begin with more se- 
 curity and momentousness than the Spring. All 
 sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time 
 and eternity ; and when tlie eternity of any 
 sight or sound strikes the eye and ear, they are 
 intoxicated -with delight. * * * It is not im- 
 portant that tlie poet should say some partiadar 
 thinff, but tJiat he should speak in haj-mony with 
 nature. Tlie tone and pitch of his voice is the 
 main thing." It is true that Bryant is, in one 
 respect, unmodern. Thoreau, despite his own 
 language, caught and observed everj' detail. 
 Our poet's learning was not scientific; he lacked 
 the minor vision which, an added gift, makes 
 Tennyson and others give such charm and 
 variety to their work. The ancients knew fewer 
 colors than ourselves. Byron, among moderns, 
 painted nature in her simple, broad manifesta- 
 tions — the sea, the mountains, the sky — subor- 
 dinating her spirit to his own passion, as Bryant 
 allies it with his own tenderness and wisdom, — 
 but even he was not her poet in the delicate, mi- 
 crocosmic, recent sense. Both certainly lacked 
 the exact cleverness and infinite variety of the 
 new school. Bryant regarded nature in its phe- 
 
 nomenal aspect, careless of scientific realities. 
 What he gained in this wise was the absence of 
 disillusionizing fact, and a. fuller understanding 
 of the language of nature's " visible forms ; " 
 what lie lost was the wide and various range 
 opened by the endless avenues of new-found 
 truth. 
 
 IV. 
 
 And right here it is well for us to observe the 
 limitations of his genius as a poet: limitations 
 so well-defined as to be a stumbling-block in the 
 way of those who lightly examine it, and some- 
 times to have thrown him out of the sympathetic 
 range of elegant and impartial minds. His 
 longevitj' was not allied with intellectual quick- 
 ness and fertility, but seemed almost to be 
 the physiological result of inborn slow- 
 ness and deliberation. He was not flexible, 
 facile of ear and voice. He con- 
 sorted with nature in its still or majestic 
 moods, and derived wisdom and refreshment from 
 its tenderness and calm. His genius, as express- 
 ed by its product, was not affluent, and scarcely 
 availed itself of his length of years. His reticeace 
 •in verse seemed habitual. In old age, poets are 
 apt to write the most, and often to the least ad- 
 vantage, but his pen through much of this period 
 was chiefly devoted to translation. How little 
 of his own poetry he produced in seventy years ! 
 A few thin volumes. Think of Milton, Landor, 
 Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hugo, Longfellow — of 
 the impetuous work of Scott and Byron — of what 
 Shelley, who gave himself to song, accomplished 
 before he died at twenty-nine. Brj^ant was 
 thought to be cold, if not severe, of temperament. 
 The most fervent social passions of his song are 
 those of friendship, of filial and fraternal love; 
 his intellectual passion is always under re- 
 straint, even when moved by patriotism, 
 liberty, religious faith. There is still less 
 of action and dramatic quality in his verse. 
 Humor, the overflow of strength, is almost 
 absent from it, or, when present, sufficiently 
 awkward; yet it should be noted that in conver- 
 sation, or in the after-dinner talks and speeches 
 so frequent in his later years, his humor was 
 continuous and charming — full of kindly gossip, 
 wisdom and mirth. He made, as we have seen, 
 little advance upon the early standard of his 
 
31 
 
 work. It would seem as if, under the lessons of 
 a father, " who taught him the value of correct- 
 ness and compression, and enabled him to dis- 
 tinguish between poetic enthusiasm and fustian," 
 he there and then matured, reached a certain 
 point, and became set and stationary. There are 
 few notable expressious and separable lines in 
 his poetry. Finally, it has been observed that 
 his diction, when not confined to that Saxon Eng- 
 lish at every man's use, is somewhat bald and 
 didactic,— always admirable and sententious, but 
 less frequently rich and full. He had a limited 
 vocabulary at command ; I should think that no 
 modern poet, approaching him in fame, has made 
 use of fewer words. His range is like that of 
 Goldsmith, restricted to the simpler phrases of 
 our tongue. Other poets, of an equally pure dic- 
 tion, show here and there, by rare and fine words, 
 the extent of their unused resources, and that 
 they voluntarily confine themselves to " the 
 strength of the positive degree." 
 
 In the face of all this, Bryant's poetry has had, 
 and will continue to have, a lasting charm for 
 many of the noblest minds. Since this is not 
 due to his length of j'ears — for he is not alone in 
 that possession — nor to richness of detail and 
 imagery — nor because, like Whittier, he has 
 adapted himself to successive changes of thought 
 and diction, — how is it that his genius triumphs 
 over its confessed limitations ? To understand 
 this, his poetry must be judged as a whole, and 
 not by its affluence or flexibility ; and it is, we 
 say, eminently of that kind which must be 
 studied in connection with its authorls surround- 
 ings and career. 
 
 V. 
 
 Be it again remembered, that he was the crea- 
 ture of our early period. He did not give him- 
 self to poetry, but added poetry to his allotted life 
 and habitude. The reverse of this, only, can 
 make the greatest poet. Art is a jealous mistress. 
 His lack of devotion to her was the fault of his 
 time, and of circumstances which decided his 
 course in life. To him the parting of the ways 
 came early ; and what was there in our literary 
 atmosphere and opportunities, sixty years ago, 
 to make a poet for life of any thorough-trained, 
 aspiring and resolute man ? The nation called 
 
 for workers, journalists, practical teachers. If> 
 after accomplishing their daily tasks, tliey found 
 time to sing a song, it thanked them and did lit- 
 tle more. Poetry was the surplusage of Bryant's 
 labors, or, more likely, their restoring comple- 
 ment. Possibly, the beauty of his rarest nature 
 would not have expressed itself in song but for 
 the influence of those early readings under a dis- 
 cerning father's care. Otherwise, though lie could 
 not have failed to become a writer, as a poet he 
 might have been one of those mute oracles whose 
 lot was mourned by Wordsworth : 
 
 " Oil I many are tlie poets that are so^\'ii 
 By Nature ; men endowed wLtli higTiest gifts, 
 Tlie vision and the faculty divine ; 
 Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, 
 ■Which, in the docile season of their youth, 
 It was denied them to acquire." 
 
 But read " The Evening Wind," see him in his 
 most spontaneous mood, and you feel that, once 
 having learned the art of verse, all the poet within 
 him thereafter must break out from time to time 
 in song. He did not hoard his reputation. But 
 his passion and tenderness did not so readily force 
 him to metrical expression as a feebler amount 
 of either forces many a lesser but more facile 
 singer trained in a less rude and unpoetic age. 
 
 On the other hand, he never, by any chance, 
 affected passion or set himself to artificial song. 
 He had the triple gift of Athene, " self-reverence, 
 self-knowledge, self-control." He was incapable 
 of affecting raptures that he did not feel, and this 
 places him far above a host of singers who, with- 
 out knowing it, hunt for themes and make poetry 
 little better than a trade. As for his diction , he 
 began when there was no feast of Pentecost with 
 its gift of tongues. I think that the available 
 portion of a poet's vocabulary is that which he 
 acquires in youth, during his formative period. 
 Is it harder for an adult to learn a foreign lan- 
 guage than to enlarge greatly his native range of 
 words, and have them at every-day command ? 
 Bryant's early reading was before the great revi- 
 val which brought into use the romance-words of 
 Chaucer, Spencer, and the Elizabethan age. It was 
 chiefly derived from the poorest, if the smoothest, 
 English period — that which began with Pope and 
 ended with Cowper. The possibilities of a wider 
 training are visible in Tennyson, who had Keats 
 
32 
 
 and Shelley for his predecessors ; not to consider 
 Swinburne, who, above his supernatural gifts of 
 rhythm and langu.ige, owes much to his youthful 
 explorations in classic and continental tongues. 
 No doubt Bryant's models confirmed his natural 
 restrictions of speech. But even its narrow range 
 has made his poetrj' strong and pure ; and now, 
 when expression has been carried to its exti-eme, 
 it is an occasional relief to recur to the clearness, 
 to the exact appreciation of words, discoverable 
 in every portion of his verse and prose. It is 
 like a return from a florid renaissance to the ear- 
 liest antique ; and indeed there was something 
 Doric in Br}'ant's nature. His diction, like his 
 thought, often refreshes us as the shadow of a 
 great rock in a weary land. He refused to depart 
 from what seemed to him the natural order of 
 English verse, that order which comes to the lips 
 of childhood, and is not foreign to any life or 
 age. Tlie tliought was like the measure, that 
 which was old with the fathers, and is young in 
 our own time, the pure philosophy of nature's 
 lessons. Give his poems a study, and their sim- 
 plicity is their charm. How easy it seems to 
 write those natural lines ! Yet it is harder than 
 to catch a hundred fantastic touches of word- 
 painting and dexterous sound. He never was 
 obscure, because he dared not and would not go 
 beyond his proper sight and knowledge, and this 
 ■was the safeguard of his poetry, his prose, and 
 of his almost blameless life. 
 
 His work is the reverse of "art for art's 
 sake," — which too often bears to " art for ex- 
 pression's sake " the relation of " literary paint- 
 ing" to the painting which is executed with n 
 master hand and eye. Verse, to Bryant, was 
 the outflow of his deepest emotions ; a severe 
 taste and discreet temperament made him avoid 
 the study of decoration. Thus, he was always 
 direct and intelligible, and appealed to the com- 
 mon people as strongly as to the select few. 
 I have compared him to our stately men of an 
 older time. Among others, Webster miglit be 
 mentioned as one whose mood and rhetoric are 
 in keeping with the poetry of Bryant. Like 
 Webster, our poet always selected the leading, 
 essential thought, and brushed the rest aside. 
 This he put in with a firm and glowing touch. ■ 
 Man J' have thought the works of both the states 
 
 man and the poet conventional, but to all simple 
 and essential truth and diction, tlie adjecti\e 
 might be brought to apply. Adopting Arnold's 
 distinction, we see that Bryant's simplicity was not 
 simplexxe, but simplicile. Everett pointed to tlie 
 fact, that poetry, at its best, is " easilj' intelli- 
 gible, touching the finest cliords of taste and 
 feeling, but never striving at effect. This is tlie 
 highest merit in every department of literature, 
 and in poetry it is well called inspiration. Sur- 
 prise, conceit, strange combinations of imagery 
 and expression, may be successfully managed, 
 but it is merit of an inferior kind. The beautiful, 
 pathetic and sublime, are alwaj'S simple and nat- 
 ural, and marked by a certain serene uncon- 
 sciousness of effort." "This," he added, "is 
 the character of Mr. Bryant's poetry." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Let us again, then, observe its forms and 
 themes, and discover clues to the essential quali- 
 ty of the genius which idealized them. Bryant's 
 chosen measures were very few and simple. Two 
 were special favorites, most frequently used for his 
 pictures of nature and his meditations on the soul 
 of things, and in their use he was a master. 
 
 One is the iambic-quatrain, in octo-syllabic 
 verse, of which the familiar stanza, " Truth 
 crushed to earth will rise again," may be recalled 
 as a specimen. Many of his best modern pieces are 
 composed in this measure, so evenly and firml3' 
 that the slightest change would mar their sound 
 and flow. " A Day Dream," written in the poet's 
 old age, is perfect of its kind, and may rank with 
 CoUins's nonpareil, " To fair Fidele's Grassy 
 Tomb.'' Witness such stanzas as these : 
 
 " I sat and watched the eternal flow 
 
 Of those smooth billows toward the shore. 
 While quivering lines of light below 
 Ran with them on the ocean-flow." 
 * * * * 
 
 " Then moved their coral lips ; a strain 
 Low, sweet, and sorrowful, I heard, 
 As if the murmurs of its main 
 Were shaped to syllable and word." 
 
 His variations upon the iambic quatrain, as in 
 the celebrated poems, " To a Waterfowl," and 
 " The Past," are equally successful. The second 
 of the poems referred to is that blank-verse in 
 which his supremacy always was recognized. 
 
33 
 
 Several dist'mct phases of our grandest English 
 measure have been observed in literature. 1. 
 The Elizabethan, free and current, matchless for 
 dramatic verse ; 2. The Miltonic, or Anglo-Epic, 
 in which Latin words and sonorous pauses and 
 inversions are so frequent ; 3. The Reflective, of 
 which Wordsworth, succeeding the didactlcians, 
 held unquestioned control ; 4. That of Tennyson, 
 by turns epic and idj-llic, combining Saxon 
 strength and sweetness with a Greek heroic 
 quality. Bryant's blank-verse may be numbered 
 with the third of these classes, but from the 
 outset was marked by a quality unquestionably- 
 his own. The essence of its cadence, pauses, 
 rhythm, should be termed American, and it is 
 the best ever written in the new world. Blank- 
 verse is the easiest and the most difficult of all 
 measures ; the poorest in poor hands ; the finest, 
 when written by a true poet. Whoever essays 
 it is a poet disrobed; he must rely upon his 
 natural gifts, his defects cannot be hidden. But 
 in this measure Bryant was at his height, and 
 owes to it the most enduring portion of his fame. 
 However narrow his range, we must own that he 
 was first in the first. He reached the upper air 
 at once in " Thanatopsis," and again and again, 
 though none too frequently.he renewed his flights, 
 and, like his own waterfowl, " pursued his solitary 
 way." 
 
 The finest and most sustained of his poems of 
 nature are those written in blank verse. At in- 
 tervals, so rare throughout his life as to resemble 
 the seven-year harvests, or the occasional wave 
 that overtops the rest, he composed a series of 
 those pieces which now form a unique panorama 
 of nature's aspects, moving to the music of lofty 
 thoughts and melodious words. Such are " A 
 Winter Piece," the " Inscription for the Entrance 
 to a Wood," "A Forest Hymn," " Summer Wind," 
 " The Prairies," " The Fountain," " Hymn of the 
 Sea," ''A Rain-Dream ;" also a few written late in 
 life, showing that the eye of the author of 
 "Thanatopsis" had not been dimmed nor his 
 natural force abated, — these are " The Con- 
 stellations, " The Night Journey of a River," and 
 " Among the Trees." In all the treatment is 
 large and ennobling, and distinctly marks each 
 as Bryanf s. The method, that of invocation, 
 somewhat resembles the manner of Coleridge's 
 
 " Hymn to Mont Blanc ;'" when in a less enrap- 
 tured strain, they exhibit repose, feeling, wise 
 and reverent thought. 
 
 In the same eloquent, sonorous verse, and with 
 like cajsural pauses and inflections, we find his 
 more purely meditative poems, upon an equal or 
 still higher plane of feeling. " Thanatopsis," 
 the " Hymn to Death," " Earth," " An Evening 
 Revery," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and one 
 of his latest and longest, " The Flood of Years," 
 Yet, in both his reflective verse and that devoted 
 to natnre, he often emplo3-ed Ij-rical measures 
 with equal excellence ; as in the breezy, ex- 
 quisite poem on ' ' Life," " The Battle Field," 
 " The Future Life, aod " The Conqueror's 
 Grave" — ^the latter one of his most elevating 
 pieces. Especially in his lyrics he seemed 
 like a wind-harp yielding tender music 
 in response to every suggestion of the great 
 mother whom he loved. Here he becomes one 
 with her, and with all her moods and " visible 
 forms." Such lyrics as " June," " The Death of 
 the Flowers," and " The Evening Wind," show 
 this, and also indicate the limits within which his 
 song was spontaneous. Each is the genuine ex- 
 pression of a personal mood, and has by actual 
 merit taken a permanent place in metrical litera- 
 ture. 
 
 VIL 
 
 At last, then, we are brought to a recognition 
 of the power in Bryant's verse which has given 
 him a station in- the poetic hemicycle far above 
 that which he could hope to win by its amount 
 or range. It is the elemeTtial qioaliiy of his sonLr. 
 Like the bards of old, his spirit delights in fire, 
 air, earth, and water, — the apparent structures of 
 the starry heavens, the mountain recesses, and 
 the vasty deep. These he apostrophizes, but over 
 them and within them he discerns and bows the 
 knee to the omniscience of a protecting Father, a 
 creative God. Poets, eminent in this wise, have 
 been gifted always with imagination. The verse 
 of Bryant often is full of high imaginings. Select 
 any portion of "Thanatopsis:" 
 
 " Pierce the Barcan wilderness, 
 Or lose thyself in the continuous woods. 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
 Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there 1" 
 or this, from " The Prairies :'' 
 
34 
 
 " The bee 
 
 * + **•*** 
 
 Fills the savannas with his mnrmurings. 
 
 And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, 
 
 Within the hollow oak. I listen long 
 
 To his domestic hum, and think I hear 
 
 The sound of an advancing multitude 
 
 Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground 
 
 Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice 
 
 Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn 
 
 Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds 
 
 Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain 
 
 Over the dark-brown furrows. AH at once 
 
 A fresher wind sweeps by and breaks my dream. 
 
 And I am in the wilderness alone." 
 
 Read the entire poem of " Earth.'' Then 
 such a stanza as this, from " The Past " : 
 " Far in thy realm withdrawn 
 Old Empires sit in eullemaess and gloom. 
 
 And glorious ages gone 
 Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb. " 
 Such a phrase as 
 
 " Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste;" 
 or, from " A Rain-Dream, " an impersonation of 
 " The Wind of Night, 
 A lonely wanderer between Earth and cloud. 
 In the black shadow and the chilly mist, 
 Along the streaming mountain-side, and through 
 The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields. 
 Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes 
 The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets 
 A welcome or a friend, and still goes on 
 In darkness." 
 
 Take passages lite these — and they are frequent 
 in Brj'ant's poetry— make allowance for the law 
 by which any real poet's work is sure to grow 
 upon us in close examination, and we still are 
 confronted with an " elemental " imagination 
 often higher than that of more productive poets. 
 Younger singers excel in richness of phrase, 
 redundant imagery, elaborate word-painting; 
 but every period has its forerunners and masters, 
 and our rising men must acknowledge Bryant as 
 a laurelled master of the early American School. 
 He seldom touched the keys, yet thej- gave out 
 an organ tone. 
 
 Indeed, when he essayed piano-music, and was 
 in a light or fauciful mood, he often was unable 
 to vie with sprightlier and defter hands. His 
 epics in swift and simple measures had a ringing 
 quality, noticeable in "The Song of Marion's 
 lien ", the best of them — and in " The Hunter of 
 the Prairies". A blithe surprise awaits us iij 
 
 j certain later pieces, such as " The Planting of 
 
 the Apple-Tree," the delicate " Snow-Shower," 
 
 and " Robert of Lincoln " — so full of bird-music 
 
 • and fancj'. Usually, as we have seen, it was 
 
 ; mth an air of uncouthness and doubt that he 
 
 i ventured beyond estahlished precedents, as 
 
 if he were in strange waters and 
 
 i would gladly touch firm land, — hut 
 
 then, he seldom ventured. As he grew older, 
 
 beyond the asperities of life, he became less 
 
 brooding, sad and grave. His fancy, what there 
 
 was of it, came in his later years, and suggested 
 
 two of his longest pieces, " Sella " and "The Lit^ 
 
 tie Children of the Snow," tales of folk-lore, in 
 
 which his lighter and more graceful handling of 
 
 blank-verse may be studied with pleasure. 
 
 vnr. 
 
 In nothing was his wise self-judgment more 
 evident — his exact measure of a prolonged men- 
 tal and physical strength — than in the task of 
 translating the epics of Homer, to which he suc- 
 cessfulU- applied himself in his old age. The 
 power that accomplished this was as wonderful 
 as Lander's retention of creative energy. The 
 limits of this paper will not permit of an analysis 
 of this heroic performance. Some years ago, 
 the present writer prepared an extended review 
 of It for The Atlantic Monthly, In which its lead- 
 ing qualities were thought to be : First. Fidelity 
 to the Homeric text ; Second. The admirable 
 manner in which the translator's characteristic 
 blank-verse was sustained, with an increased ele- 
 ment of flexibility, and without artifice, to the 
 end of the long, immortal poems. It also was 
 said that a demand for such a blank-verse rend- 
 ering of Homer had existed previously, which 
 not even Cowper bad been able to meet. Lord 
 Derby had failed from utter lack of the poetic 
 gift. But the noblest blank-verse translation, 
 even Bryant's, faithful as it was and in the grand 
 manner, must lack the Homeric rush and swift- 
 ness, and must also become prosaic in its substi- 
 tutes for the recurrent and connecting phrases of 
 the Greek text. The conclusion was that no new 
 English Homer would " tread upon the renown of 
 Bryant's crowning work, until the English hexa- 
 meter — with all its compensating qualities, by 
 ^hicb alone we can preserve delicate sji^de? of 
 
35 
 
 meaning and the epic movement — has been firmty 
 established among us, and a great poet, imbued 
 with the classical spirit, has become its 
 acknowledged master. Until then Bryant's 
 translation has filled the literarj' void." The 
 writer has seen no reason to change this estimate 
 of the unequalled merits, and of what were the 
 essential and unavoidable deficiencies, of Bryant's 
 Homeric work. The tendency of his mind, even 
 in its epic mood, was slow and stately, Latin 
 rather than Greek. Hence, as a translator from 
 the Spanish he was peculiarly successful, repro- 
 ducing the calm and royal quality of Castilian 
 song. 
 
 American poets— with pride be it remembered — 
 ever have been true to their own land in express- 
 ing its innate freedom, patriotism, aspiring re- 
 solve. Throughout Bi-yant's life his scattered 
 poems lipou political events, at home and abroad, 
 have been consecrated to freedom and its 
 devotees. He breathed a spirit of independence 
 with the wind of his native hills. The country 
 is the open wild of liberty. All our poets of 
 nature are poets of human rights. Should 
 America ever become monarchical it will be due 
 to the influence of cities and those bred in them. 
 Bryant's regard for law, for the inheritance of just 
 political and social systems, was unquestionable. 
 He might have been a constitutionalist in France ; 
 here, though bred a federalist, he was sure to 
 oppose undue centralization. After all, he was 
 of no party further than he conceived it to be 
 right. Witness his contest Avith slavery and his 
 desertion of a democracy which finally, he 
 thought, belied its name. That he did not, with 
 Longfellow and Whittier, summon his muse to 
 oppose the greatest wrong of our history was 
 omng to two causes: First, it was his lyrical 
 habit to observe and idealize general principles, 
 the abstract rather than the concrete. Whittier's 
 poems are alive with incident, and burn with 
 personal feeling. Once, only, Bryant wrote a 
 mighty poem on Slavery : when it had received 
 its death-blow, when the struggle ended, and the 
 right prevailed. Jehovah had conquered. His 
 children were fi-ee, and Bryant raised a chant like 
 that of Miriam : 
 
 " O, thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced 
 years 
 
 Didst bold thy millions fettered; 
 
 * * ♦ * ♦ * * 
 " Go, now, accursed of God, and take thy place 
 With hateful memories of the older time 1 
 
 * ****** 
 '* Lo ! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom 
 
 Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room.'* 
 
 This swelling poem, " The Death of Slavery," 
 was not needed to assure us that the cause of 
 freedom touched his heart. Foi-, secondly, his 
 true coimterpart to Whittiei-'s work was to be 
 found in the vigorous anti-slavery assaults he 
 made for years in the journal of which he died 
 tlie editor. There it was that he wreaked his 
 influence and mental power upon *Hhe rebuke of 
 fraud and oppression of whatever clime or race." 
 
 His prose labors were an outlet, constantly 
 afli'orded in his j ournalism, through which much 
 of that energy escaped which otherwise would 
 have varied the motives and increased the body 
 of his song. It was in every way as perfect as 
 his verse, as clearly prose as that was poetry. 
 Few better WTiters of simple, nervous Eng- 
 lish. His phraseology was a well of Eng- 
 lish undefiled. He used it for half a 
 century as the instrument of his every-day 
 thought and purpose ; as a leader-writer, a trav- 
 eller and correspondent, an essayist and orator, 
 a political disputant. His polemic vigor and 
 acerbity were worked off in his middle-life edi- 
 torials, and in defence of what he thought to be 
 right. There he was indeed unyielding, and 
 other pens recall the traditions of his political 
 controversies. He never confused the distinct 
 provinces of prose and verse. Refer to anything 
 written by him, of the former kind, and you find 
 plainness, virility, well-constructed syntax, free 
 from any cheap gloss of rhetoric or the "jingle 
 of an effeminate rhythm." For example, the pre- 
 face to his " Library of Poetry and Song." This 
 is a model of expressive English prose, as simple 
 as that of the Spectator essayists and far more to 
 the purpose. Like all his productions, it ends 
 when the writer's proper work is done. The es- 
 say, it may be added, contains in succinct lan- 
 guage the poet's own views of the scope and 
 method of song, a reflection of the instinct gov- 
 erning his entire poetical career. 
 
 As in written prose and verse, so in speech and 
 
3fi 
 
 public offices. The long series of addresses on 
 civic occasions closed with one which brought 
 him to his death. Mastering his work, in its in- 
 tegrity and brightness, to the very end, it was 
 his lot at last to bow, as became a poet of Nature, 
 before lier own life-nurturing, life-destroj'ing 
 forces, and thus submit to her kindest universal 
 law. The question of a passage in " An Even- 
 ing Revery " is now answered, and the prophecy 
 fulfilled : 
 
 " thou great Movement of the UniverBe, 
 
 Or Change, or Flight of Time— for ye are one 1 
 
 That beareat, silently, thy visible scene 
 
 Into night's shadow and the streaming rays 
 
 Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me ? 
 
 I feel the mighty current sweep me on, 
 
 Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar 
 
 The courses of the stare ; the very hour 
 
 He knows when they shall darken or grow bright ; 
 
 yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death 
 
 Come unforewamed I " 
 
THE POET. 
 
 By Kichard Henry Stoddard. 
 
 "Mr. Pope's father (who was an honest mer- 
 chant and dealt in Hollands wholesale) was no 
 poet, but he used to set him to make English 
 verses when very young. He was pretty difficult 
 in being pleased, and used to send him back to 
 new turn them. ' These are not good rhymes ;' 
 for that was my husband's word for verses." So 
 wrote the Rev. Joseph Spence abo\it a hundred 
 and fifty years ago, taking down the words as 
 they dropped from the garrulous lips of Pope's 
 good old mother, who idolized her famous son. 
 This little anecdote occurs to me in writing about 
 Bryant's poetry, the cultivation of which was 
 sedulously fostered by his father, who was a 
 physician of repute and a gentleman of educa- 
 tion and literary tastes. The childhood of Bryant 
 was spent in the town of Cummington, where he 
 was born, and where there must have been 
 a good school, if it be true, as Dr. Griswoldsays, 
 that he made very creditable translations from 
 the Latin poets at the age of ten. If I knew 
 what books the library of Dr. Bryant contained, 
 I could, I think, readily detect the influences 
 that moulded his juvenile compositions. I assume 
 that Pope was among the English poets whom he 
 possessed, and Gray, and possibly Cowper, who 
 passed from this troubled scene of existence when 
 Master Bryant was about six years old. If Dr. 
 Bryant cared for the native muse, he possessed 
 Freneau (of whose poetical works three editions 
 were published before the completion of the first 
 decade of the present century), Trumbull's " Mc- 
 Fingal," Dwight's " Conquest of Canaan," and 
 " Greenfield Hill" (which was published in the 
 
 year that Bryant was born), and that once famous 
 and speedily forgotten epic, BarloVs " Colum- 
 biad." He could not have learned much from 
 any American poet that had yet appeared. He 
 might have learned something, however, from 
 Freneau, who was a popular poet on account of 
 the Revolution, whose most prolific singer he 
 had been. Patriotic verse was highly thought of 
 then, and to have written against the bold Briton 
 was to have effected a lodgment in public esti- 
 mation. One element which runs through Fre- 
 neau's poetry was before long to crop out in 
 young Bryant's poetry. I mean Freneau's recog- 
 nition of the fact that there were many things in 
 the life of the Indians which were legitimate 
 themes for poetic meditation. What I mean will 
 be apparent to my readers if they will turn to 
 Griswold's " Poets and Poetry of America," and 
 glance over Freneau's " Dying Indian" and " The 
 Indian Burying Ground." I would advise them 
 to read the last carefully, if only for the music, 
 which I think influenced Bryant at a later period. 
 Campbell thought so well of this poem that he 
 conveyed a line of it into his " O'Connor's Child." 
 Br3'ant could not have missed the Indian element 
 if he had read Dwight's " Greenfield Hill," a de- 
 scriptive, historical and didactic poem which is 
 divided into seven parts, and which must be 
 tedious reading, if I may judge by the extracts 
 quoted by Griswold. This element, thickly coat- 
 ed over with verbiage, informs a section of five 
 stanzas descriptive of an Indian temple, and pads 
 out a weak example of the noble measure of 
 Spencer. Beside this measure and the sing-song 
 
heroics of Pope, "Greenfield Hill" contains 
 an example of American blank verse which is not 
 to be commended. It is heav}-, lumbering and 
 unmusical. 
 
 Bryant's first appearance in print, outside of 
 the " Poets' Corner " of the Northampton news- 
 paper which printed his translations from the 
 Latin poets, was in a little pamphlet of political 
 verse, I have neA'er seen it, and consequently 
 know nothing about it beyond what I find in 
 Griswold and Duyckinck. It was entitled "The 
 Embargo," and was published in 180S, his four- 
 teenth year. Griswold calls it a satire, and says 
 it was directed against President Jefi"erson, who 
 was probably not injured by it. He quotes 
 eighteen lines, descriptive of an old-time caucus, 
 and considers them remarkably spirited and 
 graphic, a commendation in which I cannot con- 
 cur. They are a clever imitation of the average 
 evenly balanced manner of Pope, who was clearly 
 the master to whom the young poet looked for 
 form, Bo doubt at the suggestion of his father. 
 The little Queen Anne's man had long been de- 
 throned in England, but an old-fashioned country 
 doctor in the northwest corner of JIassachusetts 
 was not sufficiently aware of that iiDportant fact 
 in the history of English poetry. " The Embar- 
 go " reached a second edition, which was publish- 
 ed in Boston in 1809, and contained an endorse- 
 ment of the youth of its writer, which had been 
 called in question by the Monthly Anthology. It 
 also contained some additional pieces of verse, 
 one of which on " Drought " is quoted by Duyck- 
 inck. It was written in Brj'ant's fifteenth year, 
 and entirely from books. In other words, it is 
 artificial, colorless, and of no poetical value. A 
 great poet had been born in New England, but his 
 first volume amounted to nothing, especially in 
 the walk of song in which he was soon to be un- 
 rivalled. If he saw nature, it was not with his 
 natural sight, but through the spectacles of books, 
 and not the best books in the library of his 
 father, if its shelves were enriched, as I think 
 they were, with Cowper. A single page of 
 " The Task," if he had had it, would, I am per- 
 suaded, have quickened his poetic vision, and 
 revealed to him his intense love of the natural 
 world. 
 The life of Bryant when it is wTitten wUl fill 
 
 — at any rate it ought to fill — the intellectual 
 blank which separates the publication of " The 
 Embargo " from the writing of " Thanatopsis." 
 I cannot fi.x the date of " Thanatopsis," nor tlie 
 place where it was composed ; but trusting (Jris- 
 wold, who could have had no motive for inaccu- 
 racy, it saw the light in manuscript shortlj- after 
 Brj'ant had completed liis eighteenth ye.ar. This 
 young man in his nonage had done what many 
 men never do at all — he had emancipated himself 
 from books and models, and had discovered him- 
 self and his own originality. What Pope had 
 been to him the short extract from " The Em- 
 bargo" quoted bj' Griswold shows. AVhat Eng- 
 lish poet inspired him next? One of the greatest 
 of the moderns — 'Wordsworth. Strictly speaking 
 I should not say that Wordsworth was an inspira- 
 tion to him, but rather a discoverj-. He found 
 in the blank verse of Wordsworth tlie clue which 
 conducted him into the profoundest recesses of 
 his being — the sacred places where Jleditation sits 
 in darkness brooding over the solemn mysteries 
 of life and death. The two volumes of Words- 
 worth's "Lyrical BallaHs" were reprinted in 
 Philadelphia in the eighth year of Bryant's age, 
 but I doubt whether a copy of that edition found 
 its way to Cummington, and. if one did, I am cer- 
 tain that Dr. Bryant did not know what to make 
 of it. Wordsworth did not write for gentlemen 
 cultured as he was, but for unconventional minds 
 like his own. The boy Bryant would have seen 
 nothing remarkable in his poetry; no boj^, no 
 young man has ever yet understood his serene 
 and loftj' genius. lie touches, he moves no man 
 until years have brought the philosophic mind. 
 It Climes to some earl}', to some late, to some not 
 at all. It came to Bryant early, and it never 
 left him. " Thanatopsis" struck the kej"note of 
 his genius, disclosed to him the growth and gran- 
 deur of his powers, and placed him, for what he 
 was, before all American poets, past, present and 
 to come. 
 
 " Thanatopsis ' is to me the most remarkable 
 poem that was ever written by a J'oung man. I 
 know of nothing like it in English literature, 
 nothing that is at once so grave, so sustained, so 
 mature, and so universal. The feeling which per- 
 vades it, the solemn reflection which Inspires it, 
 belongs to all humanity and all time, and is 
 
39 
 
 apart from and beyond all religions. The truth- 
 ful lesson of the nothingness of life is the silent 
 teaching of nature. It could not have been 
 written in the Old ^Vorld, where the conception 
 of the poet would have been limited by circum- 
 scribed areas of burial, and known periods of 
 time. It demanded a New World, of vast dimen- 
 sions and unknown antiquity, a primeval wilder- 
 ness that was once populous with forgotten races 
 of men. Such a world stretched from the shores 
 of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific at the be- 
 ginning of the present century, and waited for a 
 poet to grasp the secret of its solitude. The 
 little churchj^ard at Stoke Pogis inspired Gray's 
 immortal " Elegy ;" the great tomb of man in the 
 New World inspired Bryant's " Thanatopsis," 
 which is larger than its inspiration, and, if a 
 contemporary verdict is worth anything, will be 
 as lasting as the language which it has enriched. 
 " Tlianatopsis" saw the light in print in the 
 pages of the JS'orth American Eeviea in 1817, but 
 not entirely in the shape that' we know it now. 
 As I remember the first version, the first sixteen 
 and the last fourteen lines were wanting: in 
 other words, the poem began with the broken 
 line, "Yet a few da^-s, and thee," and ended with 
 the broken line, " and make their bed with thee." 
 As originally printed the poem opened vnth. four 
 four-line stanzas, which are far inferior to the 
 solemn blank verse of which they were the pre- 
 lude. They are as follows : 
 
 ** Hot that from life and all its woes 
 The hand of death ehaU set me free ; 
 Not that this head shall then repose 
 In the low vale most peacefully. 
 
 '* Ah, when I touch Time's farthest brink, 
 A kinder solace must attend ; 
 It chills mv very soul to think 
 On the dread hour when life must end. 
 
 " In vain the flattering verse may breathe 
 Of ease from pain, and rest from strife ; 
 There is a sacred dread of death 
 Inwoven with the strings of life. 
 
 " This bitter cnp at first was given. 
 
 When angry justice frowned severe ; 
 And 'tis the eternal doom of Heaven 
 That man mnst view the grave with fear." 
 
 If we did not know that " Thanatopsis" was 
 the work of a young man, we would never guess 
 that such was the fact, it is so serious, so elevated, 
 80 noble. Bryant rises to his theme, putting off 
 at once and forever all immaturity and uncer- 
 
 tainty of thought and expression, and speaks as 
 one having authority. He is oracular in his 
 knowledge of nature and her ministrations to 
 man. She lives in his lines as in those of no other 
 American poet, before or since. His lightest 
 epithets are authentic, and his glances of obser- 
 vation unerring. He takes iu everything at 
 once, settles the value of all things, and repro- 
 duces a perfect whole, an imperative unitj', large, 
 imposing, imperishable. 
 
 The blank verse of " Thanatopsis"' is masterly 
 and original ; I can trace the influence of no Eng- 
 lish poet in its varied pauses and musical ca- 
 dences. With the exception of " The Ages," 
 which stands at the head of the collected edition 
 of *' Bryant's Poems," his poems are arranged in 
 the order in which they were written. " Thana- 
 topsis" was followed by the simple and charming 
 lines to "The Yellow Violet," the sentiment and 
 melody of which are perfect He returned then 
 to his first love, blank verse, and wrote the fault- 
 less " Inscription for tlie Entrance to a Wood,' 
 in which he changes the broad st3-le, the grand 
 manner of " Thanatopsis," and descends to min- 
 uter details which are exceedingly picturesque, 
 and everj-where subordinated to the main effect. 
 A skillful painter ought to be able to put this im- 
 mortal Wood on canvas ; for it is already painted 
 in words by a hand of a great master. Tr3' to 
 read any of Akenside's " Inscriptions " after this 
 noble one and you will see how inferior they are. 
 And they were once so famous ! A pretty melo 
 dious " Song," of no great value, leads us to the 
 unforgetable lines " To a Waterfowl," which were 
 written, I imagine, on the seashore of Massachu- 
 setts. They were published in the North American 
 Review in 1818, six months after "Thanatopsis," 
 and were immediately recognized as the work of 
 a great poet. The moralizing stanza at the close 
 added weight, with minds of a certain cast, to 
 the picturesque impressiveness of the poem. A 
 comparison between the third line of the second 
 stanza as it was originally printed and as it 
 stands now is an instructive lesson in poetic art. 
 The first version reads : 
 
 "As darkly painted on the crimson sky 
 Thy figure floats along." 
 
 Perfect, sang the chorus of reviewers, and were 
 wrong, aa Bryant saw, for a painted figure can 
 
40 
 
 neither float iior a^jpear to float. The second I 
 version runs : j 
 
 " As darkly limued upon the crimson sky," ; 
 
 wliicli was open to the same objection as the first 
 version. The line stands in the last edition : 
 " As darkly seen against the crimson sky," 
 
 whicli is strictly true of a waterfowl floating ^ 
 against a background of twilight. : 
 
 We come to minute picturesqueness in " Green ' 
 River,'" and a lightness of touch we have never 
 seen before. This poem is the most autobiogra- 
 phic that Brj-ant has written, in that it ex- 
 presses his regret at his enforced absences from 
 nature, and his dissatisfaction with the law, 
 which was now his profession. " A Winter 
 Piece " is doubly excellent — excellent as a leaf 
 from the inner life of the poet, and excellent as a 
 picture of the woods at all seasons, and a positive 
 picture of the woods in winter. The thirty-seven 
 lines beginning, "Come when the rains,'' are 
 unequalled for brilliancj' in the whole range of 
 English poetry. " The West Wind " has no great 
 value, although it is a pleasant lyric. " The 
 Burial Place" is so good, that I wish Bryant had 
 finished it, and taken the chances of being con- 
 sidered a plagiarist from Irviug, who was not to 
 be named in the same day with him. The lyrics 
 " Blessed are they that mourn," and " jN'o man 
 Knoweth his Sepulchre," are at once strong, 
 compact and graceful, and in a stj'Ie which is 
 Bryants own. "A Walk at Sunset" interests 
 me greatlj', partlj" on account of its revealment 
 of Bryant's poetic personality, and partly be- 
 cause it marks the appearance of a new element 
 in his poetr}-, hints of which are to be found in 
 Dwight's " Greenfield Hill," and in the " Indian 
 Burying Ground" of Freneau — the eleiDent of In- 
 dian life softened by the mists of antiquity and 
 the haze of poetic imagination. 
 
 " A Walk at Simset " is an exquisitely tender 
 picture of the Housatonic Valley as I have seen 
 it on summer evenings at Stockbridge when it is 
 suffused with yellow light, and the eastern 
 heavens are colored rosily. The peculiar beauty 
 of the landscape recalls the memory of those who 
 looked upon it in earlier days, and who are not 
 unnaturally supposed to have felt its calmness 
 
 and to have been won by its charm. The poet 
 sees them in fancy, and reviews for the moment 
 their pleasing belief that the souls of their war- 
 riors went to happy islands beyond the sunset, 
 where the winds were at peace, the stars were 
 fair, 
 "And purple-skirted clouds curtain the crimson air." 
 
 The poet's thoughts wander back to days be- 
 fore the red man came, when the deer fed in the 
 shade, and no tree in the wilderness was felled 
 except by the tooth of the beaver, the winds, or 
 the rush of floods. Visions of their coming, their 
 deeds in the chase and in war pass before his 
 e3'es, and he sees the green sod of the valley and 
 the silvery waters of the river taking the first 
 stains of blood. They are gone now, gone like 
 the sunset, and night is pressing on. All that 
 tells their story is the white bone which the 
 plough strikes in the harvest field.' The offspring 
 of another race, he stands upon their ashes, be- 
 side a stream they loved ; and where their night- 
 fire showed the gray oaks by fits and their war- 
 song rang, he teaches the quiet shades the strains 
 of a new tongue. He bids the sun farewell ; his 
 light mil shine on other changes, but he -will 
 never see those realms again, 
 
 " Darkened by boundless groves and roamed by savage 
 men." 
 
 I have dwelt upon this element of Bryant's 
 poetry because it appeared in no other American 
 poet to the same extent and with the same force. 
 His mind, always a tenacious one, never suffered 
 it to escape, but referred to it in after years 
 again and again. The publication of the poems 
 that I have enumerated led the students of Har- 
 vard College to invite Bryant to recite a poem 
 before them on Commencement Day. This was 
 in 1821, his twenty-seventh year. He consented, 
 and wrote the poem with which every edition of 
 his poems commences, " The Ages." It is a rapid, 
 comprehensive, philosophic and picturesque sum- 
 mary of the history of mankind from the earliest 
 periods, a shifting panorama of good and evil 
 figures and deeds, the rising and falling of re- 
 ligions, kingdoms, empires, and the great shapes 
 of Greece and Rome. The twentieth stanza, 
 which describes the lazy convent life of the Ro- 
 mish orders, is a masterpiece of quiet sarcasm ; 
 
41 
 
 and the lines whicli convey profoundly the in- 
 fluences of ihe Romish Church are so matchless 
 that I must quote them : 
 " The throne, "whose roots axe in another world, 
 And whose far-reaching shadow awed our own." 
 
 The pictures of the landscapes of this western 
 world, beautiful, grand, animated, many-watered 
 and sail-thronged, the glimpes of Indian life, 
 the appearance of the white race, the receding 
 of forests and the rising of towns — all form 
 a magnificent gallery of life and action and emo- 
 tion. The young gentlemen of Harvard were 
 wiser than they knew when they invited Bryant 
 to write a poem for them ; for their invitation 
 resulted in the best college poem that ever was 
 written. 
 
 The gravity of Bryant's genius, which is every- 
 where apparent in " The Ages," deepens in the 
 poem which followed it (if my arrangement of 
 the order in which they were composed is cor- 
 rect), and which is a very touching production. 
 I refer to the " Hymn to Death," who is eulo- 
 gized as the friend of man, in that he delivers 
 him from the hands of the oppressor and the 
 wrong-doer. The reverie of the poet, which, 
 after all, was an idle one, was broken by the 
 death of his father, and the strain ends sorrow- 
 fully: 
 
 " It must cease — 
 For he is in hie grave who taught my youth 
 The art of verse, and in the bud of life 
 Offered me to the muses." 
 
 Dr. Bryant's skill as a physician is commemo- 
 rated, as well as the sorrow with which his death 
 was received by his friends and neighbors : 
 ** This faltering verse, which thou 
 Shall not, as wont, o'erlook, as all I have 
 To offer at thy grave — this — and the hope 
 To copy thy example, and to leave 
 A name of which the wretched shall not think 
 As of an enemy's, whom they forgive 
 As all forgive the dead." 
 
 Bryant's tribute to the memory of his good 
 father is to me very touching, and all the more so 
 because it is expressed in guarded language. I 
 find and feel a world of pathos in Bryant's poetry, 
 concerning which Mr. Lowell showed bis crotch- 
 ets so singularly in his " Fables for Critics," 
 which is only read — if it is read — by students of 
 sarcastic criticism. 
 
 The key-notes of historj' and prophecy which 
 were struck in " The Ages " reappear in " The 
 Massacre at Scio," wliich has always seemed to 
 me the most spirited lyric that sang itself into 
 fiery life during the Greek revolution, and in 
 saying this I liave borne in niind the war songs 
 of Campbell and Halleck's " JIarco Bozzaris." 
 The inspiration of " A Sunset Walk " glows 
 through the tenderness and the picturesqueness 
 of " The Indian Girl's Lament," which is simply 
 exquisite. New elements of meditation underlie 
 the compact " Ode for an Agricultural Celebra- 
 tion," and " Eizpah," which is far superior to any 
 of the "Scripture Sketches" of Mr. N. P. Willis 
 that were written about the same time, and were 
 absurdly popular. The feeling of man's mortal- 
 ity which Bryant discovered to be the distinc- 
 tive mark of his genius in "Thanatopsis " rose 
 solemnly again in "The Old Man's Funeral," 
 tempered with a philosophy and a hope which 
 had hitherto been wanting in his poetry. The 
 spirit of personal recollection which animated 
 the fluent numbers of " Green Eiver" sparkles 
 with youthful light in " The Rivulet," which re 
 fleets the early life of the poet at Cummington. 
 The waters of Helicon never bubbled more mu- 
 sically than the waters of this nameless little 
 rUl. The simplicity and the perfect melody of 
 "The Yellow Violet" start into life again in 
 " March," which is still the best poem ever writ- 
 ten on that mid and stormy month, and is alike 
 perfect in description and suggestion. The sick- 
 ness of a beloved sister occasioned Bryant's first 
 essay at sonnet-writing, an essay in which he was 
 never successful, violating, as he did, then and 
 later, most of the recognized laws of the sonnet. 
 "Consumption" is a touching poem, with an ex- 
 quisite thought in the twelfth line, 
 
 " Detach the dehcate blossom from the.tree." 
 
 It is instructive to read Bryant's poems in the 
 order in which they were written, and to detect 
 the different elements and emotions by which his 
 genius was swayed, and the order in which they 
 succeeded each other. The aboriginal influence, 
 if I may call it such, slumbered for a time after 
 " The Indian Girl's Lament," and awakened after 
 the writing of the quatorzain on his sister's iUnesa 
 in " An Indian Story," which possesses no great 
 
42 
 
 value, though it is melodious and picturesque. 
 Tlie iin|iulse to write blank verse, wliich had 
 died out in his " H3-mn to Death," started into 
 being again in " Summer Wind," one of his 
 perfect poems of nature, sultry, smothered, and 
 alive with the movements of the landscape. 
 It was followed by the best of his aboriginal 
 poems — '■ An Indian at the Burial Place of 
 liis Fathers," If it has a fault, I have yet 
 to find it, for, me jndice, it is as glorious as 
 the Berkshire scenery which it celebrates. The 
 dramatic situation and the character of the 
 speaker are both seized and retained with 
 distinctness and strength. The "Song" which 
 followed it (" Dost thou idly ask to hear ?") is 
 pretty and picturesque, but no more ; the genius 
 of Bryant was averse from writing songs of 
 imaginary amorousness. We detect in the next 
 poem, " Hymn of the Waldenses," the first out- 
 cropping of the religious element in his poetrj-. 
 It is manly and dignified, but in no seuse re- 
 ^laarkable ; a lesser poet might easily have written 
 it. Not so "Monument Mountain," which no 
 other man in America was equal to. It is the 
 most sustained and even of his early blank verse 
 poems, grand in its sweep, picturesque in its 
 groupings, dramatic, pathetic, primitive, a fit- 
 ting monument for the poor Indian girl who per- 
 ished among its precipices. 
 
 From the stern and stately blank verse of 
 "Monument Mountain," the genius of Bryant 
 turned in "After a Tempest," and painted an 
 exquisite series of pictures of outdoor life in six 
 perfect Spenserian stanzas. Everj' line, every 
 word is a picture, or a suggestion of « picture, 
 and the manifold details are everj-where sub- 
 ordinate to the general effect 
 
 " The butterfly, 
 That seemed a living blOBSom of the air," 
 
 is exceedingly beautiful. The measure of the 
 lines "To a Water Fowl" unbends itself in 
 " Autumn Woods," which are fairly radiant with 
 color. The tint and tone of the ninth stanza are 
 surprisingly rich and brilliant: 
 " But 'neath you crimson tree. 
 Lover to listening maid might breathe his flaiue. 
 Nor mark, mthin its roseate canopy. 
 Her blush of maiden shame. 
 
 Brj-ant seldom violated the minor morals of 
 
 verse, for whicli I honor him ; but he certainly 
 violated one when he wrote "'neath," which is 
 intolerable. " Mutation" and " November" call 
 for no special comment ; the last is a faithful re- 
 flection of the season described. " The Song of 
 the Greek Amazon" fi.xes the date at which it 
 was written, and iiidicates, if I am not mistaken, 
 that it was written for an illustration, and proba- 
 bly for an annual. It is dramatic in intention, 
 heroic, and very spirited. " To a Cloud" does 
 not impress me much, for I cannot forget Shel- 
 ley's " Cloud," which is gloriously imaginative 
 in spite of its wanton carelessness. Bryant's 
 measure is weak and ineffective. The story of 
 " The Murdered Traveller" is told with the 
 simplicity which characterizes all his minor 
 poems, and with an indescribable grace and 
 pathos. 
 
 Next in point of time came the " Hymn to the 
 North Star," which Bryant has never excelled. 
 I know not whether to admire it for its sim- 
 plicity, its grandeur, its imagination and its 
 intellectual largeness, or for the fusion and union 
 of all these qualities. Campbell is a compact 
 writer, but nothing in Campbell will for a 
 moment compare with the greatness of this 
 stanza : 
 
 '* Alike beneath thine eye 
 The deeds of darkness and of light are done ; 
 
 High toward the star-lit skv 
 Towns blaze, the smoke of battles blots the sun ; 
 The night-storm on a thousand hills is loud. 
 And the strong wind of day doth mingle sea and cloud." 
 
 " The Lapse of Time" is very interesting to me 
 in many ways. I see in it touches of meditative 
 philosophy which I have not before discovered, 
 exquisite melody of diction, a glimpse of Bry- 
 ant's paternal tenderness in the mention of the 
 little prattler at his knee, his belief in the great- 
 ness of his country, and a profound truth in the 
 closing couplet : 
 
 " The memory of sorrow grows 
 A lighter burden of the heart." 
 
 I pass " The Song of the Stars" as not worthy' 
 of his genius, and come to the most impressive 
 and reverential poem that he has yet written — a 
 poem in which he passed from the pantheism of 
 " Thanatopsis" into the pure religious spirit 
 which looks up to the Creator fi'om his works. 
 
43 
 
 We had a succession of woods and pictures iu 
 "A Winter Piece," but the possibility of such 
 forestry as we find iu Bryant's next poem, " A 
 Forest Hymn," had not dawned upon us as we 
 read it. The gravity, the dignity, the solemnity 
 of natural derotion, were never before stated so 
 accurate!}' and with such significance. We stand 
 in thought in the lieart of a great forest, iioder 
 its broad roof of boughs, awed by the eacred in- 
 fluences of the place. A gloom which is not 
 painful settles upon us ; we are surrounded by 
 mystery and unseen energy. The shadows are 
 full of worshippers and beautiful things that live 
 in their misty twilights. That delicate flower 
 yonder, that looks so like a smile, 
 
 " Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould. 
 An emanation of the indwelling Life, 
 A visible token of the upholding Love, 
 That are the soul of this great universe." 
 
 The great miracle of creation goes on around us ; 
 life and death, and life again. Life mocks at the 
 hate of death, seats himself on his throne, and 
 nourishes himself on his triumphs. Creator ! 
 when thou dost scare the world with tempests, 
 set the heavens on fire" with thunderbolts, or fill 
 the whirlpool that uproots the woods and drowns 
 cottages, spare us and ours, for we need not the 
 wrath of the elements to teach us who rules 
 them. 
 
 " Be it ours to meditate. 
 In these calm shades, thy milder majesty. 
 And to this beautiful order of thy works 
 Learn to conform the order of our lives." 
 
 If my study of Bryant's intellectual life is a 
 correct one, the poems of which I have spoken 
 were all written before his thirty-first year, and 
 while he was scrawling strange words with the 
 barbarous pen. That he was a husband and a 
 father we have seen in " The Lapse of Time ; " 
 that he loved and admired his wife we see in his 
 next poem. (" Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids "), 
 which is lovely — lovely enough to win the ap- 
 probation of Poe, who was chary of good words. 
 1 know of nothing more delicious than this 
 stanza : 
 
 '• Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child, 
 "Were ever in the sylvan wUd ; 
 And all the beauty of the place 
 Is in thy heart and on thy face." 
 
 I break the chronological connection of this 
 imperfect study of Bryant's genius to say that 
 this estimable lady inspired three of the tender- 
 est poems that were ever written out of the heart 
 of a loving husband. I refer to " The Future 
 Life," which was written in his forty-third year 
 (1837), "The Life that Is," which was written 
 after iier recovery from a dangerous illness at 
 Naples in his sixty-fourth year, and the solemn 
 requiem written shortly after her death and 
 headed "October, 1866." These poems are full 
 of deep but suppressed feeling, an emotion that 
 fears to trust itself to words. The last is to me 
 iuexpressibly touching. "The North Pole" of 
 Mr. Lowell has melted in his old age, if not 
 before. 
 
 The fort}' poems of which I have spoken were 
 all written, I believe, before Bryant came to 
 Ifew York and engaged actively in literary life. 
 I detect from this time forward. I think, other 
 and riper influences at work in his mind. What 
 I mean is the sense of beauty and cheerfulness 
 with which he meditated over themes in them- 
 selves sombre and melancholy. A good example 
 of this philosophic sense is that perfect poem, 
 "June." Another and better known example 
 is the pensive dirge, " most musical, most melan- 
 choly," in which he has embalmed the memory of 
 his sister, and which will always rank with the 
 immortal dirges of the language, "The Death 
 of the Flowers." There is no falling off of his 
 imagination as he goes about bis daily work in 
 town, for the New York of that day practically 
 ended at Canal street. A short walk brought 
 Bryant into the country, or enough into the 
 country to write such poems as " The Firma- 
 ment," " The New Moon," " The Gladness of Na- 
 ture," "A Summer Ramble," and "A Scene on 
 the Banks of the Hudson." A stanza out of "A 
 Summer Ramble " was no doubt the constant cry 
 of his heart : 
 
 "Away I I will not be, to-day. 
 
 The only slave of toil and care. 
 Away from dest and dust ! away 1 
 
 I'll be as idle as the air." 
 
 And he is, for he straightway betakes himself 
 to a long ramble along the banks of the Hudson, 
 or across the heights of Weehawken, which his 
 
44 
 
 friend Halleck had recentlj' made famous in his 
 hmnorous poem of " Fanny." 
 
 Contact with other men of letters and oppor- 
 tunities for literary employment broadened the 
 genius of Br}-aDt and occasionally, 1 fear, weak- 
 ened it. I see it broadened in such poems as ''A 
 Song of Pitcairn's Island," winch is charmingly 
 turned ; in " Romero," which is animated with 
 the patriotism of Spanish hearts ; in " The Dam- 
 sel of Peru," and in " The African Chief," which 
 is one of his most vigorous productions. I see it 
 weakened in the lines beginning " I cannot forget 
 with w'hat fervid devotion," and in the poems, 
 " To a Mosquito," " A Meditation on Rhode Is- 
 land Coal " and " Spring in Town." The humor 
 of these elaborate trifles is very thin, and the 
 imagination expended on them is uttterly 
 wasted. Bryant had a strong sense of hnmor, 
 but it found no vent in his verse. His regard 
 for the better side of the Indian character 
 showed itself in "The Disinterred AVarrior," a 
 noble, statuesque poem; and his unquenchable 
 love of freedom in " The Greek Partisan," 
 which was composed, I imagine, for a picture. 
 He gives ua a broad view of his native hills and 
 the surrounding country and his eldest daughter 
 in his " Lines on Revisiting the Conntrj-." and 
 a glimpse of an aged man and woman, long 
 since dead, who once lived in the neighborhood 
 of his father's house. "The Two Graves" is 
 not one of his great poems, but it is very musi- 
 cal and tender. I find no large work of this pe- 
 riod until I come to " The Past." There is a 
 depth, -<i grandeur, a solemnity in this poem 
 which Bryant had not before attained, and an 
 imaginative presentation of things intangible 
 which the strong art of the poet summons before 
 ns, we know not how. He contrives to repeople 
 
 " The dark backward and abysm of time " 
 with awful and sorrowful and beautiful shapes 
 and shadows. 
 
 " They have not perished — no ! 
 Kind words, remembered voices once so sweet. 
 
 Smiles, radiant long ago. 
 And features, the great soul's apparent seat . 
 * * * * 
 
 And then shall I behold 
 Him, by whose kind paternal side I sprung. 
 
 And her, who, still and cold, 
 Fills the next grave — the beautiful and young." 
 
 We turn from the liaunted darkness of " The 
 Past " to " The Evening Wind," which is the first 
 o( a series of poems of which the humanities of 
 earth are as positivelj' the theme as its mortalit3- 
 was in " Thanatopsis." This great poet never 
 ceases liencciorth to remember that he is a man 
 auiong men, and that all that concerns them 
 concerns him. He sees the regions of land and 
 sea that the wind has blown over on its journey 
 to his hittice. He knows that it is a delight to 
 others as well as to himself; to the higher forms 
 of nature as well as to mankind ; that it rocks the 
 little bird in his nest, curls the still waters, sum- 
 mons the forest liarmonies from innumerable 
 boughs, and takes its pleasant way over the clos- 
 ing flowers. The old man leans his silver head to 
 feel it ; it kisses the sleeping child and dries the 
 moistened curls on his temples; and those who 
 watch b\' the sick man's bed part his curtains to 
 allow it to cool his burning brow. This large, far- 
 reaching sympathy with his fellow-creatures is 
 a marked characteristic of Br\"ant's poetry, and 
 distinguishes it, I think, from that of every other 
 American poet, living or dead. 
 
 " The Evening Wind," is the first of a remark- 
 able series of poems, of whicli ' An Evening 
 Reverv," " N"oou," " The Crowded Street," and 
 " The Night Journey of a River," are noble ex- 
 amples. The heart of Bryant went out to the 
 human race as the heart of Burns went out to 
 the dumb creation in " The Twa Dogs," and 
 " The Farmer's Salutation to his Auld Mare," 
 with infinite solicitation and pity. The still, sad 
 music of humanity was ever soundinic in his ears, 
 moaning like the wind in the forest. To his ej'es 
 humanity w'as an endless procession moving 
 along the earth, in sunshine and shadow, out of 
 the darkness of birth into the night of death. 
 They repose and they suffer, these fleeting, van- 
 ishing figures, but not for long. The end is cer- 
 tain and near. This philosophj- of life is a seri- 
 ous one, but it admits of consolation and cheer- 
 fulness. It is drear}' in Byron ; it is awful in 
 " Ecclesiastes," but it is neither in Bryant, at 
 least, not to me, for I never rise from the perusal 
 of the poems I have named, and others belonging 
 to the same class, with a feeling of depression 
 and gloom, thanks to the health and strength and 
 serenity of his genius, which carries me away 
 
45 
 
 out of myself, and elevates me above the sorrows 
 and the sufferings of mankind. 
 
 There is a second series of poems equally dis- 
 tinctive of Bryant, and rather difficult of classi- 
 fication. They began with " A Forest Walk ;" 
 they inspired " The Ages ;" they gathered darkl}- 
 in the lines " To the Apennines " and " Earth ;" 
 and they were radiant and picturesque in " The 
 Fountain " and " The Prairies." They may be 
 said to concern themselves with the antiquity of 
 nature and of the race. 
 
 A third and much larger series of poems may 
 be roughly described as poems of nature, though 
 they embrace sentiments of affection, philosophic 
 reflection, meditation, morality, and other ele- 
 ments of thought and emotion. Such poems are 
 " The Yellow Violet," " Inscription for the En- 
 trance to a 'Wood," " Green River," " A Winter 
 Piece," " The Rivulet," " March," " After a 
 Tempest," '* June." " The New Moon," and a 
 score of others which will readily recur to the 
 readers of Brj'ant. With " A Forest Hymn " 
 commenced, as I have said, a series of poems in 
 which a religious element predominated. It re- 
 appeared in the " Hymn to the North Star," 
 "The Firmament," " Hymn of the City," " The 
 Future Life," " The Life that Is," and perhaps 
 as many more poems of a later date. 
 
 I have mentioned the lyrics with which Bryant 
 fired the hearts of his readers during the Greek 
 revolution, which cost Byron his life, and roused 
 the martial energies of Campbell and Halleck. 
 They were spirited, as I have remarked before, 
 but not of so much value to us as the poems 
 which commemorated the patriotism of our 
 fathers, and awakened the patriotism of our sons. 
 They began fairly in "The Song of Marion's 
 Men," " Seventy-Six " and "The Green Moun- 
 tain Boys ;" they ended gloriously in " Not Yet," 
 and " Our Country's Call." 
 
 Another class of poems come under the head of 
 poems of imagination and fantasy. They began 
 with the rural song, if I may call it such, which 
 
 the j-oung poet addressed to tlie lady of his love ; 
 they culminated in "The Land of Dreams" and 
 " The Burial of Love." I know of nothing more 
 poetical than these exquisite dreams within 
 dreams, which haunt the memory with visions of 
 loveliness. The genius of Bryant was as beauti- 
 ful as it was magnificent. 
 
 I have omitted to mention Bryant's transla- 
 tions, of which he executed, from first to last, 
 over twenty, from the Greek, Latin, Spanish, 
 German and Portuguese. I am not scholar 
 enough to judge of them, but my sense of poetry 
 leads me to prefer the translations from the 
 Spanish to all the other tongues. The genius of 
 Bryant sympathized profoundly, I am convinced, 
 with the high, grave thoughts, and the lofty, 
 sonorous measures of the Spanish poets. He was 
 also (if the opinion of an unlettered man is worth 
 anything) completely in sj-mpathy with the 
 primitive greatness of Homer. His translations 
 of the " Iliad" and the "Odyssej'" are the only 
 ones that I have been able to read. 
 
 Bryant at his best was a great poet, and when 
 not at his best was still a poet. He had a capa- 
 cious intellect, which conceived largely and e-xe- 
 cuted strongly, clearly, and with wonderful force 
 of imagination. His eye was never awed by the 
 immensity of the universe, and his heart, even 
 in boj'hood, was never subdued by the dread 
 thmight of death, which was always in his mind. 
 He was the truest painter of American scenery, 
 because he was the most accurate and most lov- 
 ing of all our painters, being at once minute and 
 comprehensive. His diction was at all times in 
 keeping with his theme, adapting itself readily to 
 every turn of his thought. He knew the value 
 of words, and neither stinted nor squandered 
 them. Other American poets may have been 
 more popular than he was, but none has had his 
 reputation, and none has escaped his influence. 
 
 Such, I believe, are some of the characteristics 
 of the poetry of mj' good friend Bryant. 
 
THE JOURNALIST. 
 
 By AN Editceial Associate. 
 
 Mr. Bet ANT was a citizen who recognized fully 
 the duties of citizenship, but who had no ambi- 
 tion to fulfil those duties as a holder of public 
 office. Had he, in earlier years, not turned his 
 attention to journalism, it cannot be doubted that 
 he would have found means for using his pen in 
 behalf of the measures which his strong convic- 
 tions so earnestly approved. Having assumed 
 the editorial control of a leading daily newspaper, 
 he found in that position the fullest opportunity 
 to discuss all subjects which pertained to the 
 national welfare, and for more than half a cen- 
 tury the Evening Post was an exponent of his 
 views. Until the close of the civil war he was 
 almost a daily contributor to its columns, and 
 since that time he has exercised a general super- 
 vision of its course — his influence being none the 
 less active because usually taking the form of 
 criticism after the deed. In the highest sense of 
 the term, therefore, Mr. Bryant was a politician. 
 For every low phase of politics — the struggle for 
 office, the methods of party managers, or the 
 demagogic arguments of place hunters— he had 
 the heartiest contempt. 
 
 The political history of an editor must be 
 sought in the journal which reflects his views, 
 and we therefore turn to the files of the Evening 
 Post to learn what men and measures Mr. Bry- 
 ant supported or condemned. During the period 
 embraced in his editorial career the most impor- 
 tant questions which the republic has had to de- 
 cide since its birth came up for discussion. He 
 saw slavery contending for an extension of power 
 and territory, succeeding for a time and then 
 
 overwhelmed in final disaster. He witnessed 
 the struggles over the United States Bank, took 
 part in the defence of the Sub-Treasury scheme, 
 and, when the war imposed upon the country an 
 irredeemable paper currency, he assisted in the 
 still unfinished effort to secure a return to the 
 system which the founders of the Republic so 
 wisely believed to be the best for the nation. He 
 early discovered the evils of a protective tariff 
 system, and for no cause did he labor more zeal- 
 ously and constantly than for that of striking 
 from our foreign trade the shackles which still 
 embarrass it. During his editorial career he 
 was called upon to criticise the administrations of 
 Presidents Jackson, Tan Buren, Harrison, Tyler, 
 Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lin- 
 coln, Grant, and Hayes. This bare statement is 
 sufficieut to show the wide extent of the subjects 
 which came under his notice. What opinions 
 he expressed, what schemes he opposed, and 
 what projects he supported the columns of the 
 Evening Post best disclose. More characteristic 
 testimony to his views is given in some instances 
 in speeches which he made and letters on politi- 
 cal topics which appeared under his own signa- 
 ture; but his editorial pen was his most common 
 means of comunication with the public, and, 
 as we have said, the student of his political 
 history must turn to the pages of his own journal 
 to find the views which, if not always set forth 
 directly by himself, were printed subject to his 
 approval. 
 
 As soon as Mr. Bryant accepted an editorial 
 connection with the Evening Post it began to at- 
 
48 
 
 taclc the protective system and to advocate tlie 
 pi-ijiciples of free trade, and it wais then the only 
 newspaper nortli of tlie Potomac which took this 
 ground. During all his life there was no politi- 
 cal subject in which Jlr. Bryant toot so constant 
 an interest as that of revenue reform, and the last 
 article which he contributed to the pages of this 
 journal was a discussion of the balance of trade. 
 So prominent has been his position as a free- 
 trade advocate that we need not dwell further 
 upon his views on this subject. 
 
 On the slavery question Mr. Bryant was origi- 
 nally a Free Soil Democrat. In February, 1837, 
 on the occasion of the rejection of a petition of 
 colored men of this State asking the Legislature 
 to put them on the same footing with the whites, 
 the EvExixG Post said : 
 
 " It appears to us that it is verj" unwise to con- 
 nect this question with that of the principal ob- 
 ject of the Abolitionists, which is, todoaway with 
 slavei'y in the Southern States. The great objec- 
 tion brought against their course hitherto has been 
 that they were meddling with a matter with 
 which they had no concern, and which their in- 
 terference might make worse for both master and 
 slave. There is not the least ground for either of 
 these objections in tl. e case of the petition in 
 Cjuestion. "We recognize the blacks as citizens, and 
 we have a perfect right to say how easy we will 
 make the condition of their citizenship. The mo- 
 ment we allow ourselves to be restrained in legis- 
 lating on this subject by a regard for what is or 
 may be said at the South or anywhere else, we 
 submit to external interference, we allow a power 
 from without to dictate what shall be the quali- 
 fications of our voters. For our own part, we hesi- 
 tate not to say that the prayer of the petition 
 was just." 
 
 From February 6 to 11, \S31, the House of Rep- 
 resentatives kept up an excited debate on the 
 question of allowing Mr. Adams to present anti- 
 slavery petitions. The Evexixg Post, comment- 
 ing on the debate, said : 
 
 "The whole affair is a striking example of the 
 foU3' of attempting to muzzle discussion in this 
 country. Checked in one direction, it will break 
 out in anotlier, the more violently on account of 
 the attempt to rejiress it." 
 
 Later in the same year, when there was an 
 angry discussion in the Senate on the subject of 
 receiving a petition for emancipation in the Dis- 
 trict of Columbia, the Evening Post said : 
 
 " Holding, as we do, that Congress has the 
 constitutional power to dispose of the slavery 
 
 I question in the District as it may deem fit, we 
 I regard with an indignant feeling any interfer- 
 ■ ence with the riglit of the citizens of the United 
 States to make it the subject of memoriais to the 
 national legislature. To repulse such applica- 
 tions in silent scorn is neither tlie way to con- 
 vince those who make them of their error, if 
 they are in one, nor to make tliem desist from 
 their course." 
 
 Strong as were Mr. Bryant's feelings in behalf 
 of free trade, he did not allow those feelings to 
 excite in liim anj- sympathy with the Southern 
 nullifiers who proposed to set the United States 
 authorities at defiance, and the Evening Post 
 spoke out earlj- and forcibly against the proposed 
 nullification of United States laws by any State. 
 Thus, on the 23d of March, 1832, it protested 
 against the utterances of another journal which 
 it referred to as " speaking lightly of the Union," 
 and it said : 
 
 " The moment that our government ceases to 
 be supported by the force of opinion in any con- 
 siderable portion of its territory, that moment it 
 is at an end. It is a dangerous experiment that 
 some politicians are making to discover the ut- 
 most limit of this force of opinion, and at what 
 point it will cease to support the execution of 
 the laws in a large part of the Union. It is worse. 
 It is a flagitious experiment — a danger unneces- 
 sarily and wantonly incurred." 
 
 AVhen President Jackson's proclamation of De- 
 cember 10, 1832, to the South Carolina nullifiers 
 appeared, the Evening Post commended it, saj'- 
 ing of it: 
 
 " The fallacies of the nullification doctrine are 
 exposed in language of remarkable clearness and 
 strength, and the consequence of carrying it into 
 effect are depicted in a manner which must cause 
 all those in South Carolina who are not wholly 
 beside themselves with the excitement of the mo- 
 ment to shrink back with dread from the step 
 wliich in the height of their infatuation they are 
 about to take." 
 
 In the same connection the Evening Post 
 said: 
 
 " That question (South Carolina's attitude) 
 must be managed with great judgment and with 
 a strict desire to do justice and to preserve the 
 Union, or its consequences may extend beyond 
 the State of South Carolina. That the President 
 and his Cabinet will so manage it we have not a 
 doubt, and their course thus far is pledge that 
 they will do so. But the administration cannot 
 do everything ; it must be sustained by Congress. 
 The universal South is looking to Congress for a 
 
49 
 
 removal of tlie burdens of whicli it has so long 
 complained now that the plea of their being 
 necessary for raising a revenue can no longer be 
 urged in their excuse.'* 
 
 Mr. Bryant opposed the Whig projects of 
 internal improvements and was an earnest 
 supporter of President Jackson's course toward 
 the United States Bank — disapproving of the 
 bank and favoring the removal of the United 
 States deposits. We find in the columns of the 
 EvExi.s'G Post in 1833 complaints of the govern- 
 ment's dela3' in ordering the deposits to be re- 
 moved, and when the order for the removal was 
 given it greatly rejoiced. Alluding to the de- 
 spairing lamentations of the journals which 
 sided with the bank, it said : 
 
 " Like the mis-shapen dwarf in the Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel, they wave their lean arms on 
 high and run to and fro crying ' Lost ! lost ! lost !' 
 Who can doubt the sincerity of their lamenta- 
 tions at the death blow which has been given to 
 the United States Bank, when it is remembered 
 how munificent a patron that institution has been 
 to them ? AVho can wonder that they appear at 
 the head of the funeral train as chief mourners, 
 and raise so loud their solemn wul-wullahs when 
 he reflects how well their grief is paid for ? But 
 their wailing is vain — 'vainly they heap the ashes 
 on their heads' — the fate of the bank is sealed; 
 and we who are not paid to wet our 
 cheeks with artificial tears, who have no 
 cause to be a mourner, must be permitted to con- 
 gratulate the country that a monopoly which, in 
 the corrupt exercise of its dangerous power, 
 threatened to sap the foundation of American 
 independence has, by this firm and timely act of 
 the general government, been reduced to a state 
 of feebleness which, we trust, is only the pre- 
 cursor of final dissolution." 
 
 The Evening Post was a steady advocate of 
 the Sub-Treasury scheme, and when in 1841 the 
 act closing the Sub-Treasury in this city went 
 into effect it said : 
 
 "Never was there a system of more complete 
 and more expeditious responsibility. What 
 would have required the negotiations and ar- 
 rangements of months if a bank had been the 
 depository is done in an instant. There is no 
 inconvenience, no alarm, no loss. Wall street 
 suffers no shock. Front street does not hear of 
 the event. The merchants obtain their accom- 
 modations as usual. We doubt whether the wit 
 of all our Legislatures, both state and national, 
 has, within twenty years, devised anything so 
 perfect in its way as the mode ol keeping and 
 
 paying out the public money which Congress 
 has just had the folly to abrogate." 
 
 On the ith of September, 183'?, President Van 
 Buren sent in his message to Congress on its 
 meeting in extra session. The message treated 
 largely of the safe-keeping and disbursement of 
 the public money, and of it the Eve.ning Post 
 said: 
 
 " We welcome it not only witli the satisfaction 
 which the members of a political party feel 
 when those whom they have placed high in pub- 
 lic trust redeem worthilj' and fully the pledges 
 they have given, but with a peculiar gratifica- 
 tion of seeing the measure of separating politics 
 from banking, for which we have long contended, 
 earnestly recommended to the American people." 
 
 In August, 1841, Mr. Tyler vetoed the Bank 
 bill which the Whig Congress had passed. The 
 Evening Post predicted that he could not sanc- 
 tion this measure consistently, and, commenting 
 on the result, it said : 
 
 " It becomes the Democratic party to rejoice 
 at this event for more reasons than one. It puts 
 an end to our apprehensions about a national 
 bank. It is a matter of rejoicing tliat treachery 
 has met with its due reward. Such is the pun- 
 ishment which has overtaken the conspirators 
 who sought to establish a bank without consult- 
 ing the will of the people. It is a subject of 
 congratulation that the least scrupulous and most 
 sordid of all pai-ties which ever existed in this 
 country is broken up, prostrated and scattered 
 by this blow from the hand of one who assisted 
 to place it in the ascendancy." 
 
 Of course a man holding Mr, Bryant's views 
 was brought constantly in conflict with the 
 opinion of Henry Clay. Thej- were as opposed 
 to one another politically as two political stu- 
 dents could be, and we can recall but one ques- 
 tion about which they agreed, namely, in oppos- 
 ing the war with Mexico. But when the Whig 
 National Convention at Harrisburg, Pa., in De- 
 cember, 1839, nominated General Harrison for 
 the Presidency instead of Henrj' Claj-, the 
 Evening Post made the following generous al- 
 lusion to the defeated candidate : 
 
 " The refusal to nominate Mr. Clay aff'ords a 
 fair presumption that tlie Whig party is unwil- 
 ling to leave the next Presidential election to be 
 decided by the popularity of their own principles. 
 Mr. Clay is completely identified with the Whig 
 party, not only in all its doctrines, but in all its 
 practices and measures. He is one of the fairest 
 
')0 
 
 and at tlie same time one of the most favorable 
 impersonatioud of that party which can be found. 
 If lie were to be a candidate lie would stand be- 
 fore the public responsible for the proceedings of 
 his partj- through a long course of years — pro- 
 ceedings quorum pars magna fuit. His party 
 liave preferred a man who has taken a very in- 
 significant ijart in civil life, a man of pliant and 
 easy disjjosition, who was never remarkable for 
 decided opinions, and, in fact, whose opinions 
 nobody ever thought it worth while to inquire 
 about before he was nominated." 
 
 As a Free Soil Democrat ilr. Bryant was a 
 zealous opponent of the Texas annexation pro- 
 ject, and he denounced it in the Evening Post as 
 " infamous." He was one of the vice-presi- 
 dents of an anti-anne-xation meeting held 
 in the Tabernacle in this city on the 
 24th of April, 1S44, at which Albert Gal- 
 latin presided, and resolutions were adopted 
 declaring that 1 he United States had by treaty 
 acknowledged Texas to be a part of Mexico ; that 
 annexation would be a declaration of war against 
 that nation, and that " Texas should in no case 
 be annexed without proper guards against 
 .slavery." He favored the nomination of Van 
 Buren for the Presidency in 1S44, and was not 
 satisfied with Polk. The Evexixg Post, however, 
 supported the latter, arguing that " if the dis- 
 satisfied part of the party should Avithdraw their 
 support from Mr. Polk the effect would be either 
 to defeat the party altogether or to permit the 
 advocates of unconditional annexation to claim 
 the victory as exclusively their own." But, if 
 the Van Buren Democrats continued their alle- 
 giance to the party, it thought that *' the Texas 
 question then becomes a question which the Dem- 
 ocrats are to settle among themselves, on prin- 
 ciples of equity and justice, in the determination 
 of which the whole partj' will be consulted." 
 
 Texan annexation was accomplished, and the 
 predicted war with Mexico followed. We find 
 the Evening Post saying on the 8th of May, 
 1846, a short time before General Taylor crossed 
 the Rio Grande : 
 
 " We were assured when Texas was annexed to 
 the Union that it would draw after it no such 
 consequences as now seem imminent if our rela- 
 tions with Mexico be not managed with great 
 delicacy and prudence. We have a right to ex- 
 pect of our government that it shallleaveno hon- 
 orable method unemployed to prevent that act 
 
 from bringing upon us hostilities serious to our 
 commerce, and expenditures burdensome to the 
 people." 
 
 When the war actualh" began the Evening 
 Post said ; 
 
 " Whatever may be the varieties of opinion in 
 regard to the question whether this war could 
 have been avoided, the large majority of both 
 political parties, in this part of the country at 
 least, are disposed to give support to the admin- 
 istration in its prosecution. The fact is, we be- 
 lieve, the people are wear\- of the amphibious 
 state in which our relations toward Mexico have 
 so long remained. We approve of making such 
 demonstrations of vigor as shall convince Mexico 
 that we are in earnest, and that we are resolved 
 upon an adjustment of the difficulties which have 
 so long subsisted between us. " 
 
 Mr. Bryant supported Pierce for President in 
 1852, although recognising some of the inconsis- 
 tencies of the platform on which he was nomi- 
 nated. He was, however, disappointed in his ad- 
 mhiistration, and believing that it was irretrieva- 
 blv allied to the slave power he became one of its 
 opponents. On the 29th of Api'il, 1856, a great 
 meeting was held in the Tabernacle in this citj' 
 " to oppose the measures and policy of the pres- 
 ent national administration for the extension of 
 slavery over territory embraced within the com- 
 pact of the ' Missouri Compromise,' and in favor 
 of repairing the mischiefs arising from the viola- 
 tion of good faith in its repeal, and of restoring 
 the action and position of the federal government 
 on the subject of slavery to the principles of 
 Washington and Jefferson." At this meeting 
 the following letter from Mr. Bryant was read; 
 
 " New York, April 28, 1856. 
 
 " Gentlemen : It maj- not be in my power to 
 be present at the meeting at which you have 
 done me tlie honor to request my attendance, but 
 I fully agree Avith you as to the importance of a 
 combined effort to assert the right of the great 
 bod}"" of American citizens against the encroach- 
 ments of an oligarchy — a class of proprietors who 
 seek to subject all other interests, even the most 
 sacred and dear, to their own. 
 
 " Even if the question were merely whether 
 we should stand bj' our old neighbors — our 
 friends and kinsmen, who have lately left us for 
 a new home west of Missouri, the occasion would 
 be a fitting one to call forth all our zeal and unite 
 all our strength. If we desert them in their hour 
 of need we shall be justly branded as cold-hearted, 
 selfish and cowardly. No nation in the history 
 
51 
 
 of the world was ever so faithless to the obliga- 
 tions of humanity as to be indifferent lo the fate 
 of the colonies it had planted. With the I'epub 
 lies of antiquity it was a matter of course to an- 
 swer the call of tlieir colonies wiih instant sj'm- 
 pathy and aid. England would cover herself 
 with infamy if she were to allow one of her col- 
 onies, appealing to her for protection, to be 
 hrought by force under the sway of an absolute 
 government. In the present case the call made 
 upon us is for a species of succor which will cost 
 us no sacrifice, the cheap and peaceful aid of our 
 votes. The votes of the great, prosperous aud 
 powerful North are all that is required to de- 
 liver the settlements on the Kansas from the 
 combination of fraud and violence formed to 
 wrest from them their rights and compel them 
 to submit to laws which their representatives 
 never enacted. We raise committees, we organ- 
 ize a system of charity when our benevolence ia 
 appealed to bj' the people of a foreign countrj- in 
 distress. Ought we to do less for our country- 
 men? Let us organize the entire region of the 
 free States, with such aid as we can obtain ft-om 
 the just and well disposed of the slave States, in- 
 to a great association for breaking up the con- 
 spiracy against the rights of our countrymen and 
 kindred at the West who look to us for help. 
 Every generous feeling allies itself with the sense 
 of justice in favor of the cause in which you are 
 engaged. I am, gentlemen, with great regard, 
 j'our obedient servant, 
 
 " William C. Bryant." 
 
 From this time Mr. Bryant acted with the Re- 
 publican party. He sustained Fremont in the 
 Evening Post in 1856, was a Republican Presi- 
 dential elector in 1860, gave Lincoln and the 
 Union cause his warmest support in 1861 and 
 during the war, and advocated the election of 
 Grant in 1868. He was, however, no servile 
 follower of any party standard, and he was ever 
 ready to criticise the men and measures of the 
 Republican party when they were opposed to his 
 judgment as he was ready to commend the men 
 and measures of its opiJonents when they met his 
 approval. 
 
 The administration of General Grant was un- 
 satisfactory to him in many ways, and he with 
 thousands of others looked to the Cincinnati con- 
 vention of 1872 to offer to the country a candidate 
 and a platform which would give the fullest 
 promise of an administration pledged to support 
 an enlightened revenue system and a reformed 
 civil service. The nomination of Horace Greelej% 
 the leading protectionist of the country, was a 
 
 great disappointment to him, and he did not hesi- 
 t.ate in refusing to accept Mr. Greeley ns the 
 representative of the ideas which the promoters 
 of the Cincinnati convention favored. On the 
 30th of Maj', 1S7'2, a meeting was held in Stein- 
 way Hall in this city to discuss the possibility of 
 putting in the field a ticket which would repre- 
 sent those ideas. At this meeting Jlr. Bryant 
 presided, and in his speech on that occasion he 
 said: 
 
 " "We will go on and demand of Congress that 
 it shall give the people all which they are en- 
 titled to ; that is to say, an honest revenue tariff 
 and nothing else. That we are determined to 
 have, and we will not give over this effort; wo 
 will not cease agitating this subject until we 
 shall have made it dangerous for any political 
 party, whatever its name, to ignore this import- 
 ant question and to put aside the demand of the 
 people for an abrogation of this dutj', these in- 
 direct taxes, which are burdensome to every 
 walk of life, every class, and which paralyze the 
 industry of the country." 
 
 The nomination of such a candidate as this 
 meeting desired was not secured, and the Kvkn- 
 ING Post gave its support to the re-election of 
 President Grant as the best thing attainable in 
 the circumstances. 
 
 During the summer of 1872, there were rumors 
 that Mr. Bryant himself would be the Presiden- 
 tial candidate of the dissatisfied members of the 
 Cincinnati Convention. To silence this report 
 he printed the following card : 
 
 " Certain journals of this city have lately 
 spoken of me as one ambitious of being nominat- 
 ed as acandidate for thePresidencyof the United 
 States. The idea is absurd enough, not only on 
 account of my advanced age, but of my unfitness 
 in various respects for the labor of so eminent a 
 riost. I do not, however, object to the discus- 
 sion of ray deficiencies on any other ground than 
 that it id altogether superfluous, since it is iin- 
 pcssible that I should receive any formal nom- 
 ination, and equally impossible, if it were offered, 
 that I should commit the folly of accepting it. 
 '• WiLLLiM C. Bryant. 
 
 " New York, July 8, 1872." 
 
 Mr. Bryant's last appearance at a political 
 meeting was in 1875, when on the 12tb of Janu 
 ary he presided at the meeting held in Cooper 
 Institute to denounce the interference of United 
 States troops with the Louisiana Legislature. In 
 his speech on this occasion he said : 
 
52 
 
 " I regard this question solely as a solema 
 question of constitutional law. No matter wlio 
 desires the interference of the military, it should 
 not have been given but in the way of the Con- 
 stitution — otherwise it is an act from wliich no 
 citizen has a riglit to withhold his condemnation. 
 It must be rebuked the instant it is perpetrated. 
 The evil must be crushed in its infancy, while its 
 bones are yet in gristle, and before it becomes 
 formidable as a precedent. These practices, 
 which contemplate the subjection of local polities 
 to the federal authorities by the exercise of the 
 military power, must be stopped, must be broljeu 
 up forever." 
 
 Mr. Bryant's active interest in all the political 
 questions of the day continued up to the time of 
 his last illness, and although he was not called 
 on, after the meeting mentioned above, to speak 
 on political subjects, he continued from time to 
 time to use his pen with all its old vigor. An 
 editorial article by him, printed in the Evening 
 Post of the 26th November, 1876, on the occa- 
 sion of the intervention of the United States 
 troops in the Legislature of South Carolina illus- 
 trated his vigor of thought and expression, and 
 was widely copied. In this article he said : 
 
 " 'We protest against the proceeding, not only 
 in the name of liberty and justice, but in behalf 
 of the Republican party, whose good name and 
 worthy record are brought in question by the 
 
 resort to military force in a question purely 
 political. Here is already incorporated into the 
 histor}- of a republic a precedent of as arbitrary 
 a nature as the act of Cromwell when he turned 
 the Britisli Parliament out of doors. Tlie rule of 
 all representative bodies, tliat tlicy are judges of 
 the election. and qualifications of tlieir members, 
 is summarily set a.side, and Mr. Dennis the furni- 
 ture dealer, with federal troops at his back, 
 usurps that office. Even the excuse tliat disturb- 
 ance and bloodshed were dreaded, and insurrec- 
 tion so formidable that Governor Chamberlain 
 would lack the means to quell it, does not ap- 
 pear to hare been made. Tlie usurpation is not 
 masked with any plausible pretext ; it sweeps 
 awa}- every restraint of usage and precedent and 
 law, and substitutes simple force for the quiet 
 formalities of ordinary legislation. The Repub- 
 lican party is not powerful enough in comparison 
 with the opposition to sustain the responsibility" 
 of such measures, and it becomes every member 
 of it who desires its predominance and its useful- 
 ness, to disclaim all part in such proceedings." 
 
 A subject in which he took great personal in- 
 terest in late years was reciprocity treaties with 
 other countries, and particularly with Hawaii; 
 and almost the on]}' piece of consecutive edi- 
 torial work which he did on the Evening Post, 
 since the war, was the series of articles in 
 support of the Hawaiian treaty, all of which 
 were from his pen. 
 
THE LAST ORATION. 
 
 Mr. Bryant appeared for the last time in pub- 
 lic on the 29th of May, 1S18. He then took part 
 in the ceremony of unveiling the bust of Maz- 
 zini, the Italian statesman, in the Central Park, 
 in New York, and delivered the following ad- 
 dress : 
 
 " History, my friends, has recorded the deeds 
 of Giuseppe Mazzini on a tablet which will en- 
 dure while the annals of Italy are read. Art has 
 been called to do her part in perpetuating his 
 memory, and to-day a bust is unveiled which will 
 make millions familiar with the divine image 
 stamped on the countenance of one of the great- 
 est men of our times. 
 
 " The idea of Italian unity and liberty was the 
 passion of Mazzini's life ; it took possession of 
 him in youth, it grew stronger as the years went 
 on, and lost none of its power over him in his 
 age. K"or is it at all surprising that it should 
 have taken a strong hold on his youthful imagin- 
 ation. I recollect very well that when, forty- 
 four years ago, I first entered Italy, then held 
 down under the weight of a score of despotisms, 
 the same idea forcibly suggested itself to my 
 mind as I looked southward from the slopes of 
 the mountain country. There lay a great sister- 
 hood of provinces requiring only a confederate 
 republican government to raise them to the 
 rank of a great power, presenting to the world 
 a single majestic front, and parcelling out the 
 powers of local legislation and government 
 among the different neighborhoods ia such a 
 manner as to educate the whole population 
 in a knowledge of the duties and rights of 
 freemen. There were the industrious Pied- 
 montese, the enterprising Genoese, among whom 
 Mazzini was born — a countryman of Colum- 
 bus — there were the ambitious Venetians and 
 
 the Lombards, rejoicing in their fertile plains; 
 and, there, as the imagination followed the 
 ridge of the Appenines toward the Strait of 
 Messina, were the Tuscans, famed in letters, 
 the Umbrians, wearing in their aspect the 
 tokens of Latin descent, the Romans in their 
 centre of arts, the gay Neapolitans, and further 
 south the versatile Sicilians, over whose valleys 
 rolls the smoke of the most famous volcano in the 
 world. As we traverse these regions in thought 
 we recognize them all as parts of one Italy, yet 
 each inhabited by Italians of a different charac - 
 ter from the rest, all speaking Italian, but with a 
 difference in each province ; earh region cher- 
 ishing its peculiar traditions, which reach back to 
 the beginning of civilization, and its peculiar 
 usages observed for ages. 
 
 " Well might the great man whose bust we dis- 
 close at this time to the public gaze be deeply 
 moved by this spectacle of his countrymen and 
 kindred bound in the shackles of a brood of local 
 tyrannies which kept them apart that they might 
 with more ease be oppressed. When he farther 
 considered the many great men who had risen 
 from time to time in Italy as examples of the 
 intellectual endowments of her people — states- 
 men, legislators, men of letters, men eminent in 
 philosophy, in arms, and in arts — I say that he 
 might well claim for the birth-place of such men 
 the unity of its provinces to make it great, and 
 the liberty of its people to raise them up to the 
 standard of their mental endowments. Who 
 shall blame him — who in this land of freedom — • 
 for demanding in behalf of such a country a po- 
 litical constitution framed on the most liberal 
 pattern which the world has seen ? 
 
 " For such a constitution he planned ; for that 
 belabored; that object he never suffered to be 
 
54 
 
 out of his sight. Ko proclaimer of a new religion 
 was ever more faithful to his mission. Here 
 where we have lately' closed a sanguinary but 
 successful war in defence of the unity of the 
 states which form our republic ; here where we 
 have just broken the chains of three millions of 
 bondmen, is, above all others, the place where a 
 memorial of tlie great champion of Italian unitj' 
 and liberty should be set up amid a storm of ac- 
 clamation from a multiUide of freemen. 
 
 " Yet earnestly as he desired these ends and 
 struggled to attain them, the struggle was a 
 noble and manly one ; he disdained to compass 
 these ends by base or ferocious means ; he ab- 
 horred bloodshed ; he detested vengeance ; he 
 spoke little of rights, but much of duties, resolv- 
 ing the cares of au enlightened statesmanship 
 into matters of duty. The only warfare which 
 he would allow, and that as a sorrowful neccssit}', 
 was an open warfare waged against that brute 
 force tliat violates human duty and human right. 
 In that warfare his courage rose always equal to 
 the occasion — a courage worthy of the generous 
 political philosophy which he professed. For 
 there was no trial he would not endure, no sacri- 
 fice, no labor he would not undertake, no danger 
 he would not encounter for the sake of that dream 
 of his youth and pursuit of his manhood, the 
 unity and liberty of Italy. 
 
 "That country is now united under one politi- 
 cal head — save a portion arbitrarily and unjustly 
 added to France — and to the public opinion 
 formed in Italy by the teachings of Mazzini the 
 union is in large measure due. Italy has now a 
 constitutional government, the best feature of 
 which it owes to the principles of republicanism 
 in which Mazzini trained a whole generation of 
 the young men of Italy, however short the 
 present government of the country may fall of 
 the ideal standard at which he aimed. 
 
 " One great result for which he labored was 
 the perfect freedom of religious worship. Well 
 has he deserved the honors of posterity who, 
 holding enforced worship to be an abomination 
 in the sight of God, took his life in his hand 
 and went boldly forward until the j-oke of the 
 great t3'ranny exercised over the religious con- 
 science in his native country was broken. Snch 
 a hero deserves a monument in a land where the 
 government knows no distinction between reli- 
 gious denominations and leaves their worship to 
 their consciences. 
 
 " I will not say that he whose image is to-day 
 unveiled was prudent in all his proceedings ; 
 nobody is ; timidity itself is not always prudence. 
 But wherever he went and whatever he did he 
 was a power on earth. He wielded an immense 
 influence over men's minds; he controlled a vast 
 agency, he made himself the centre of a wide 
 diffusion of opinions; his footsteps are seen in 
 the track of history b}- those wlio do not alwa3-s 
 reflect by whose feet they are impressed. Such 
 was the celerity- of his movements and so sure 
 the attachment of his followers that he was the 
 terror of the crowned heads of Europe. Kings 
 trembled when the3- heard that he had suddenly 
 disappeared from London, and breathed more 
 freelj' when they learned that he was in his 
 grave. In proportion as he was dreaded he was 
 maligned. 
 
 " Image of the illustrious champion of civil 
 and religious liberty, cast in enduring bronze to 
 typify the imperishable renown of thy original ! 
 Remain for ages y'et to come where we place 
 thee, in this resort of millions; remain till the day 
 shall dawn — far distant though it may be — when 
 the rights and duties of human brotherhood shall 
 be acknowledged by all the races of mankind." 
 
ILLNESS, DEATH AND BURIAL. 
 
 Mr. Bryant partook of a ver3'^ light luncheon 
 on the day of the Mazzini celebration, and was 
 driven to the Central Park soon afterward in his 
 carriage. The day was warm, and the sun was 
 shining so brightly when he advanced to make 
 his address that a friend insisted upon holding an 
 umbrella over him; as he began his peroration, 
 however, he stepped forth and stood with his un- 
 covered head exposed to the full glare of the sun- 
 light, and when he ceased speaking he was 
 evidently much exhausted. Disclaiming all 
 fatigue, he accepted an invitation to visit the 
 house of General James G. Wilson in Seventy- 
 fourth street to rest and partake of a little re- 
 freshment. This was at about lialf-past three 
 o'clock in the afternoon. With one hand on the 
 arm of his host, and tlie other holding the hand 
 of General Wilson's little daughter, he crossed 
 the green to the Halleck statue, in front of which 
 he paused to make a few comments. The Morse 
 statue, and the Lenox Library building also at- 
 tracted his attention in their order, and called 
 forth some further remark. Between the Maz- 
 zini bust and the Seventy-second street gate a 
 number of birds were observed flying about or 
 hopping across the green. Mr. Bryant asked 
 the child by his side whether she knew what 
 the birds were, and, on receiving correct answers, 
 seemed much pleased. He then asked her if she 
 had ever heard some little verses about the Bob-o'- 
 Link. She replied that she had, and she also knew 
 the poet who wrote them. This caused him mucli 
 amusement, and he said: "I think I shall have 
 to write them out for you some time.'' 
 
 Going up the steps of the house, Mr. Bryant 
 still held General Wilson's arm. The outer door, 
 which is a double one, stood half open. Stepping 
 into the vestibule with his daughter to open the 
 
 inner door with his latch-key. General Wilson 
 left his guest leaning against the outer door-post. 
 Scarcely u second had elapsed before a sound 
 attracted his attention, and, turning, he caught 
 sight of Mr. Bryant just as his head struck tlin 
 platform step. The old gentleman had fallen 
 directly backward, and the lower part of his 
 body lay inside the vestibule. Had he stepped 
 back at all in his fall, he would without doubt 
 have gone to the bottom of the steps ; had he 
 veered to either side, he must have struck the 
 edge of the closed door or the stone jam. In 
 either ease he would probably have been killed 
 at once, or received a wound which he could sur- 
 vive at most but a few hours, A gentleman who 
 was passing in the street saw the accident and 
 hastened to offer his services ; at the same time 
 the servants of the house appeared, and Mr. Bry- 
 ant was carried into the parlor and laid on a 
 sofa in a state of insensibility. Mrs. Wilson had 
 some ice water brought, with which she bathed 
 his head. The sufferer murmured " Don't !'' but 
 exhibited no signs of consciousness. He at last 
 recorei-ed enough to sit up, and a glass of iced 
 sherry was offered him, which he drank. This 
 seemed to revive him a good deal, and he put his 
 hand to his head, moaning, " Mj' head ! my 
 head ! I don't feel well." General Wilson sug- 
 gested his going up stairs to bed, and asked 
 where his medical adviser could be found, but 
 all offers of assistance were declined. The one 
 thought that seemed to possess Mr. Bryant's 
 mind was that of getting home; accordingly, it 
 was proposed to call a carriage, but he expressed 
 a preference for the horse cars. 
 
 He was taken down town by General Wilson 
 in a Madison avenue car as far as Seventeenth 
 street, where a passing cab was hailed, and he 
 
56 
 
 was driven direcll}- to liis liouse. No, 24 West 
 Sixteenth street. During all this time he would 
 use connected sentences in conversation, but 
 lapses would occur in his train of thought, and 
 his attention would wander for a minute or two. 
 
 Arrived at his home, he loolicd curiously at 
 the house and up and down the street. "Whose 
 house is tliis ?" " What street is this ?" he would 
 inquire, apparently unwilling to enter a place so 
 unfamiliar to him without an explanation. Gen- 
 eral Wilson did not answer these questions 
 directly, but evaded them by suggesting that 
 they should go in together and rest a few 
 moments, and, having helped Mr. Bryant up the 
 steps, rang the bell. The servant did not come 
 at once ; and with a movement which had 
 evidently become mechanical through long habit, 
 the old gentleman put his hand into his pocket, 
 drew thence a latch-kej''. and opened the door 
 himself The two passed through the parlor 
 into the dining-room, where the maid-servant 
 who had started to answer the bell advanced 
 toward them. Mr. Bryant looked dreamily at 
 her n, moment, then turned to General Wilson, 
 and inquired: " Would you like to see Miss Fair- 
 child ?" Receiving an affirmative answer, he 
 directed the servant to call his niece. 
 
 When Miss Fairchild entered the parlor. Gen- 
 eral Wilson was there to meet her, and in a few 
 words explained what had occurred. She hast- 
 ened to the dining-room and spoke to Mr. Bryant, 
 who was seated in a large easy chair. He re- 
 cognized her at once, and she proposed sending 
 for Dr. Gray, his physician. He expressed a 
 doubt whether the doctor, who goes out but very 
 little, would come if sent for, but finally con- 
 sented. After his removal upstairs to his library 
 he was left for a moment in the care of a servant 
 a fact which he appreciated well enough to give 
 some orders to her. He then fell into a semi- 
 conscious state. Dr. Gray, on his arrival, called 
 Dr. Carnochan, the surgeon, into consultation ; 
 a careful examination, however, having dis- 
 covered no cut or contusion on the patient's 
 head, and the disorder having been decided to 
 be concussion of the brain, Dr. Paine was called 
 in, upon whom, jointly with Dr. Gray, thereafter 
 devolved the entire conduct of the case. From 
 Dr. Paine, on the day of Mr. Bryant's death — 
 
 two weeks afterward — the follomng statement 
 was obtained ; 
 
 " A few hours after the accident, and while 
 Mr. Bryant was in his own house, he became un- 
 conscious. From this comatose state he rallied 
 occasionally, at times reviving sufliciently to en- 
 gage in some very slight conversation, although 
 it is uncertain how far he was able to recognize 
 liis friends. He made no remarks upon any 
 subject except a few in reference to his pre- 
 ferences in the matters of diet and air. Once in 
 a while he would ask for more air. Until Sun- 
 day he was able to leave his bed, and some hope 
 was entertained tliat he might recover his phy- 
 sical health ; but on that day, without any ap- 
 parent cause, a paralysis of his right side in- 
 tervened, and he began rapidly to fail. His 
 coma became more decided ; he spoke with diffi- 
 culty, but gave no signs of recognition or intel- 
 ligence ; he grew weaker and weaher. His 
 vitality continued to diminish until 5.35 o'clock 
 this morning, when, without struggle or Cisturb- 
 ance of any sort, and surrounded by his family, 
 he died while asleep." 
 
 The funeral of Mr. Bryant took place on Fri- 
 day morning, June 14th, in the Rev. Dr. Bellows's 
 church, at the corner of Fourth avenue and 
 Twentieth street. There were no services at the 
 house. 
 
 The coffin, which was covered with black 
 cloth and mounted with silver, bore a plate with 
 the inscription, " William Cullen Bryant. Born 
 November 3, 1794. Died June 12, ISVS." Rest- 
 ing on the coffin was a spray of palm leaves, 
 fastened together by a knot of white ribbon ; two 
 large baskets of flowers were upon the commu- 
 nion table, and on the baptismal font was a 
 beautiful floral pillar. 
 
 After the doors were opened, at ten o'clock, the 
 throng in waiting moved slowly into the church, 
 which was filled to its utmost capacity, the gal- 
 leries being as crowded as the main floor. When 
 all the pews were occupied the aisles were filled 
 with persons standing, except the upper part of 
 the centre aisle, which was kept clear. Many 
 who came to the church were obliged to turn 
 away, finding that they could not gain admis- 
 
57 
 
 Large delegations -were present from the Cen- 
 tury Club, the Union League Club, the New 
 York Historical Society, the Public Schools Aid 
 Society, the New York Press Club, the Associated 
 Press, and other organizations. 
 
 Four different Italian Societies were represent- 
 ed, the Mazzini Monument Committee, the Italian 
 Mutual Benevolent Society, the Italian Brotherly 
 Society and the Circolo Italiano, which sent a 
 committee to the church, of which C. F. Secchi 
 de Casali, editor of jOEco <t Italia, was chairman. 
 
 Among the well-known persons present were 
 Messrs. John Bigelow, Jackson S. Schultz, Joseph 
 H. Choate, John Jay, E. C. Cowdm, Cornelius R. 
 Agnew, Peter Cooper, Luther R. Marsh, David 
 Dows, Joseph Seligman, Charles Lanier, Josiah 
 M. Fiske, A P. Man, Charles W. Griswold, F. 
 D. Tappen, Lucius Tuckerman, J. Langdon 
 "Ward, W. H. Lee, F. A. Stout, M. M. Beckwith, 
 C. A. Peabody, Thomas HUlhouse, J. B. Kiddoo, 
 0. P. C. Billings. \\. H. Fogg, Charles E. Beebe, 
 James Otis, John H. Hall, Daniel Lord, Jr., 
 George C. Magoun, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Osgood, 
 Chief Justice Daly, Judge Peabody, Judge How- 
 land, the Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby, John H. 
 Gourlie, John A. Graham, Henry D. Sedgwick, 
 Judge 'William E. Curtis, Professor Younjans, 
 Judge Speir, David Dudley Field, Salem H. 
 Wales, Smith E. Lane, Allan Evarts, Stephen P. 
 Nash, C. C. Beaman, Edmund C. Stedman, Walt 
 Whitman, Eastman Johnson, John Burroughs, 
 Daniel Huntington, Professor Botta, S. R. Gif- 
 ford, R. W. Hubbard, Professor Drisler, Pro- 
 fessor Van Amringe, Professor Stengel, Fire 
 Commissioners King and Gorman, James W. 
 Pinchot, the Rev. Dr. Booth, Charles O'Conor, 
 Henry Sedley, Henry A. Oakley, Governor 
 Tilden mth Mrs. Pelton, Colonel Jelton, 
 Mrs. Cornelius W. Lawrence, Charles Butler, 
 Richard Henry Stoddard, Dr. T. M. Coan, Row- 
 land Johnson, Le'n'is G. Morris, of Fordham, 
 Ex-Governor Morgan, Edward Cooper, R. H. 
 McCurdy, D. D. T. Marshall, Dr. L. Hallock, 
 Colonel T. B. Thorpe, Sidney Howard Gay. 
 Charlton T. Lewis, John Savage, Erastus Brooks, 
 Cyrus W. Field, EUwood E. Thorne, Wilson G. 
 Hunt, R. W. Gilder, Whitelaw Reid, the Rev. 
 Dr. Prime, the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the 
 Rev. Dr. Potter, the Rev. Dr. Adams, Thurlovr 
 
 AVeed, Cephas G. Thompson, Molyneux Bell, 
 Addison Brown, W. F. Williams, Dr. Alexander 
 AVilder, William Ross Wallace, J. JI. McLean, 
 the Rev. Dr. Dowley, the Rev. Dr. Storrs, the 
 Rev. Dr. Ormiston, the Rev. Dr. Rogers, Bishop 
 Potter, Richard H. Dana, Jr., Professor Levering 
 of Harvard College, Drs. Gra}' and Paine. Henry 
 Bergh, George W. Rose, and many others. 
 
 Among the members of Mr. Bi'3'ant's familj' 
 present were Messrs. John H. Bryant and Arthur 
 Bryant, his brothers; Bryant Godwin, Harold 
 Godwin, Miss Minna Godwin, Miss Nora Godwin 
 and Miss Fanny Godwin, his grandchildren; Miss 
 Fairchild, his niece; and Miss Brj'ant, his 
 daughter. Mrs. Parke Godwin, Mr. Bryant's 
 elder daughter, who is travelling with her hus- 
 band in Europe, received the sad intelligence too 
 late to admit of her returning to attend the 
 funeral. 
 
 Of the persons who have been associated with 
 Mr. Bryant in connection -n-ith the Evexing Post 
 there were present, among others, Mr. Isaac 
 Henderson, Mr. Isaac Henderson, Jr., Mr. AVilliam 
 G. Eoggs, Mr. N. F. Whiting, Mr. Albert E. 
 King and Mr. Watson R. Sperry. 
 
 The services began with a prelude on the 
 organ, the selection being the andante from Bee- 
 thoven's seventh symphony. This was followed 
 by the singing of Rooke's " Rest, spirit, rest," 
 the singers being a quartette composed of Miss 
 Barton, soprano ; Miss Bell, alto ; Mr. Jamiesou, 
 tenor, and Mr. Clapp, bass. Mr. Melvin Brown 
 was the organist. 
 
 The Rev, Dr. Bellows read the King's chapel 
 service for the dead, and then offered prayer. 
 After the hymn " Come unto Him," by Handel, 
 he delivered the address which is printed else- 
 where in full. 
 
 At the close of the address the choir sang to 
 the tune of Beethoven's " Germany " the follow- 
 ing hymn, of which Mr. Bryant was the author : 
 
 " Deem not that tbey are blest alone 
 Whose days a peaceful tenor keep ; 
 The God who loves our race has shown 
 A blessing for the eyes that weep. 
 
 •■ The light of smiles shall fill again 
 The lids that overflow with tears. 
 And weary hours of woe and pain 
 Are earnests of serener years. 
 
58 
 
 " oil, there are daye of hope and rest 
 For every dark and troubled night 1 
 
 And grief may bide an evening giieet ; 
 But joy shall come with early light. 
 
 ** And thou who o'er thy friend's low bier 
 Dost shed the bitter drops like rain, 
 Hope that a brighter, happier sphere 
 Will give him to tliy arms again." 
 
 The Lord's Praj-er having been recited in 
 unison by tlie pastor and tlie congregation. Dr. 
 Bellows announced tliat the body would be con- 
 veyed to Roslyn, Long Island, for burial. He 
 then pronounced tlie benediction. 
 
 Beetlioven's funeral march was played on 
 the organ and the vast congregation dispersed, 
 passing slowly by the cofSn, which remained un- 
 opened. 
 
 The special train which conve3'ed the body of 
 Jlr. Bryant to Roslyn, Long Inland, in the after- 
 noon, left Huntei'"3 Point at half-past 1 o'clock. 
 The accoinpan3-ing party occupied two passenger 
 cars. Of Mr. Bryant's faniih- there were present, 
 Miss Brj'ant, Arthur Bryant, John H. Bryant, 
 Bryant Godwin, Harold Godwin, Miss Minna 
 Godwin, Miss Nora Godwin, iliss Faun}- God- 
 Avin, Captain Cullen Bryant and Miss Fairchild. 
 Among the accompanying friends were Chief- 
 Justice Daly, Ex-Governor Tilden, Cjtus W. 
 Field, Judge Howland, the Rev. Dr. Osgood, 
 Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. John J. Monell, Miss Sands, 
 Charles Butler, Charles F. McLean, J. H. Piatt, 
 John A. Graham, John Bigelow, Mrs. Bigelow, 
 S. L. M. Barlow and Mrs. Barlow, James 'Wil- 
 liams, the Rev. Horatio N. Powers, Isaac Hen- 
 derson, Isaac Henderson, Jr., F. K. Goddard, 
 General Wilson, Watson R. Sperry and Henry 
 Dithmar, who for nearly a quarter of a century 
 has been foreman of the Evexing Post composing 
 room. 
 
 When the train arrived at Roslj'n the coffin 
 was jilaced in a hearse and borne to the ceme- 
 tery, followed by the mourners. A grave had 
 been dug in the Brj'ant burial plot, close to the 
 granite monument which marks the resting-place 
 of Mr. Brj'ant's wife. While the attendants were 
 placing the coffin beside the open grave the 
 friends gathered near its head, under the shadow 
 of the granite monument and a cluster of young 
 trees. For » few moments there was a pause. 
 
 Presently Dr. Bellows, standing at tlie head of 
 the grave, spoke. 
 
 " My dear friends," he said. " let us draw les- 
 sons from Mr. Bryanl's life ; let us uncover our 
 hearts, not our heads, to the sunshine. We have 
 left the city behind us now, where we have done 
 all that was possible to do to sho\y our reverence 
 and respect ; but here let us pause and think tliat 
 liis dust might rejoice to find itself in tlie coun- 
 try, amid trees, birds, and flowers. While we 
 breathe the pure air, niay we not have a fore- 
 taste of the happiness he enjoys in the immortal 
 fields ? But 1 will not speak to jou out of my 
 own mouth. I have something better — Bryant's 
 own words — his own preparations for this hour, 
 nay, this very moment. Seldom has it happened 
 to any man to rehearse beforeliand the thoughts 
 and words appropriate to be uttered at his own 
 grave. I shall read to you these extracts pre- 
 pared b}- the loving hands of one who shared 
 Bryant's cradle — his brother." 
 
 The extracts were from " Thanatopsis," begin- 
 ning with the verse — 
 
 ** Solive that when thy summons comes to join — " 
 
 and from the poems euiitled, "To a Water- 
 fowl,'' "AHj-mn to Death," "The Battlefield," 
 "Waiting b}' the Gate," stanzas prefaced to 
 "Thanatopsis" when first published, "The Jour- 
 ney of Life,'' a poem addressed to Mrs. Bryant 
 in her last illness, "The Life that Is," " Octo- 
 ber, 1866," "November 3, 1861," and "The Two 
 Travellers." 
 
 The close of the address was a charge to the 
 villagers present to " cherish tlie precious herit- 
 age of dust," and the assurance that in the furure 
 the best fame of Roslyn would be that it is Brj-- 
 ant's resting place. The Scriptural quotations of 
 the Episcopal burial services were read ; a brief 
 priiyer was made, and the coffin was lowered 
 into its place. Then a number of little children, 
 belonging to the Sunday-school of the village, 
 stepped forward, and, walking around the grave, 
 threw flowers into it until the box enclosing the 
 coffin was covered. Several branches of the 
 century plant, sent by the Century Club, were 
 laid with the flowers. This closed the burial 
 services, and the mourners slowly left the cem- 
 etery. 
 
FUNERAL ADDRESS. 
 
 Deliveked by the Rev. HENRY W. BELLOWS, D.D., at Ail Souls' Cbukch, is New York 
 
 CiTT, ON THE 14th OF JuXE, 1878. 
 
 The whole conntry is bending with us, their 
 favored representatives, over the bier that holds 
 the dust of Bryant ! Private as the simple service 
 is that consigns the ashes of our illustrious poet 
 and journalist to the grave, there is public mourn- 
 ing in all hearts and homes, making these funeral 
 rites solemn and universal by the sympathy that 
 from every quarter flows toward them, and 
 swells the current of grateful and reverent emo- 
 tion. Much as the modest, unworldly spirit of 
 the man we mourn shrunk from the parade of 
 public rites, leaving to his heirs the duty of a 
 rigid simplicity in his funeral, neither his wishes 
 nor theirs could render his death and burial less 
 than an event of general significance and national 
 concern. It is not for his glory that we honor 
 and commemorate him. Public fame, for more 
 than half a century, has made it needless, or im- 
 possible, to add one laurel to his crown. So long 
 ago he took the place he has since kept in public 
 admiration, respect, and reverence, that no living 
 tongue could now dislodge or add to the security 
 and mild splendor of his reputation. For three 
 generations he has been a fixed star in our firma- 
 ment, and no eulogy could be so complete as that 
 which by accumulation of meaning dwells in the 
 simple mention of his name. 
 
 Few lives have been as fortunate and complete 
 as his. Born in 1794, when this young nation 
 was in its teens, he has been contemporary with 
 nearly the whole first century of its life. If no 
 country ever experienced in the same period such 
 a miracle of growth, if none ever profited so 
 
 much by discoveries and inventions — never be- 
 fore so wonderful as those made in the half cen- 
 tury which gave us steam-navigation, the rail- 
 road, and the telegraph — he saw the birth, he 
 antedates the existence of every one of the 
 characteristic triumphs of modern civilization, 
 and yet he has not died until they became wholly 
 familiar and nearly universal iq their fruitful in- 
 fluence! Born and bred in New England, and 
 on the summits of the Green Mountains, he in- 
 herited the severe and simple tastes and habits of 
 that rugged region, and having sprung from a 
 vigorous and intellectual parentage, and in con- 
 tact with a few persons with whom nature and 
 books took the place of social pleasures and the 
 excitements of town and cities, his native genius 
 made him, from a tender age, the thoughtful and 
 intimate companion of woods and streams, and 
 constituted him nature's own darling child. It 
 was a friendship so unfeigned, so deep, so much 
 in accordance with his temperament and mental 
 constitution, that it grew into a determining 
 passion, and shaped his whole life, while in the 
 poetry to which it gave birth it laid the founda 
 tions and erected the structure of his poetic fame. 
 What Wordsworth did for English poetry, in 
 bringing back the taste for nature, as the counter- 
 part of humanity — a world to be interpreted not 
 by the outward eyes, but b}' the soul — Bryant 
 did for America. One who knew them both, as 
 I did, could not fail to observe the strong resem- 
 blance in character and feeling, with the marked 
 difference between them on which I -n-ill not dwell. 
 
60 
 
 Both were reserved, unsiuiling, austere, or irre- 
 sponsive men, in aspect ; not at home in cities or in 
 crowds, not easy of access, or dependent on com- 
 panionship — never full}' themselves except wlien 
 alone with nature. Thej' coveted solitude, for it 
 gave them uninterrupted intercourse with that 
 beautiful, companionable, tender, unintrusive 
 world, which is to ordinary souls dull, common, 
 familiar, but to them was ever new, ever mysteri- 
 ous, ever delightful and instructive. 
 
 Few know how small a part intercourse with 
 nature for itself alone — not for what it teaches, 
 but for what it is, a revelation of Divine beauty 
 and wisdom and goodness — had even a half cen- 
 tury ago for the common mind. Wordsworth in 
 England, Brj'ant in America, awoke this sleeping 
 capacity, and by their tender and awed sense of 
 the spiritual meaning conveyed in nature's con- 
 summate beauties and harmonies, gave almost 
 a new sense to our generation. Before their da}-, 
 we had praises of the seasons and passages of 
 poetry in which cataracts, sunsets, rainbows and 
 garden flowers were faithfully described ; but 
 nature as a whole — as a presence, the very gar- 
 ment of God— was almost unheeded and un- 
 known. When we consider what Bryant's 
 poems — read in the public schools in happy 
 selection — have done to form the taste and feed 
 the sentiment of two generations, we shall begin 
 to estimate the value of his influence. And 
 when we recall in all his writings not a 
 thought or feeling that is not pure, uplifting and 
 reverent, we can partly measure the gratitude 
 we owe to a benefactor whose genius has conse- 
 crated the woods and fields and brooks and way- 
 side flowers, in a way intelligible to plainer 
 minds, and yet above the criticism of the most 
 fastidious and cultivated. 
 
 But if fortunate in passing his early life in the 
 country, and forming his taste and his style in 
 communion with nature, a few good books and a 
 few earnest and sincere people, he was equally for- 
 tunate in being driven by a love of independence 
 into the study of the law and a ten years' prac- 
 tice in a considerable town in Western Massa- 
 chusetts, and then drawn to this city, where he 
 drifted into the only form of public life wholly 
 suited to his capacities — the editorial profession. 
 It was no accident that made Bryant a poli- 
 
 tician and an editor. Sympathy with individiial 
 men and women was not his strong point — but 
 sympathy with our common humanity was in 
 him a religious pa.ssion. IIu had a con.stitutional 
 love of freedom, and an intense sentiment of 
 justice, and the}' constituted together his politi- 
 cal creed and policy. He believed in freedom, 
 and this made him a friend of the oppressed, an 
 enemy of slavery, a foe to special and class legis- 
 lation, an advocate of free trade — a natural demo- 
 crat, though born and reared in a federal com- 
 munity that looked with suspicion upon exten- 
 sions of the suffrage and upon the growth of 
 local and Stale rights. But his love of freedom 
 was too genuine to allow him to condone the 
 faults even of liis own party, when freedom's 
 friends were found on tlie other side. He could 
 bear, he did bear the odium of his unpopular 
 conviction, when what was called the best society 
 in New York was of another opinion and be- 
 longed to another party ; and he could bear with 
 equal fortitude tlie ignominy of lacking party 
 fidelity, when his patriotic spirit felt that his 
 old political friends were less faithful than they 
 should be to freedom and union. The editorial 
 profession enabled his shy and somewhat unso- 
 cial nature to work at arm's length for the good 
 of humanity. and the country; and I can con- 
 ceive of no other calling in life that would have 
 economized his temperament and faculties so 
 fully in the public service. His literary skill, 
 his industry, his humane philosophy, his senti- 
 ments of justice, his patriotism, his love of free- 
 dom here found full scope without straining and 
 tasking his personal sympathies, which lacked the 
 readiness, the tact and the geniality that in some 
 men make direct contact with their fellow crea- 
 tures an increase of power and of influence. 
 What an editor he made, you all know. None 
 could long doubt the honesty, the conscientious- 
 ness, the elevation and purity of his convictions 
 or his utterances. Who believes he ever swerved 
 a line, for the sake of popularity or pelf, from 
 what he felt to be right and true? That he 
 escaped all prostitution of his pen or his con- 
 science, in his exposed and tempted calling, we all 
 admiringly confess. And what moderation, can- 
 dor and courage he carried into his editorial 
 work. Purity of thought, elegance and aim- 
 
61 
 
 plicity of style, exquisite taste and liigli morality 
 characterized all he wrote. He rebuked the 
 headlong spirit of party, sensational extrava- 
 gances of expression, even the use of new-fangled 
 plirases and un-English words. He could see 
 and acknowledge tlie merits of those from whom 
 he widely differed, while unbecoming personali- 
 ties found no harbor in his columns. Young 
 men and women never found anything to corrupt 
 their taste or their morals in his paper, and fam- 
 ilies could safely lay the Evening Post upon the 
 table where their children and their guests might 
 take it up. Uncompromising in what his con- 
 victions commanded, and never evading the 
 frankest expression of his real opinion, however 
 unpopular, he was felt to be above mere parti- 
 sanship, and so had a decided influence with 
 men of all political preferences. His prose was 
 in its way as good as his poetry, and has aided 
 greatly to correct the taste for swollen, gaudy 
 and pretentious writing in the public press. He 
 was not alone in this respect, for none can 
 fail to recall the services in this direction 
 of Charles King and Horace Greeley, not to 
 name less conspicuous instances. But Bryant's 
 poetic fame gave peculiar authority to his edito- 
 rial example, and made his style specially help- 
 ful and instructive. That he should have suc- 
 ceeded in keeping the poetic temperament and 
 the tastes and pursuits of a poet fully alive under 
 the active and incessant pressure of his journal- 
 istic labors — making his bread and his imme- 
 diate influence as a citizen and a leader of public 
 sentiment by editorial work, while he "built 
 the lofty rhyme" for the gratification of his 
 genius and for the sake of beauty and art, with- 
 one one glance at immediate suffrages or rewards 
 — if not a solitarj', is at least a perfect, example of 
 the union in one man of the power to work with 
 nearly equal success in two planes, where what 
 he did in one did not contradict or conflict with 
 what he did in the other, while they were not 
 mingled or confounded. Nobody detects the 
 editor, the politician, the man of business. In 
 Bryant's poetry, and few feel the poet in his 
 editorial writings ; but the man of conscience, 
 of humanity, of justice and truth, of purity and 
 honor, appears equally in both. This is somewhat 
 the more remarkable, because affluence, versatil- 
 
 ity and humor are not characteristic of his genius- 
 It is staid, earnest, profoundly truthful and pure, 
 lofty and perfectly genuine — but not mercurial, 
 vivacious, protean and brilliant. Like the Jordan 
 that leaps into being full, strong, crystal-pure, 
 but swells little in its deep bed, all its course to 
 the sea — admitting few tributaries and putting 
 out no branches, Bryant's genius sprang com- 
 plete into public notice when he was still in his 
 teens ; it retained its character for sixty years 
 almost unchanged, and its latest products are 
 marked with the essential qualities that gave him 
 his first success. Never, perhaps, was there an 
 instance of such precocity in point of wisdom and 
 maturity as that which marked " Thanatopsis," 
 written at eighteen, or of such persistency in 
 judgment, force and melody as that exhibited in 
 his last public ode, written at 83, on occasion of 
 Washington's last birth-day. Between these two 
 bounds lies one even path, high, finished, fault- 
 less, in which comes a succession of poems, al- 
 ways meditative, always steeped in the love and 
 knowledge of nature, always pure and melodious, 
 always stamped with his sign-manual of flawless 
 taste and gem-like purity — but never much aside 
 from the line and direction that marked the first 
 outburst and the last flow of his genius. 
 
 Happy the man that knows his own powers — 
 their limits, and their aptitudes — and who con- 
 fines himself rigidly -within the banks of his own 
 peculiar inspiration. Bryant was too genuine, 
 too real a lover of nature, too legitimate a child 
 of the muse, ever to strain his own gift. He 
 never made verse, but allowed his verse to flow, 
 inspired by keen observation and hearty enjoy- 
 ment of nature, watching only that it flowed 
 smoothly and without turbulence or turbidness, 
 which his consummate art enabled him perfectly 
 to accomplish. Never, perhaps, was a natural 
 gift more successfully trained and cultured, 
 without losing its original raciness and simplicity. 
 Nothing less than the widest and deepest study 
 of poetry, in all literatures young and old, in all 
 languages and schools, could have enabled him 
 to keep his verse in such perfect finish for 
 sixty successive years. He knew all the wiles of 
 the poet, some of which he disdained to practise — 
 but of no man in his time was it less safe to 
 assume ignorance or neglect of anything that 
 
62 
 
 belonged to the poet's art. His knowledge of 
 poetry was prodigious, his memory of it precise 
 and inexhaustible. He had considered all the 
 masters, and knew their quality and character- 
 istics. But marked as his own style is, it is 
 marked only with its native hues. There is no 
 trick in his adroitness — no artifice in his art; 
 nothing that tires, except it be the uniformity of 
 its excellence. Considering how long his genius 
 has been known and acknowledged, and how 
 thoroughly he represents the old school of Dry- 
 den in his purity and fastidiousness of language, 
 it is, perhaps, not to be wondered at that his 
 popularity as a citizen and a man has even 
 somewhat eclipsed his immediate popularity as a 
 poet. I think him fortunate in not having the 
 popularity of novelty, of fashion, of sing-song 
 verse, of morbid sentiment, of mere ingenious 
 thinking, or some temporary adaptation to pass- 
 ing moods of popular feeling, whether in univer- 
 sities or in social circles. He curiously escaped, 
 if indeed his truthful genuineness of nature did 
 not give him an original defence against it, from 
 the introversive, self-considering, and individual- 
 istic temper which has characterized much of the 
 poetry, of the highest academic culture, in our 
 time. Either he was born too early, or he emi- 
 grated from New England too early, to fall under 
 the influence of this morbid eubjectiveness ; or 
 his active and practical pursuits kept him In the 
 current of real life, and near to the universal 
 feeling of men. At any rate — free, rational, as his 
 genius ever was — there is not a suspicion of the 
 sceptical or denying element in his works. He 
 is not sick nor morbid, nor melancholy, nor dis- 
 couraged. 
 
 Sentiment enough he has, but no sentimentality; 
 awe of the Infinite, but no agnosticism ; a re- 
 cognition of all human sorrows and sins, but no 
 querulousness, much less any despair. He loved 
 and honored human nature; he feared and rev- 
 erenced his Maker ; he accepted Christianity in 
 its historic character ; he believed in American 
 institutions ; he believed in the church and its 
 permanency, in its ordinances and its ministry ; 
 and he was no backward-looking praiser of the 
 times that had been, and a mere accuser and de- 
 famer of the times that are. This made his 
 poetry, as it made his prose and his whole in- 
 
 fluence, wholesome, hopeful, nutritious; young, 
 without being inexperienced, ripe, without tend- 
 ing to decay. The very absence of those false 
 colors which give immediate attractiveness to 
 the clothing of some contemporary poetry, gives 
 his undyed and natural robes a fadeless charm, 
 which future generations will not forget to 
 honor. Every one must notice that great im- 
 mediate popularity is not a good augury for en- 
 during fame ; and further, that poetry, like all 
 the products of the fine arts, must have not only 
 positive quality, power and harmony, but must 
 add to these freedom from defects. It is strange 
 what an embalming power lies in purity of style, 
 to preserve thoughts that would perish, even 
 though greater and more original, if wrapped 
 in a less perfect vesture. What element of de- 
 cay is there in Bryant's verse ? How universal 
 his themes; how intelligible and level to the 
 common heart; how little ingenious, vague or 
 technical; how free from what is provincial, 
 temporary, capricious; how unflawed with 
 doubtful figures or strained comparisons or new 
 and strange words ; how unmarred by a forced 
 order or weary mannerisms ! He is a rigid Puritan, 
 alike in his morals and his vocabulary ; there is 
 scarcely a false foot, a doubtful ryhme, a luckless 
 epithet, a dubious sentiment anywhere to be 
 found in his works. ' And perhaps nature with- 
 held from him what is called an ear for music 
 only to emphasize his ear for rhythm, and save 
 him from the danger of a clogging sweetness and 
 a fatiguing sing-song. 
 
 It is the glory of this man that his character 
 outshone even his great talent and his large fame. 
 Distinguished equally for his native gifts and his 
 consummate culture, his poetic inspiration and 
 his exquisite art, he is honored and loved to-day 
 even more for his stainless purity of life, his 
 unswerving rectitude of will, his devotion to the 
 higher interests of his race, his unfeigned pa- 
 triotism, and his broad humanity. It is remark- 
 able that with none of the arts of popularity 
 a man so little dependent on others' apprecia- 
 tion, so self-subsistent and so retiring, who never 
 sought or accepted ofl[ice, who had little taste 
 for co-operation, and no bustling zeal in ordinary 
 philanthropy, should have ■ drawn to himself the 
 confidence, the honor and reverence of a great 
 
metropolis, and become, perhaps it is not too 
 much to say, our first citizen. It was in spite 
 of a constitutional reserve, a natural distaste for 
 crowds and public occasions, and a somewhat 
 chilled bearing towards his kind, that he achieved 
 by the force of his great merit and solid worth this 
 triumph over the heart of his generation. The 
 purity of the snow that enveloped him was more 
 observed than its coldness, and his fellow-citizens 
 believed that a fire of zeal for truth, justice and 
 human rights burned steadily at the heart of 
 this lofty personality, though it never flamed or 
 smoked. And they were right ! Beyond all 
 thirst for fame or poetic honor, lay in Bryant 
 the ambition of virtue. Reputation he did not 
 despise, but virtue he revered and sought with 
 all his heart. He had an Intense self-rever- 
 ence, that made his own good opinion of his 
 own motives and actions absolutely essen- 
 tiaL And though little tempted by covets 
 ousness, envy, worldliness, or love of power, 
 he had his own conscious difficulties 
 to contend with, a temper not without turbu- 
 lence, a susceptibility to injuries, a contempt for 
 the moral weaknesses of others. But he labored 
 incessantly at self-knowledge and self-control, 
 and attained equanimity and gentleness to a 
 marked degree. Let none suppose that the per- 
 sistent force of his will, his incessant industry, 
 his perfect consistency and coherency of life and 
 character, were not backed by strong passions. 
 With a less consecrated purpose, a less reverent 
 love of truth and goodness, he might easily have 
 become acrid, vindictive or selfishly ambitious. 
 But he kept his body under, and. a far more dif- 
 ficult task for him, his spirit in subjection. God 
 had given him a wonderful balance of faculties 
 in a marvellously harmonious frame. His spirit 
 wore a light and lithe vesture of clay, that never 
 burdened him. His senses were perfect at four- 
 score. His eyes needed no glasses ; his hearing 
 was exquisitely fine. His alertness was the won- 
 der of his contemporaries. He outwalked men 
 of middle age. His tastes were so simple as to 
 be almost ascetic. Milk and cereals and fruits 
 were his chosen diet. He had no vices, and no 
 approach to them, and he avoided any and every 
 thing that could ever threaten him with the 
 tyranny of the senses or of habit. 
 
 Regular in all his habits, he retained his youth 
 almost to the last. His power of work never 
 abated, and the herculean translation of Homer 
 which was the amusement of the last lustre of 
 his long and busy life showed not only no sen- 
 ility or decline in artistic skill, but no decrease 
 of intellectual or physical endurance. 
 
 Perliaps the last ten years of his life have 
 made him nearer and dearer to his fellow-citizens 
 than any previous decade ; for he had become 
 at last not only resigned to public honors, but 
 had even acquired a late and tardy taste for 
 social and public gatherings. Who so often 
 called to preside in your i^ublic meetings or to 
 speak at your literary or social festivals ? who 
 has pronounced as many hearty welcomes to 
 honored strangers, unveiled as many statues, 
 graced as many occasions of public sympathy; 
 who so ready to appear at the call of your public 
 charities, or more affectionately welcomed and 
 honored on your platforms ? All this, coming 
 late in life, was a grateful, I might almost say a 
 fond surprise. He had wrapped himself in his 
 cloak to contend with the winter wind of his 
 earlier fortunes, and the harder it blew (and it 
 was very rough in his middle life) tlie closer he 
 drew it about him. But the sun of prosperity 
 and honor and confidence that warmed and 
 brightened the two closing decades of his life, 
 fairly melted away his proud reserve toward the 
 public, and he laid himself open to the warm and 
 fragrant breeze of universal favor. He was 
 careful, however, to say that he did not hold 
 himself at the public's high estimate. In a long 
 conversation I had with him at Roslyn, two 
 years ago, he showed such a surprising self- 
 knowledge and such a just appreciation of popu- 
 lar suffrages, that it was impossible to doubt his 
 genuine humility, or jealous determination not 
 10 be deceived by any contagious sentiment of 
 personal reverence or honor springing up in a 
 generation that was largely ignorant of his writ^ 
 ings. Yet he fully and greatly enjoyed these 
 tributes — and more and more, the longer he lived. 
 Of Mr. Bryant's life-long interest in the Fine 
 Arts ; his large acquaintance with our older ar- 
 tists and close friendship with some of them ; of 
 his place in the Century Club, of which he was 
 perhaps the chief founder, and of which he died 
 
G4 
 
 the honored President, I could speak with full 
 knowledge ; but artists and centurions hoth are 
 sure to speak better for themselves, in due time, 
 as the city and the nation surely will. 
 
 I must reserve the few moments still left me 
 to bear the testimony which no one has a better 
 right to offer, to Mr. Brj'ant's strictly religious 
 character. A devoted lover of religious liberty-, 
 he was an equal lover of religion itself — not in 
 any precise dogmatic form, but in its righteous- 
 ness, reverence and charity. What his theology 
 was, you may safely infer from his regular and 
 long attendance in this place of Christian wor- 
 ship. Still, he was not a dogmatist, but preferred 
 practical piety and working virtue to all modes 
 of faith. What was obvious in him for twenty 
 years past was an increasing re.spect and devo- 
 tion to religious institutions, and a more decided 
 Christian quality in his faith. I think he had 
 never been a communicant in any church until 
 he joined ours, fifteen years ago. From that 
 time, nobody so regular in his attendance on 
 public worship, in wet and dry. cold and heat, 
 morning and evening, until the very last month 
 of his life. The increasing sweetness and benefi- 
 cence of his character, meanwhile, must have 
 struck his familiar friends. His last years were 
 his devoutest and most humane years. He be- 
 came beneficent, as he grew able to be so. and 
 his hand was open to all just need, and to many 
 unreasonable claimants. 
 
 The fii'st half or even two-thirds of his life had 
 been a hard struggle with fortune. And he had 
 acquired saving habits, thanks chiefly to the pru- 
 dence of his honored and ever lamented vrife. 
 But the moment he became successful and ac- 
 quired tlie means of beneficence, he practised 
 it bountifully, indeed, perhaps often credulously. 
 For he was simple-hearted and unsuspecting, 
 easily misled by women's tears and entreaties, 
 and not always with the fortitude to say No — 
 when onl}' his own money was at stake. Indeed 
 he had few defensive weapons either against in- 
 trusion or supplication, and could with difficulty 
 withstand the approaches of those that fawned 
 upon him, or those that asked his countenance 
 for selfish purposes. Perhaps he understood 
 their weaknesses, but he had not the heart to 
 medicine them with brave refusal. 
 
 He endowed a public library in Cummington, 
 his birth-place, at a cost of many thousands. He 
 built and gave a public hall to the viMage of 
 Rosyln, L. I., the chosen and beloved summer 
 home of his declining years. Wlicn, at his re- 
 quest, I went to dedicate it to public use, and at 
 a proper moment asked " What sliall we call 
 this building ?" the audience shouted "Bryant 
 Hall !" No, said the modest benefactor, let it 
 be known and called simplj- " The Hall," and The 
 Hall it was baptized. 
 
 I shall have spoken in vain, if I have not left 
 upon your hearts the image of an upright, sin- 
 cere, humane and simple yet venerable man- 
 hood — a life full of outward honors and inward 
 worth. When I consider that I have been 
 speaking of one whose fame fills the world, I 
 feel how vain is public report compared with the 
 honor of God and the gratitude and love of hu- 
 manity I It is the private character of this un- 
 affected. Christian man that it most concerns us 
 to consider and to imitate. He was great as the 
 world counts greatness— he was greater as God 
 counts it. 
 
 He is gone ! and the city and the country is 
 immeasurably poorer, that his venerable and 
 exalted presence no more adorns and crowns 
 our assemblies. But Heaven is richer ! The 
 Church of Christ adds one unaffected, unsancti- 
 monious saint to its calendar. The patriarch of 
 American literature is dead. The faithful Chris- 
 tian lives ever more : — 
 
 " Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven 
 Hath swallowed up thy form ; yet on my very heart 
 Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given 
 And shall not soon depart." 
 
 — Bryant's lines " To a Waterfowl," 
 
 We are about to bear his remains to their 
 quiet and green resting-place, bj' the side of his 
 beloved wife — the good angel of his life— in 
 Roslyn, L. I. Let me read in conclusion the 
 warrant for this step in his own poem called 
 " June," which I am persuaded you will feel to 
 be the only fit conclusion of these memorial 
 words : — 
 
 I gazed upon the glorious sty, 
 
 And the green mountains round, 
 And thought that when I came to lie 
 
 At rest within the ground. 
 
65 
 
 'Twere pleasant that in flowery June, 
 When brooks send up a cheerful tmie. 
 
 And groves a cheerful sound, 
 The sexton's hand, my grave to make. 
 The rich, green mountain-turf should break. 
 
 A cell within the frozen mould, 
 
 A coffin borne through sleet, 
 And icy clods above it rolled, 
 
 While fierce the tempests beat — 
 Away I — I will not think of these ; 
 Blue be the sky and soft the breeze. 
 
 Earth green beneath the feet. 
 And be the damp mould gently pressed 
 Into my narrow place of rest. 
 
 There, through the long, long summer hours, 
 
 The golden hght should lie. 
 And thick young herbs and groups of flowers 
 
 Stand in their beauty by. 
 The oriole should build and tell 
 His love-tale close beside my cell ; 
 
 The idle butterfly 
 Should rest him there, and there be heard 
 The housewife bee and humming bird. 
 
 And what if cheerful shouts at noon 
 Come from the village sent. 
 
 Or song of maids beneath the moon 
 
 With fairy laughter blent ? 
 And what if, in the evening light, 
 Bethrothed lovers walk in sight 
 
 Of my low monument? 
 I would the lovely scene around 
 Might know no sadder sight nor sound. 
 
 I know that I no more should see 
 
 The season's glorious show. 
 Nor would its brightness shine for me, 
 
 Nor its wild music flow ; 
 But if, around my place of sleep, 
 The friende I love should come to weep, 
 
 They might not haste to go. 
 Soft airs, and song, and light and bloom 
 Should keep them hngering by my tomb. 
 
 These to their softened hearts should bear 
 The thought of what has been. 
 
 And speak of one who cannot share 
 The gladness of the scene; 
 
 Whose part, in aU the pomp that fills 
 
 The circuit of the summer hillfl. 
 Is that his grave is green; 
 
 And deeply would their hearts rejoice 
 
 To hear again liis living voice. 
 
REMINISCENCES 
 
 Bt an Editoiiial Associate. 
 
 I suppose that none of us who have had the 
 privilege of being Mr. Bryauf s associates and 
 helpers in his daily work, especially during these 
 placid last years of his life, will ever be able to 
 think of him at all without thinking of his goings 
 and comings among us, of the kindly words and 
 pleasant ways with which he lightened our la- 
 bors, the uniform equability of temper with 
 which he conducted business, the philosophical 
 calm with which he contemplated affairs of a dis- 
 turbing nature, and the modest simplicity of 
 bearing with which he prevented the reverence 
 that all of us felt for him from finding* expression 
 in our treatment of him. 
 
 I suppose that he must have known how pro- 
 foundly we respected and honored him, not as 
 the most gifted poet of our country only, or even 
 chiefly, but still more as a man of ideal character 
 worthy of a reverence which no other man could 
 have won from us. I say I suppose he must have 
 known that we honored him thus, but there was 
 never a sign of such consciousness in his bearing. 
 He was reserved always by nature, but his re- 
 serve was rather that of shy modesty than that 
 of conscious worth, and in his intercourse with 
 his associates in the office of the Evening Post 
 he was always singularly frank and easy. He 
 even avoided that appearance of superior au- 
 thority which is almost inseparable fi"om the 
 exercise of control over the working of a news- 
 paper staff. His few and infrequent commands 
 were requests always, and not only so, they were 
 requests framed in the language and uttered 
 in the tone of one who asks a favor, not of one 
 who merely wishes to disguise a command. 
 
 Notwithstanding his age and his chiefship in 
 the office, he never, to my knowledge, sent for 
 any member of his staff to come to him ; if he 
 had aught to say he went to the person to whom 
 he wished to say it. He would pass through 
 the editorial rooms with a cheery " good morn- 
 ing ;" he would sit down by one's desk and talk 
 if there was aught to talk about ; or, if asked a 
 question while passing, would stand while an- 
 swering it, and frequently would relate some 
 anecdote suggested by the question or offer some 
 apt quotation to illustrate the subject under dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 When Tupper wrote his plaj^ " Washington," 
 and all the newspaper wits were pricking the 
 author of " Proverbial Philosophy" with sharp 
 pens, an article was written in the office in which 
 it was urged that Tupper, having done no harm 
 in the world, having written wliat a large class 
 of readers wanted to read, and having sought to 
 the best of his ability to pay a tribute to Wash- 
 ington and to America, was entitled to mercy at 
 the hands of all Americana. There was a frank 
 declaration in the article of its writer's convic- 
 tion that Tapper's works were as worthless as 
 they were harmless, and the plea for him was 
 generally a plea for innocent feebleness. As it 
 was known that Mr. Bryant had met Tupper in 
 England, the managing editor thought it best to 
 submit the article in proof to Mr. Bryant before 
 using it as an editorial utterance. Mr. Bryant 
 read it, and came in laughing over some of its 
 playful points. 
 
 " I wish," he said, "that you had used this 
 without showing it to me ; then I could have 
 
6S 
 
 said truly that it was printed without my knowl- 
 edge. It ought to be printed ; but, now that I 
 know of it, I scarcely see how it can be, for Tup- 
 per is coming to New York next year, and I shall 
 have to entertain liim at my house." 
 
 " But that is a year hence," replied the man- 
 aging editor, " and Mr. Tupper vdU not know that 
 such an article appeared." 
 
 " Oh, yes he will," said Mr. Bryant, " you re- 
 member the line about ' some damned go6d- 
 natured friend,' who is sure to direct his atten- 
 tion to it." 
 
 His quotations in conversation were fi-om a 
 great variet3' of sources, but the most extensive 
 one I ever heard him make was from Cowley, of ■ 
 whose poetry Mr. Bryant made a special study 
 during the latter part of his life. I do not re- 
 member now what the occasion was or from 
 what poem he quoted, but I shall never forget 
 the effect it produced. He was standing by a 
 form around which the printers were gathered, 
 hastily getting it ready for the press. Some cas- 
 ual word was spoken which suggested the lines, 
 and Mr. Bryant, locking his hands before him, 
 repeated the verses with wonderful force and 
 tenderness, causing the printers, hurried as they 
 were, to pause and listen. As he finished he 
 turned to the woodwork around the elevator, and, 
 tapping it, said, " There is very little wood there 
 to make trouble in case of fire." There was a 
 look of almost boyish abashment in his face as he 
 recovered from the fine enthusiasm. 
 
 Mr. Bryant's tenderness of thefeelings of other 
 persons, and his earnest desire always to avoid 
 the giving of unnecessary pain, were very marked. 
 Soon after I began to do the duties of literarj' 
 editor, Mr. Bryant who was reading a revaew 
 of a little book of wretchedly halting verse, said 
 to me: 
 
 " I wish you would deal very gently with 
 poets, especially with the weaker oiles. " 
 
 Later I had a very bad case of poetic idiocy 
 to deal with, and as Mr. Bryant happened to 
 come into my room while I was debating the 
 matter in my mind, I said to him that I was em- 
 barrassed by his injunction to deal gently with 
 poets, and pointed out to him the utter impossi- 
 bility of finding anything to praise or even 
 liffhtly to condemn in the book before me. After 
 
 I had read some of its stanzas to him he 
 answered : " No, you can't praise it, of course ; 
 it won't do to lie about it, but" — turning the 
 volume over in his liand and inspecting it — 
 " you might say that the binding is securely put 
 on, and that — well, the binder has planed the 
 edges prettj- smooth. " 
 
 Tliere is a large class of hopeless versifiers who 
 have been in the habit of sending their poetic 
 wares to Mr. Bryant and asking his judgment 
 upon them, and, between his tender conscience, 
 which would not permit him to trifle with the 
 truth, and his keen reluctance to give pain, he 
 was sometimes sorely perplexed. These things 
 imposed upon him, too, an amount of labor for 
 others which was an unfair burden, and on one 
 occasion he came into my room with a parcel of 
 letters and papers in his hand and in a tone of 
 dejection asked me: " Do people send you their 
 manuscripts to read in this way ? " I replied 
 that a good many of them did, and showed him 
 the manuscript of a novel or an epic poem which 
 a Pennsylvanian youth had modestlj* requested 
 me to revise for the press. 
 
 " What do you write to them ? " he asked. 
 Then he sat down and told me how sorely he 
 suffered from the perplexity already mentioned, 
 and I ventured to suggest that a letter of even 
 seeming commendation from him to an ambitious 
 incapable might spoil a good blacksmith and 
 make a ridiculously poor poet; that perhaps n 
 good many of his correspondents sought his ap- 
 proval in this way as a bolster to their vanity ; 
 and that the greatest kindness, in very many 
 cases, that he could do to his correspondents 
 would be frankly to tell them that they could not 
 write poetry. He admitted the correctness of 
 this view, with something like a shudder, and the 
 matter ended by his acceptance of my suggestion 
 that he should refer the letters and poems of his 
 unknown correspondents to the staff for examin- 
 ation, and that we should report directly to the 
 writers. 
 
 They continued to task him in this way, how- 
 ever, to the end. On the morning of that sad 
 day on which he met with his mishap he came 
 into my room with a pair of poems sent to him 
 by a person whom he knew and asked me to read 
 
fi9 
 
 them. I did 30 and foand them to be extremely 
 poor stuff. 
 
 " I supposed so," he said ; " and now I suppose 
 I shall have to write to her on the subject. Peo- 
 ple expect too much of me — altogether too 
 much.'' 
 
 It was like a wail, and when the news of his fall 
 and of his illness came the words rang in my ears 
 with a terrible sadness. 
 
 The conversation that morning was the longest 
 I ever had with him, and it was one which would 
 have no little value to the public if I might here 
 report it in full. I had always taken pains to 
 profit by his casual comments upon literature 
 and literary subjects, for although his tenderness 
 always restrained him from writing criticisms, 
 our literature has had no sounder, no more acute, 
 no more wisely appreciative critic than he. On 
 that fatal morning something in our conversation 
 brought up the subjects of American literature 
 and American criticism, and he talked for nearly 
 an hour in review of the whole field, classifying 
 and arranging the different branches of the subject 
 as skilfully as he would have done it in an essay, 
 and expressing some unconventional opinions 
 which startled me by their vigorous originality, 
 and by the apparent care with which they had 
 been wrought out in his mind. His conversation 
 was a critical history of American literature in 
 miniature, and some of the opinions expressed 
 would shock that class of critics whose admira- 
 tion, of anything American is tempered by a 
 truly Nazarene conviction of the unworthiness of 
 Nazareth. 
 
 It is a curious fact that in recallinar these con- 
 versations, guided as they always were by the 
 circumstances of the moment, and spontaneous 
 as his utterances were, I cannot recall a single in- 
 stance in which Mr. Bryant said a harsh or even 
 a mildly condemnatory thing of any human being. 
 He was vigorous in his condemnation of un- 
 worthy things, unworthy acts and unworthy prin- 
 ciples of action ; but nothing that he ever said in 
 my presence indicated his dislike for any man, 
 although I have heard him talk of men whom he 
 must have detested, unless he was free from the 
 otherwise universal human tendency to detest 
 the man who does detestable acta. 
 
 No man probably ever contemplated death 
 with more philosophical placidity tlmn Mr. Brj'- 
 ant did. Having sung deatli's praises in his 
 " Hymn to Death," he proved the sincerity of 
 his verse in his life. His calmness, however, 
 was not the morbid calmness of one who has 
 worn out his love of life and his fear of death in 
 contemplating its coming. His interest in life 
 and the affairs of life was keen to the last ; he 
 never talked of death except when the subject 
 naturally arose, and then his words were always 
 those of tmfaltering trust, always those of a 
 healthful nature to which life and death are 
 alike — not indifferent, but right. The only di- 
 rect reference he ever made to his own end 
 within my knowledge was on the day when 
 the news came of the late Pope's death. Mr. 
 Bryant happened to be in the office on that day, 
 and the managing editor of the Evkninq Post 
 carried the news to him. 
 
 " I am glad he is dead," said Mr. Bryant ; and 
 then he added, by way of explanation, " I 
 wanted to see what they would do over there be- 
 fore making my own bow." It was said in the 
 cheeriest way possible, and the reference to the 
 approach of his own end was made precisely as 
 might have been a reference to an approaching 
 change from his city house to his Koslyn home. 
 I think, indeed, that he contemplated death very 
 much in that way. He told me, when Canon 
 Farrar's " Eternal Hope " was published, that he 
 had fuUy satisfied himself years ago on the sub- 
 ject of a future life ; that he had gone carefully 
 over the whole ground, and, he added, " I have 
 a confidence that is not to be shaken, that if con- 
 sciousness exists at all beyond the tomb, it is the 
 consciousness of life, not of death. If we are 
 awakened after that sleep, I cannot doubt that 
 the awakening will be for our good." Then he 
 laughingly referred to the care with which the 
 Evening P^t had avoided the expression of an 
 opinion on the theological question in reviewing 
 the book, and related the anecdote of a woman 
 who, after hearing her somewhat heterodox pas- 
 tor preach a sermon setting forth a doctrine of 
 limited future punishment, went to him and 
 thanked him, saying, " That is so much better 
 than no hell at alL" 
 
THE FLOOD OF YEARS. 
 
 Bt "William Cullex Brtaxt. 
 
 A Mighty Hand, from an exliaustless urn, 
 Pours forth the never-ending Flood of Tears 
 Among the nations. How the rushiog waves 
 Bear all before theml On their foremost edge. 
 And there alone, is Life ; the Present there 
 Tosses and foams and fills the air with roar 
 Of mingled noises. There are they who toil. 
 And they who strive, and they who feast, and they 
 Who hurry to and fro. The sturdy hind — 
 Woodman and delver with the spade — are there, 
 And busy artisan beside his bench. 
 And rallid student \vith his written roll. 
 A moment on the mounting billow seen — 
 The flood sweeps over them and they are gone. 
 There groups of revelers, whose brows are twined 
 With roses, ride the topmost swell awhile, 
 And as they raise their flowing cups to touch 
 The clinking brim to brim, are whirled beneath 
 The waves and disappear. I hear the jar 
 Of beaten drums, and thunders that break forth 
 From cannon, where the advancing billow sends 
 Up to the sight long files of armed men, 
 That hurry to the charge through flame and smoke. 
 The torrent bears them under, whelmed and hid, 
 Slayer and slain, in heaps of bloody foam. 
 Down go the steed and rider; the plumed chief 
 Sinks with his followers; the head that wears 
 The imperial diadem goes down beside 
 The felon's with cropped ear and branded cheek. 
 A funeral train — the torrent sweeps away 
 Bearers and bier and mourners. By the bed 
 Of one who dies men gather sorrowing. 
 And women weep aloud ; the flood rolls on ; 
 The wail is stifled, and the sobbing group 
 Borne under. Hark to that shrill sudden shout — 
 The cry of an applauding multitude 
 Swayed by some loud-tongued orator who wields 
 The hving mass, as if he were its soul. 
 The waters choke the shout and all is still. 
 Lo, next, a kneeling crowd and one who spreads 
 The hands in prayer; the engulfing wave o'ertakes 
 
 And swallows them and him. A sculptor wields 
 
 The chisel, and the stricken marble grows 
 
 To beauty; at his easel, eager-eyed, 
 
 A painter stands, and sunshine, at his touch 
 
 Gathers upon the canvas, and life glows ; 
 
 A poet, as he paces to and fro, 
 
 ilurmurs his sounding line. Awhile they ride 
 
 The advancing billow, till its tossing crest 
 
 Strikes them and flings them under while their tasks 
 
 Are yet unfinished. See a mother smile 
 
 On her young babe that smiles to her again — 
 
 The torrent wrests it from her arms; she shrieks. 
 
 And weeps, and midst her tears is carried down. 
 
 A beam hke that of moonlight turns the spray 
 
 To glistening pearls ; two lovers, hand in hand. 
 
 Rise on the billowy swell and fondly look 
 
 Into each other's eyes. The rushing flood 
 
 FUngs them apart; the youth goes down; the maid. 
 
 With hands out-stretched in vain and streaming eyes. 
 
 Waits for the next high wave to follow him. 
 
 An aged man succeeds; his bending form 
 
 Sinks slowly; mingling ^vith the sullen stream 
 
 Gleam, the white locks and then are seen no more. 
 
 Lo, wider grows the stream; asea-hke flood 
 Saps earth's walled cities; massive palaces 
 Crumble before it; fortresses and towers 
 Dissolve in the swift waters; populous realms 
 Swept by the torrent, see their ancient tribes 
 Engulfed and lost, their very languages 
 Stifled and never to be uttered more. 
 
 I pause and turn my eyes and, looking back, 
 Where that tumultuous flood has passed, I see 
 The silent Ocean of the Past, a waste 
 Of waters weltering over graves, its shores 
 Strewn with the wreck of fleets, where mast and hull 
 Drop away piecemeal; battlemented walls 
 Frown idly, green with moss, and temples stand 
 Unroofed, forsaken by the worshipers. 
 There lie memorial stones, whence time has gnawed 
 The graven legends, thrones of kings o'ertumed. 
 The broken altars of forgotten gods. 
 
72 
 
 Foundations of old cities and long etreeta 
 
 Where never fall of human foot is heard 
 
 Upon the desolate pavement. I behold 
 
 Dim glimmerings of lost jewels far within 
 
 The sleeping waters, diamond, sardonyx, 
 
 Ruby and topaz, pearl and chrysolite, 
 
 Once glittering at the banquet on fair brows 
 
 That long ago were duat; and all around, 
 
 Strewn on the waters of that silent sea. 
 
 Are withering bridal wreaths, and glossy locks 
 
 Shorn from fair brows by loving hands, and scrolls 
 
 O'erwritten, — haply with fond words of love 
 
 And vows of friendship — and fair pages flung 
 
 Fresh from the printer's engine. There they lie 
 
 A moment and then sink away from sight. 
 
 I look, and the quick tears are in my eyes, 
 For I behold, in every one of these, 
 A blighted hope, a separate history 
 Of human sorrow, telling of dear ties 
 Suddenly broken, dreams of happiness 
 Dissolved in air, and happy days, too brief. 
 That sorrowfully ended, and I think 
 How painfully must the poor heart have beat 
 In bosoms without number, as the blow 
 Was struck that slew their hope or broke their peace. 
 
 Sadly I turn, and look before, where yet 
 The Flood must pass, and I behold a mist 
 Where swarm dissolving forms, the brood of Hope, 
 Divinely fair, that rest on banks of flowers 
 Or wander among rainbows, fading soon 
 And reappearing, haply giving place 
 To shapes of grisly aspect, such as Fear 
 Molds from the idle air; where serpents lift 
 The head to strike, and skeletons stretch forth 
 The bony arm in m,enace. Further on 
 
 A belt of darkness seems to bar the way, 
 
 Long, low and distant, where the Life that Is 
 
 Touches the Life to come. The Flood of Years 
 
 Rolls toward it, nearer and nearer. It must pass 
 
 That dismal barrier. What is there beyood ? 
 
 Hear what the wise and good have said. Beyond 
 
 That belt of darkness still the years roll on 
 
 More gently, but with not less mighty sweep. 
 
 They gather up again and softly bear 
 
 All the sweet lives that late were overwhelmed 
 
 And lost to sight — all that in them was good, 
 
 Noble, and truly great and worthy of love — 
 
 The lives of infants and ingenuous youths. 
 
 Sages and saintly women who have made 
 
 Their households happy — all are raised and borne 
 
 By that great current on its onward sweep. 
 
 Wandering and rippling with caressing waves 
 
 Around green islands, fragrant with the breath 
 
 Of flowers that never wither. So they pass. 
 
 From stage to stage, along the shining course 
 
 Of that fair river broadening like a sea. 
 
 As its smooth eddies curl along their way. 
 
 They bring old frieuds together; hands are clasped 
 
 In joy unspeakable; the mother's arms 
 
 Again are folded round the child she loved 
 
 And lost. Old sorrows are forgotten now. 
 
 Or but remembered to make sweet the hour 
 
 That overpays them; wounded hearts that bled 
 
 Or broke are healed forever. In the room 
 
 Of this grief-shadowed Present there shall be 
 
 A Present in whose reign no grief shall gnaw 
 
 The heart, and never shall a tender tie 
 
 Be broken — in whose reign the eternal Change 
 
 That waits on growth and action shall proceed 
 
 With everlasting Concord hand in hand. 
 

 > I -- 
 
 -js.'vr'c-e. .III... Ms*