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 The life, character and wffi9?„,9LK 
 
 3 1924 022 052 371 
 
LIFE, CHARACTER AND WRITINGS 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
THE 
 
 LIFE, CHARACTER AND WRITINGS 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 A COMMBMORATJVE ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 
 
 At the Academy of Music, December 30, 1878. 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
 743 AND 745 Broadway. 
 
Copyright, 1879, by 
 THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 aass/:^ 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
 
 This great and distinguished assembly is 
 in itself an imposing tribute to the memory of 
 an illustrious man. But even more impressive 
 than this presence of genius and distinction, 
 of character and intelligence, is the absence 
 of one citizen — that venerable figure which 
 had come to represent in this community all 
 the civic graces and virtues, and from whose 
 temperate lips on every occasion of literary 
 and patriotic commemoration, of political 
 emergency or of public appeal, we have been 
 accustomed to hear the fitting words of coun- 
 sel, of encouragement, of consolation. When 
 Cooper died, the restless city paused to hear 
 Bryant's words of praise and friendship. 
 When Irving followed Cooper, all hearts 
 turned to Bryant, and it was before this so- 
 ciety and in this place that he told the story 
 
8 A Commemorative Addre 
 
 "ess. 
 
 of Irving's life. Now Bryant has followed 
 Cooper and Irving, the last of that early- 
 triumvirate of American literature, not less 
 renowned than the great triumvirate of Amer- 
 ican politics, and he whose life began before 
 the century leaves behind but one of his 
 early literary contemporaries. The vener- 
 able poet Dana, friend of Bryant's youth, at 
 an age prolonged beyond fourscore and ten — 
 
 " An old age, serene and bright, 
 And lovely as a Lapland night " — 
 
 the editor who published Thanatopsis sixty- 
 one years ago, has seen its author join the 
 innumerable caravan and lie down to pleasant 
 dreams. But a thousand eloquent and rev- 
 erent voices of the press and the pulpit, of 
 the college and the club, of orator and poet, 
 from the sea-coast to the prairies, have 
 spoken for him who spoke for all. There 
 was no eminent American upon whom the 
 judgment of his countrymen would be more 
 immediate and unanimous. The broad and 
 simple outline of his character and career had 
 become universally familiar like a mountain 
 
William Cullen Bryaiit. g 
 
 or the sea, and in speaking of him I but re- 
 peat the thought of every American, and 
 register a judgment already pronounced. A 
 patriarch of our literature, and in a perma- 
 nent sense the oldest of our poets, a scholar 
 familiar with many languages and literatures, 
 finely sensitive to the influence of nature, 
 and familiar with trees and birds and flowers, 
 he was especially fitted, it might be thought, 
 for scholarly seclusion and the delights of the 
 strict literary life. But he who melodiously 
 marked the solitary way of the water-fowl 
 through the rosy depth of the glowing heav- 
 en, and on the lonely New England hills, 
 
 " Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," 
 
 saw in the river and valley, in forest and 
 ocean, only the solemn decoration of man's 
 tomb — the serious, musing country-boy felt 
 also the magic of human sympathy, the im- 
 pulse of his country, the political genius of his 
 race, and the poet became distinctively an 
 American and a public political leader. In 
 the active American life of this century he 
 bore his full part, never quailing, never doubt- 
 
lo A CojuDiemorative Address. 
 
 ing, giving and taking blows ; stern often, re- 
 served, unsparing, but panoplied ever in an 
 armor which no fabled Homeric hero wore, 
 beyond the art of Vulcan to forge or the dark 
 waters of the Styx to charm, the impenetrable 
 armor of moral principle. Time as it passed 
 chastened the ardor of the partisan, without 
 relaxing the vital interest of the citizen in pub- 
 lic affairs. His lofty personality rose above 
 the clamor of selfish ambition, and in his life 
 he reconciled, both in fact and to the popular 
 imagination, the seeming incompatibility of 
 literary taste and accomplishment, and supe- 
 riority with constant political activity. So 
 rises the shining dome of Mont Blanc above 
 the clustering forests and the roaring streams, 
 and on its towering sides the growths of vari- 
 ous climates and of different zones, in due 
 order, meet and mingle. It is by no official 
 title, by no mere literary fame, by no signal 
 or single service or work; no marvelous Lear 
 or Transfiguration, no stroke of state craft 
 calling to political life a new world to redress 
 the balance of the old, no resounding Auster- 
 litz or triumphant Trafalgar, that Bryant is 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 1 1 
 
 commemorated. There may have been, in 
 his long Hfe-time, genius more affluent and 
 creative, greater renown, abilities more com- 
 manding, careers more dazzling and romantic; 
 but no man, no American, living or dead, has 
 more truly and amply illustrated the scope 
 and the fidelity of Republican citizenship. 
 
 Something of this is explained by the time 
 and place of his birth, and the influences that 
 moulded his childhood. At the close of the 
 last century, his father, Peter Bryant, a phy- 
 sician, and the son of a physician, followed 
 the family of his future wife from Bridgewater, 
 in Massachusetts, westward across the Con- 
 necticut river, and up into the Hampshire hills 
 to Cummington, where the first pioneer had 
 built his cabin scarcely thirty years before, 
 and there, in 1794, Bryant was born. West- 
 ern Massachusetts is a high hill country, with 
 secluded green valleys — a farming and graz- 
 ing region, but every little stream turns a 
 mill, and along the water-courses the air hums 
 with the music of a various industry. The 
 great hills are still largely covered with 
 woods that shelter the solitary pastures and 
 
12 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 upland farms ; woods beautiful in spring with 
 the white laurel and azalea, ringing through 
 the short summer with the song of the hermit 
 thrush and the full-choired music • of New 
 England birds, and in autumn blazing with 
 scarlet and gold of the changing leaf, until the 
 cold splendor of the snowy winter closes the 
 year. 
 
 All trace of the house in which Bryant was 
 born is gone ; but the broad landscape that 
 the boy saw remains, softened now by tillage 
 and orchards, but a grave, solitary landscape 
 still. The region was soon familiar to him. 
 Not only its serious spirit touched his soul 
 and left its inextinguishable impress upon his 
 character — but he knew it in detail — its trees, 
 its shrubs and plants, their history and uses — 
 the habits and resorts of all its birds and 
 beasts ; and this knowledge gave the man the 
 accuracy of a naturalist. The very spirit of 
 primitive New England brooded over the 
 thinly peopled hills, and in the little villages 
 and farms, and in the bare meeting-house and 
 log school-house were cherished and perpetu- 
 ated the Puritan traditions and character that 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 13 
 
 have made a great people. In the more se- 
 cluded communities of that region the simple 
 and robust virtues of a vanished century still 
 linger, and we may see in them to-day what 
 our fathers beheld, and, beholding, joyfully 
 believed a republic possible — a republic of 
 honest, equal, intelligent, self-respecting citi- 
 zens, the republic of Franklin and of Adams, 
 the republic of Lincoln and of Bryant. He 
 was not born too late to see and feel among 
 the people of the hills the spirit of the Revo- 
 lution — to hear, by the blazing winter fire, tales 
 which are now romantic legends, told by 
 their own heroes, stories of Bennington and 
 Bunker Hill, of Ticonderoga and Saratoga ; 
 and doubtless, also, he had himself seen some 
 of the Hampshire recruits of Shay's rebellion, 
 which sprang from the confusion and suffering 
 that followed the Revolution. There were 
 remoter and more terrible traditions, also, 
 tales of the old French war, of Port Royal 
 and Louisburg ; legends of the beautiful val- 
 ley of the Connecticut, which King Philip's 
 war had wasted ; cruel memories of Deerfield, 
 and Hadley, and Turner's Falls, and of the 
 
14 A. Commemorative Address. 
 
 fatally luxuriant meadow where the flower of 
 Essex lay bleeding. 
 
 Bryant has described the sports of his boy- 
 hood and the customs of the country-side. 
 They are not all gone. The columns of 
 smoke rising over the woods from the maple- 
 sugar camp, in the chill air of March and early 
 April, eighty years ago, still hang above 
 them ; and when, under the reddening trees 
 of the last October, I went to the grave of his 
 father in the lonely burial-ground on the hill, 
 the farmer was piling upon the barn floor the 
 long, rustling heaps of corn for the husking, 
 as the boy Bryant saw them. His books 
 were Sanford and Merton, and Miss Barbauld, 
 the Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, 
 and Berquin's Stories and Watts's Hymns. 
 But the father early trained his son in the 
 books that he himself liked to read — Pope, 
 and Gray, and Goldsmith — and his son soon 
 began to echo their music. The boy wrote 
 verses at ten which the happy father sent to 
 the " Hampshire Gazette," at Northampton, 
 a paper which had been established with true 
 American instinct, in the midst of the excite- 
 
Williaui Cullen Bryant. 15 
 
 ment of Shay's rebellion, to encourage loyalty 
 to law. It was a fitting journal in which to 
 print the earliest verses of the future editor 
 who> was always to defend law as the palla- 
 dium of liberty. 
 
 To this secluded mountain village, and to 
 the boy and his father, who had evidently a 
 singular sympathy even at that age, the news 
 of the great world came by the weekly post. 
 There were then printed during the week, in 
 all New England, only thirty thousand copies 
 of newspapers, and among them there was 
 but one daily paper. But the whole country 
 glowed with political ardor. The River 
 Gods, as the heads of leading families in the 
 valley of the Connecticut were called, were 
 uncompromising Federalists, and so were the 
 social powers of the hills. The Federal Doc- 
 tor Bryant trained his son in his own political 
 views, and, doubtless, he thought to good 
 purpose, when, before his fourteenth birthday, 
 the son had written " The Embargo," a poem 
 which reflected, in Pope's decasyllabic, the 
 universal Federal hatred of Thomas Jeffer- 
 son. Percival, also, who was but ten months 
 
1 6 A Commetnorative Address. 
 
 younger than Bryant, displayed at the same 
 age of thirteen the fervor of Connecticut Fed- 
 eralism in his " Commerciad," a poem of two 
 thousand two hundred and sixty-eight lines, 
 which probably nobody ever read through, in 
 which he was as unsparing upon Mr. Jeffer- 
 son as the young Bryant, but somewhat less 
 smooth in versification : 
 
 " There Hillhouse, born our country's rights to guard, 
 To keep our people from the statutes hard 
 Of cursed Jefferson, son of the Devil, 
 AVhose thoughts are wicked, and whose mind is evil." 
 
 Such rhymes of boys are but songs of the 
 mocking-bird ; yet they show the intensity 
 and bitterness of the political feeling amid 
 which Bryant was trained, at a time which 
 we sometimes fondly call the golden age of 
 the Republic. But a time in which boys were 
 taught to call Jefferson the Devil, and in 
 which it was said of Washington that he was 
 the source of all the misfortunes of the coun- 
 try, was a time whose frantic political vituper- 
 ation pales the " uneffectual fire " of our own, 
 and in whose mad extravagance we may well 
 study the baseness of partisan ribaldry. 
 
Willi am Cnllen Bryant. ly 
 
 Bryant learned Latin and Greek readily, 
 and he was sixteen years old when, in Octo- 
 ber, 1810, he joined the Sophomore Class at 
 Williams College. One of his classmates, 
 General Charles F. Sedgwick, still living in 
 an honored age, describes the wiry and well- 
 knit figure of the young poet, the beauty of 
 his face, and his full flowing, dark brown hair 
 when he came to the college. The reputa- 
 tion of his early verses and the rumor of his 
 genius were like an aureole about the head 
 of the modest young scholar; but he was 
 never known to speak of his verses, nor did 
 his companions allude to them. One day, 
 however, to the delight of the class and of 
 the tutor, he recited an original poem, and to 
 a few friends he read a translation of an ode 
 of Anacreon. During his brief college life 
 Bryant was mild and gentlemanly, unobtrusive 
 in his conduct, grave in conversation, diligent 
 in study, associating naturally with the quiet 
 and orderly students. But he was not con- 
 tented. The boy had come down from the 
 pure breezes of the hills into what seemed to 
 him the closer and less healthful air of the 
 
1 8 A Coinmemorative Address. 
 
 little village, not then as now one of the love- 
 liest of the beautiful villages of New England, 
 and at the end of his second term, the ist of 
 May, 1811, having been at college only seven 
 months, he took an honorable dismission. 
 The College, however, subsequently granted 
 him his degree, and restored his name to the 
 catalogue. Before Bryant left, he read before 
 a college society a short humorously sarcastic 
 poem upon his alma mater, a boyish freak at 
 which he always smiled. The harmless verse 
 survives, I believe, only in the recollection of 
 the Reverend Dr. Hallock, son of the Plain- 
 field pastor who fitted Bryant for college. 
 But Dr. Hallock, with delicate fidelity to the 
 fame of his college and his friend, has locked 
 it fast in his memory and jealously guards the 
 key. Upon leaving Williams, Bryant had 
 hoped to go with his chum to Yale College, 
 but his father found that the cost would be 
 too great, so the youth returned to his father's 
 house and devoted himself for a year to the 
 classics and mathematics. 
 
 This was the end of Bryant's schooling, 
 and this was all the visible preparation for the 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 19 
 
 writing of the first enduring poem in Amer- 
 ican literature — tlie work, indeed, from which 
 that Hterature distinctively dates — the poem 
 which, in all the after, riper fruitage of the 
 poet's genius, was never surpassed. The 
 marvel of Thanatopsis is the greater, because, 
 although a singularly mature and precocious 
 boy, there is no sign in Bryant's earlier verses, 
 flowing and correct as they are, of original 
 power. In Raphael's early pictures there is 
 evidently the overmastering influence ofPeru- 
 gino, but there is also a finer and humaner 
 touch. In Beethoven's first music there is 
 often the rhythmical reminiscence of Mozart, 
 but there are also signs of the power and 
 grandeur which we know by the master's 
 name. But in the earlier verses of Bryant, as 
 in Byron's Hours of Idleness, there is no pre- 
 sage of his genius, no prelude of his fame. 
 
 Bryant says that Thanatopsis was written 
 soon after leaving college. He was not sure 
 whether it was in his eighteenth or nineteenth 
 year, but it was before he began the study of 
 the law in 1813. For some reason he did 
 not send it to the " Hampshire Gazette," nor 
 
20 A CoiJimemorativc Address. 
 
 seek a publication in any form. But once, 
 upon leaving home, he placed the MS. of 
 Thanatopsis, with that of other verses, in a 
 drawer in his father's office. It must have 
 lain there for some months when Dr. Bryant, 
 then a member of the Legislature, finding the 
 poems in his drawer, sent them, anonymously, 
 and without his son's knowledge, to the 
 " North American Review," which had then 
 been published for two years, and was at once 
 a review and a magazine. Mr. Dana, who 
 was one of the editors, immediately recog- 
 nized the worth of the poem, and said truly, 
 what no man was more qualified than he to 
 declare, that it could not have been written in 
 this country, for he kneAV no American who 
 could write it. He was told that the author 
 was a member of the Legislature, and he has- 
 tened to the Senate Chamber, where Dr. Bry- 
 ant was pointed out to him. " 'Tis a good 
 head," he said, " but I do not see Thanatop- 
 sis there." The poem was published in the 
 September number of the Review in 1817, 
 and it is preceded by a separate poem of four 
 stanzas, which was attached to it by mistake. 
 
William C^illen Bryant. 21 
 
 Their tone is that of the same melancholy fas- 
 cination with death, but they are in a wholly 
 different key. Thanatopsis itself, as originally 
 printed, contained but forty-nine of the eighty- 
 one lines that we know, and it was accom- 
 panied by three of the MSS. which the Doc- 
 tor had found in his office drawer: the 
 Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, and 
 two translations from Horace. 
 
 This is all that we know of the production 
 of this poem. I linger upon it, because it 
 was the first adequate poetic voice of the 
 solemn New England spirit ; and in the gran- 
 deur of the hills, in the heroic Puritan tra- 
 dition of sacrifice and endurance, in the 
 daily life, saddened by imperious and awful 
 theologic dogma, in the hard circumstance of 
 the pioneer household, the contest with the 
 wilderness, the grim legends of Indians and 
 the war, have we not some outward clue to 
 the strain of Thanatopsis, the depthless and 
 entrancing sadness, as of inexorable fate, that 
 murmurs, like the autumn wind through the for- 
 est, in the melancholy cadences of this hymn to 
 Death? Moreover it was without a harbinger 
 
2 2 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 in our literature, and without a trace of the 
 English masters of the hour. The contrast in 
 literary splendor, of Europe and America at 
 the beginning of the century, seemed to many 
 a sensitive American as hopeless as it was 
 conspicuous. The great German epoch of 
 Goethe and Schiller was at its highest glory, 
 and in England, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Southey, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Moore, 
 and Byron were in full song when Thanatop- 
 sis was published. The contrast was, indeed, 
 hard. In vain the patriotic President Dwight 
 had said that Trumbull's MacFingal was as 
 good as Hudibras, for who ^yould speak for 
 President Dwight, and what courage was 
 equal to saying that his Conquest of Canaan 
 was as good as Milton's Paradise Lost ? Yet 
 Trumbull and Dwight, Barlow and Freneau, 
 were our chief names in poetry, and Barlow's 
 burlesque. Hasty Pudding, was the best char- 
 acteristic American poem when Thanatopsis 
 appeared. "Shall we match Joel Barlow," 
 exclaimed Fisher Ames a little earlier, 
 "against Homer and Hesiod? Can Thomas 
 Paine contend against Plato, or could Find- 
 
William Ctillen Bryant. 23 
 
 lay's history of his own (whisky) insurrection 
 vie with Sallust's narrative of Catiline's ? " 
 We are apt to say that the conditions of co- 
 lonial settlement are not favorable to literary 
 and artistic development. But it is easy to 
 overestimate the value of mere circumstance, 
 and it is always the genius, not the circum- 
 stance, that controls. Canova used to say, 
 that if Pitt and Fox had lived in Italy they 
 would have been artists ; but we must not 
 therefore conclude that Eli Whitney was 
 Dante under new conditions, and that if Da- 
 vid Crockett had been ' born in Augustan 
 Rome, he would probably have come down 
 to us as the poet Virgil. Great histories will 
 hardly be written upon the frontier of a new 
 country : but Robert Burns, in a hovel, sang 
 songs as pure as the dew-drop and sweet as 
 the morning. It is precisely the intellectual 
 force and independence, the nameless and 
 mysterious genius shown in Thanatopsis, a 
 poem so purely original and unexpected, that 
 Dana at once said that it could not have been 
 written by an American, which is the pioneer 
 of national literature, and which placed the 
 
24 A Com^nemorative Address. 
 
 poem at once and forever in the literature of 
 the world. 
 
 When Thanatopsis was published, Bryant 
 was already a practicing lawyer. He had be- 
 gun his studies with Judge Samuel Howe, of 
 Worthington, near Cummington, who, when 
 he found a volume of Wordsworth in his stu- 
 dent's hands, warned him that such reading 
 would spoil his style, and he was admitted to 
 the bar at Plymouth in 1815. He opened an 
 office for a year in Plainfield, where he had 
 fitted for college ; but few clients came, and in 
 18 16, in the month of October, he says, when 
 the woods were in all the glory of autumn, he 
 turned his back upon the Hampshire hills for 
 the adjoining county of Berkshire, and settled 
 in Great Barrington. In Berkshire he passed 
 nine years, and there some of his most fami- 
 liar verses were written. A companion of 
 those days, the venerable Ralph Taylor, who 
 lived in the same house with him, remembers 
 that he was fond of roaming over the hills, 
 and in his walks was very genial and sociable. 
 He had gay comrades, too, village revelers ; 
 but Bryant, then as always, quietly held his 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 25 
 
 own temperate way, unseduced by fatal good- 
 fellowship. He was an active, learned, and, 
 as I have heard, even a fiery young lawyer, 
 and his name appears four or five times in the 
 reports of the Supreme Court. He was also 
 a true son of the land of the town-meeting, 
 and he did not evade his duty as a citizen. 
 On the 1st day of January, 18 18, he delivered 
 an address before the Great Barrington Bible 
 Society, and in 1820 he was elected clerk of 
 the town, and remained in office until he re- 
 moved to New York. As a Justice of the 
 Peace his first act was the marriage of a gen- 
 tleman still living, and as town-clerk, in Jan- 
 uary, 1 82 1, he recorded in the town book his 
 own marriage — that marriage to which the 
 sacred and hidden allusions in his verse are 
 exquisitely touching and tender, and which 
 was the most gracious and beautiful influence 
 of his life. For the forty-five years that they 
 lived together his wife was his only really in- 
 timate friend, and when she died he had no 
 other. He was young, his fame was growing, 
 and with domestic duties, with literary studies 
 and work, and professional and public activi- 
 
2 6 ^ / Commemorative Address. 
 
 ties, his tranquil days passed in the happy 
 valley of the Housatonic. 
 
 It is plain, however, that Bryant's taste, his 
 temperament, his natural powers, were averse 
 to the law. The literary instinct was always 
 stirring in his heart, and there are constant 
 and delightful traces of his literary industry 
 at this time. In March, 1818, he published 
 in the " North American Review" a fragment 
 of Simonides, the Lines to a Water-fowl, and 
 a poem to a friend upon his marriage, in 
 which the poet gayly declares what he daily 
 disproved : 
 
 " And I that loved to trace the woods before, 
 And climb the hill, a ])la)-mate to the breeze, 
 Have vowed to tune the rural lay no more, 
 Have bid my useless classics sleep at ease, 
 And left the race of bards to scribble, starve and 
 freeze." 
 
 If he thouo-ht himself Avilline to leave the 
 muse, she was not ready to desert him. In 
 the next July he contributed to the " Re- 
 view " an interesting paper upon American 
 poetry, in which he finds little to praise, but 
 thinks that it was better than could have 
 
William Ciilleji Bryant. 27 
 
 been expected in a young nation just begin- 
 ning to attend to intellectual refinement, and 
 he concludes felicitously, but discouragingly, 
 that the only poets we had could hardly be 
 more admired " without danger to the taste 
 of the nation." A year later, in June, 18 19, 
 he published a short essay in the " North 
 American Review," on " The Happy Tem- 
 perarhent," which is singularly interesting as 
 the work of a poet whose strain is sometimes 
 called remote from human sympathy, and a 
 man who was so often thought to be cold 
 and austere. It Is not, says the author of 
 Thanatopsis, the shallow, unsympathetic dis- 
 position which laughs all ills away that is to 
 be called happy, because the " melancholy 
 feelings, when called iip by their proper and 
 natural causes, and confined to their proper 
 limits, are the parents of almost all our vir- 
 tues." " The temperament of an unbroken 
 cheerfulness," says our poet, " Is the tempera- 
 ment of Insensibility." A paper In the Sep- 
 tember number of the same year, on Tri- 
 syllabic Feet, in Iambic verse, shows his 
 constant and careful study of the literary art, 
 
28 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 as well as of literature. In the summer of 
 1821, the author whose genius had been first 
 recognized by the literary tribunal of Cam- 
 bridge, read before the Phi Beta Kappa So- 
 ciety, at Harvard College, his longest poem, 
 " The Ages." It is a simple, serious, and 
 thoughtful survey of history, tracing a gen- 
 eral law of progress ; and the stately Spen- 
 serian measure is marked by the moderation, 
 the sinewy simplicity, the maturity and free- 
 dom from mannerism, which are Bryant's 
 sign-manual. The last stanza of this poem 
 breathes in majestic music that pure passion 
 for America, and that strong and sublime 
 faith in her destiny, which constantly appears 
 in his verse and never wavered in his heart. 
 It was the era of the Holy Alliance in Eu- 
 rope, the culmination of the reaction against 
 the French Revolution and the Napoleonic 
 wars, when popular liberty was in mortal 
 peril; and, after a glance at struggling Eu- 
 rope, the poet exclaims : 
 
 " But thou, my country ! thou shalt never fall, 
 But with thy children — thy maternal care, 
 Thy lavish love, thy blessings showered on all — 
 These are thy fetters — seas and stormy air, 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 29 
 
 Are the wide barrier of thy borders, where, 
 Among thy gallant sons that guard thee well, 
 Thou laugh'st at enemies ! who shall then declare 
 The date of thy deep-founded strength, or tell 
 How happ'^' in thy lap the sons of men shall dwell? " 
 
 He was already acknowledged to be the 
 first of our poets, and he himself dates the 
 dawn of our literature in the year 182 1, the 
 year of his marriage and of his Harvard 
 poem. It was in that year that Cooper's 
 Spy was published and Irving's Sketch-Book 
 was completed, and Bryant's own first slight 
 volume was issued ; Dana's Idle Man was 
 just finished, and Miss Sedgwick had already 
 published Hope Leslie. Two years before, 
 Percival's first volume had appeared, which 
 Edward Everett had saluted as a harbinger 
 ■of great achievements ; and Halleck's and 
 Drake's Croakers were already popular. Bry- 
 ant's ambition, his hopes, his conscious pow- 
 er, secretly solicited him and weaned him 
 more and more from the law. The rigor of 
 his Federalism also was relaxing. During the 
 earlier days of his life, in Berkshire, his name 
 appears officially signed to notices and re- 
 
30 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 ports of Federal meetings and caucuses, but 
 he was not known to make political speeches, 
 nor to be an active politician. All signs, even 
 of such political interest, however, disappear 
 toward the end of his residence in Great Bar- 
 rington, although he undoubtedly voted, in 
 1824, for John Ouincy Adams, as there was 
 but one vote cast against him in the town. 
 
 For some time Bryant had counted among 
 his most faithful friends the Sedgwicks of 
 Stockbridge, one of the most noted of the 
 Berkshire families. In 1820, Miss Sedgwick 
 wrote from Stockbridge that she had sent for 
 Bryant, and he had called upon her as he 
 came from court. She found him of a charm- 
 ing countenance ; very modest, but not bash- 
 ful, and he very readily promised to write 
 some hymns for her friend, Mr. Sewall. Two 
 years later she writes from New York that 
 Bryant had been in town, and that she had 
 never seen him so happy nor half so agree- 
 able. She describes him as very much ani- 
 mated with his prospects, meaning evidently 
 his literary prospects, and full of good sense, 
 good judgment, and moderation. Miss Sedg- 
 
William Ctilleti Bryant. 31 
 
 wick's brother, Henry, was Bryant's especial 
 friend, and Mr. Sedgwick's hereditary Feder- 
 alism was overborne by his profound interest 
 in the question of free trade. He wrote ar- 
 ticles, pamphlets, and essays against Mr. 
 Clay's American and tariff system, and his 
 arguments found a prompt and ready re- 
 sponse in Bryant's instinctive love of liberty. 
 Perhaps, as his friend eloquently talked, the 
 young poet recalled the lines of Pope in 
 " Windsor Forest," lines that he must often 
 have read with his father, and often after- 
 ward in fancy applied to the noble bay and 
 harbor of this great city : 
 
 " The time shall come, when, free as seas or wind, 
 Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind ; 
 Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, 
 And seas but join the regions they divide ; 
 Earth's distant ends our glory shall behold, 
 And the New World launch forth to seek the Old." 
 
 Mr. Sedgwick, wishing to see Bryant in 
 a larger sphere, urged him constantly to re- 
 move to New York, and Bryant's heart took 
 sides with his friend. He came to see the 
 city, and a very little event soon broke the 
 
32 A Coinmemorattve Address. 
 
 slight thread that held him to the law. The 
 tradition of the local bar is, that in 1824 Bry- 
 ant had obtained for a client a verdict for 
 slander ; but judgment was arrested upon 
 appeal, because of a technical omission in 
 Bryant's declaration, although Chief-Justice 
 Parsons virtually admitted the justice of the 
 claim. There is a further tradition, that a 
 difference with one of the opposing counsel, 
 about the cost of the suit, was one of the oc- 
 casions in which the restrained fire of the 
 poet's temperament blazed fiercely forth. It 
 was easy for a man whose wishes sought an 
 excuse for leaving the law, to find it in what 
 seemed to him a denial of acknowledged jus- 
 tice by the highest legal tribunal. To his 
 indignant mind, the law probably seemed, 
 despite Coke's famous words, the perfection 
 of unreason, and the poet, bent upon closing 
 his office, and loving his Wordsworth more 
 than his Blackstone, may well have felt that 
 if the seat of law be the bosom of God, it had 
 returned whence it came. Bryant had tried 
 his last case. He left Berkshire, but while 
 its Monument Mountain stands and its Green 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 2>2> 
 
 River flows, Berkshire'will claim their poet as 
 her own. One of the last of the Berkshire 
 poems was the June, which was first pub- 
 lished in the year after he left Great Barring- 
 ton, the poet's farewell to 
 
 " The glorious sky, 
 And the green uplands round : " 
 
 the farewell whose pensive and airy music 
 was in all hearts and on all lips when he died, 
 as he had fancifully wished, in June. 
 
 The New York to which Bryant came to 
 live by literature was a city of a hundred and 
 eighty thousand inhabitants, the pleasant city 
 of which Paulding says, in his New Pilgrim's 
 Progress, that the dandy under no temptation 
 must extend his walk beyond the north-west 
 corner of Chambers Street. The solid city 
 reached a little beyond Canal Street, and a 
 line of houses straggled up as far as Fourth 
 Street. There were those who still remem- 
 bered the pebbly shore of the Hudson River 
 just above Barclay Street, which was the 
 favorite walk of Jonathan Edwards, when he 
 was preaching for a time in the church in 
 
34 -^ Commemorative Address. 
 
 Wall Street, and Bryant speaks of his own 
 delight in rambling along the wooded shores 
 of the Hudson above Canal Street. The 
 house of his friend Sedgwick, whose sister 
 Catharine was already famous, was the resort 
 of the Knickerbocker wits and authors, and 
 of all literary strangers. To this modest Hol- 
 land House came Verplanck, Halleck, Hill- 
 house, Cooper, Moore, Chancellor Kent, 
 Dunlap, Jarvis, De Kay, Jacob Harvey, Du- 
 rand, Henry James Anderson, and from this 
 charmed circle Cooper afterward founded a 
 club, which met weekly in Washington Hall. 
 The year of Bryant's arrival in New York 
 v/as that of the beginning of the Sketch Club 
 and the founding of the National Academy of 
 Design. To this Academy he was always 
 loyal, and he writes proudly from London, in 
 1845, of the exhibition of the Royal Academy: 
 " I see nothing in it to astonish one who has 
 visited the exhibition of our Academy of the 
 Arts of Design in New York." 
 
 His work began at once, but the " New 
 York Review," which he edited, and other 
 literary enterprises, soon failed ; and in the 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 35 
 
 year 1826, when he was thirty-two years old, 
 he became associate editor, with William 
 Coleman, of the "Evening Post." It was 
 the memorable year of the first Jubilee of 
 our Independence. Peace and prosperity 
 seemed to be assured, and the mighty flood 
 of American civilization, with a people grown 
 in fifty years from three millions to ten, was 
 sweeping from the sea-coast over the Alle- 
 ghanies, and far westward beyond the Mis- 
 sissippi, leaving in every valley and on every 
 hill-top, as it passed, the bold enterprise, the 
 ready invention, the nimble skill, the cheerful 
 and heroic endurance, the religious sobriety, 
 all the robust qualities that found and per- 
 petuate great States. Lafayette had just 
 crossed the ocean to see with rejoicing eyes 
 the glory of the nation whose generous 
 soldier he had been. De Witt Clinton had 
 just led in triumph the waters of Lake Erie 
 to the sea; and in the year in which Bryant 
 began his editorial life, John Adams and Jef- 
 ferson had died, happy in the undoubted se- 
 curity of their work, and Webster, summoned 
 to speak the reverent gratitude of a nation, 
 
36 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 had delivered the oration in Faneuil Hall, 
 which instantly passed into the class-book 
 and speakers, and was declaimed in every 
 schoolhouse in the land. The country had 
 not lost its original character of a rural re- 
 public. Political feeling, as we have seen, 
 was intense, but the vast political hierarchy 
 which has sprung from patronage, and which 
 now, with far-reaching and elaborate organi- 
 zation, constitutes a distinct and disciplined 
 class of middle-men for the control of poli- 
 tics, was practically unknown, and the move- 
 ments of parties, therefore, more truly repre- 
 sented the convictions of the people. John 
 Quincy Adams was President, a man of un- 
 sullied character, of great ability, of resolute 
 independence, superior to party trick or per- 
 sonal intrigue ; a civilian of will as indomitable 
 as that of his military successor — a President 
 — and such may our Presidents always be ! — 
 who believed that he serves his party best 
 who serves his country most. 
 
 This was the fortunate epoch and this the 
 happy country of 1826. It was also the end 
 and the beginning of party organizations. 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 27 
 
 Mr. Adams favored what was called a mag- 
 nificent national policy, a system of interna- 
 tional improvements, of superb public works, 
 a continental alliance with South America, a 
 protective tariff. Bryant was more interested 
 in the freedom of trade than in any other pend- 
 ing public question, and the general argument 
 for freedom of trade was an argument for the 
 limited function of the national government. 
 Bryant's subsequent editorial associate, Mr. 
 Bigelow, tells us that upon undertaking the 
 joint editorship of the Post, a paper which 
 had been founded under the auspices of 
 Hamilton, the father of protection and of the 
 United States Bank, the only condition that 
 the young poet from the hills made was an 
 unfettered freedom to advocate the emanci- 
 pation of commerce from severe restrictions, 
 and the separation of the money of the 
 Government from the banking capital of the 
 country. 
 
 It was at this time, in the years 1823 and 
 the two following years, that England, under 
 Huskisson, abandoned the old system of pro- 
 tection and made the changes in commercial 
 
38 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 legislation which are regarded as the first 
 practical application of the principles of free 
 trade. The contest In this country began at 
 once upon the revision of the tariff of 1824, 
 and the passage of that of 1828, from which 
 sprang nullification. It was a great debate, In 
 which sectional feeling was fiercely Inflamed, 
 and In which also Webster and Calhoun 
 changed ground. It was the first Important 
 public discussion in which Bryant engaged, 
 and he was soon involved In it with all the 
 fire of conviction and all the energy of his 
 nature. The Post was the sole advocate, in 
 the Free States, of the policy and the justice 
 of the principles of Free Trade. With reso- 
 lute pertinacity, through good and evil re- 
 port, Bryant maintained that the condition of 
 higher civilization, the surest pledge of inter- 
 national peace and justice, and the security of 
 American prosperity was freedom of commer- 
 cial exchange. He fought this battle for more 
 than fifty years ; the last article that he wrote 
 for his paper was a discussion of the balance 
 of trade, and he died in the faith, acknowl- 
 edged as one of its most powerful champions. 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 39 
 
 Meanwhile General Jackson had declared for 
 a "judicious" tariff. The Post supported him 
 for the Presidency; and in 1829, the year of 
 Jackson's inauguration, Mr. Coleman died, 
 and Bryant became chief editor. But his 
 devotion to freedom of exchange was like 
 that which he cherished for all other freedom. 
 It was American liberty, not what the English 
 laureate, speaking of revolutionary France, 
 calls "The blind hysterics of the Celt." It 
 was the freedom of the citizen in the State, 
 and the freedom of the State in the Union. 
 It was liberty under law, that he sought, for 
 he knew that lawless revolution is a remedy 
 more appalling than the evils it would cure. 
 He had pointed out, in principle and in de- 
 tail, the injustice of the tariff toward the 
 Southern States, but when nullification was 
 proposed as a remedy, his voice was prompt, 
 clear and decisive in sustaining General Jack- 
 son's proclamation — true to national union in 
 1832 as he was in 1861. 
 
 But from the day that Bryant began to 
 edit the Post, there was but one question 
 which was really supreme, the question which 
 
40 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 hung like a huge storm-cloud in the summer 
 sky, its lightning sheathed, its thunder silent, 
 but gathering with every moment angrier 
 force and more appalling fury — the question 
 with whose final and tremendous settlement 
 the land still heaves. It had apparently dis- 
 appeared in the deceitful calm that followed 
 the Missouri struggle, but the first penetra- 
 ting and significant note of a tempest not to 
 be stayed was heard within four years of Bry- 
 ant's removal to New York, in the moral 
 anti-slavery appeal of Lundy and Garrison. 
 Bryant seemed to the ardent leaders of that 
 great agitation as the multitude of editors and 
 politicians seemed to them, indifferent and 
 hesitating, too cold and reluctant for their 
 own generous wrath and zeal. In his letters 
 from the Southern States and the West In- 
 dies, as late as 1849, there is a photographic 
 fidelity of detail in descriptions of slavery 
 and of the slaves, but they are the pictures of 
 a seemingly passionless observer. There is 
 no apparent sense of wrong, no flaming in- 
 dignation, no denunciation ; an occasional im- 
 pulsive expression only shows his feelings. 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 41 
 
 This restraint and moderation, however, al- 
 ways so characteristic, are most impressive, 
 and give to his prose, whether in letters or 
 addresses or editorial articles, however strong 
 the public feeling or hot the debate, the 
 weight and value which so often exhale in 
 greater fervor of expression. But the breath 
 of the tropics did not relax his moral fibre. 
 The loiterer at the Negro corn-shucking 
 in Carolina and in the orange groves of 
 Florida, the tranquil stranger in the Cuban 
 coffee estates and the sugar plantations of 
 Matanzas, who observed everything and 
 quietly asked a traveler's questions, was 
 not untrue to the spirit that he had inhaled 
 with his native breath among the northern 
 hills. 
 
 Through all the great Slavery contest from 
 1820 to 1861, which included the prime of his 
 manhood, Bryant's course was determined by 
 his own love of liberty and justice, by his 
 temperament and conscience. He repelled 
 the reproaches of friends equally with the 
 gibes of enemies. When the moral appeal 
 swelled to an agitation under which the coun- 
 
42 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 try rocked; when there were even voices 
 heard in Faneuil Hall justifying the assassi- 
 nation of Lovejoy, and American freemen 
 speaking for liberty in New York were si- 
 lenced by mobs, and with no consuming wrath 
 of protest from the respectable public opinion 
 of the city — although Bryant, as I think, dep- 
 recated the agitation as mistaken in its meth- 
 od, and necessarily futile and disastrous in its 
 result, he resolutely defended the fundamental 
 right of discussion, which was the practical 
 and essential anti-slavery demand. 
 
 Early in 1837, when the House of Repre- 
 sentatives tried to stifle the anti-slavery peti- 
 tions presented by John Quincy Adams — and 
 they might as well have tried to blow out 
 the sun — Bryant denounced the folly and the 
 wrong of attempting to "muzzle discussion in 
 this country," and in the same year, when the 
 colored voters of New York asked the legis- 
 lature to grant them suffrage upon the same 
 conditions with the white voters — Bryant sus- 
 tained their prayer as just, and disdained any 
 deference to external dictation whether from 
 the South, from the North, or from any other 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 43 
 
 quarter. With the same clear perception 
 and inflexible principle he held that Con- 
 gress had perfect power over the question of 
 slavery in the District of Columbia ; and he 
 sternly condemned all interference with the 
 right of any body of citizens anywhere in the 
 country to declare their views upon the sub- 
 ject by petition to their representatives. To- 
 day, In the full sunlight of constitutional per- 
 sonal liberty, these angry debates seem like 
 the strange spectres of a cloudy night. Their 
 echoes are remote and unreal, like those of 
 Attila's battle in the air. But in telling the 
 story of the life of a reverend citizen who saw 
 the beginning and the end of that tremendous 
 contest, the struggle in which the institutions 
 and the principles that we all love and trust 
 were tried by blood and fire, emerging at last 
 to victory, but emerging only through 
 
 " exultations, agonies, 
 
 And love, and man's unconquerable mind," 
 
 victory not for one side, but for all men ; not 
 for provincial sections, but for national union ; 
 not for the North nor for the South, but for 
 
44 A ComTneinorative Address. 
 
 America and universal liberty ; in telling the 
 story of such a life, the men and the contests 
 of old days spring again to light, we see how- 
 continuous is the stream of history, and we 
 learn once more that the welfare of liberty 
 and civilization is intrusted to precisely those 
 qualities which Bryant displaj^ed in his edito- 
 rial career. 
 
 His temperament was conservative in the 
 truest sense, but his political convictions and 
 sympathies were in the same sense liberal 
 and Democratic. The old Federal distrust 
 of the people, which in later days and under 
 other conditions has seemed to so many hon- 
 est and patriotic men to be justified as only a 
 proper fear of ignorance and corruption, yet 
 a distrust which, however logical it may seem 
 in argument and detail, is refuted by the mar- 
 velous and beneficent American history of a 
 century, was a doubt which Bryant never 
 shared. As Sir PhiHp 'Sidney warned the 
 young poet to look in his own heart and 
 write, so his good genius taught Bryant to 
 look into his own heart and believe. He 
 knew himself, and he therefore trusted others. 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 45 
 
 He had seen among the hills the virtues, the 
 habits, the character, that make popular gov- 
 ernment simple and practicable, and he did 
 not doubt that under the unparalleled circum- 
 stances of the country, however political con- 
 ditions might be complicated by the large 
 infusion of other blood and other traditions, 
 the great appeal which our institutions make 
 to the conscious dignity and self-respect of 
 human nature would be answered in ways we 
 might not be able to foresee, but which expe- 
 rience and self-knowledge admonish us will 
 be effective. 
 
 But, from the first to the last, his Democracy 
 never meant a rabble nor a mob, but a consti- 
 tutionally self-restrained people. Bryant, in- 
 deed, was a warm party man. It was a fiery 
 nature which always lay beneath the placid 
 and coldly reserved manner, and which at 
 times flashed suddenly into vehement expres- 
 sion. The verse of no poet is more abso- 
 lutely sincere, and the lines in the tender 
 poem to his wife, on the future life, written in 
 1837, which have often seemed singularly 
 extravagant for a man so apparently passion- 
 
46 A Commemoraiive Address. 
 
 less, were unquestionably the fervid expres- 
 sion of self knowledge : 
 
 •'And wrath has left its scar — that fire of hell 
 Has left its frightful scar upon my soul." 
 
 With what force he restrained himself we 
 shall not know. A\^e only know with Avhat 
 success. But his habitual moderation and 
 calmness were not the gift of an easy, lym- 
 phatic temperament ; they were the grace of 
 a great and manly self-command. In the vast 
 political strife of the halfcentury, he was a 
 foremost combatant. But his politics had no 
 personal aims. During his life he held but 
 two public offices — those of town-clerk and 
 justice of the peace in Great Barrington. He 
 was a presidential elector in i860, a mere 
 honorary position, and he declined even an 
 election as Regent of the University, from his 
 invincible dislike of any kind of public life. 
 There is, indeed, no nobler ambition than to 
 fill a great office greatly, but it was not in 
 Bryant's heart. The splendid prizes of offi- 
 cial place never allured him, and his lofty aims 
 shone as pure in his perfect independence as 
 
Williafu- Cullen Bryant. 47 
 
 the virginal beauty of Sabrina in the " glassy, 
 cool, translucent wave." 
 
 In all the long, tumultuous years of his edi- 
 torial life does any memory, however search- 
 ing or censorious, recall one line that he 
 wrote which was not honest and pure, one 
 measure that he defended except from the 
 profoundest conviction of its usefulness to the 
 country, one cause that he advocated which 
 any friend of liberty, of humanity, of good 
 government would deplore ? When in the 
 British Parliament, after a hard and weary 
 and doubtful struggle of twenty years, the bill 
 of William Wilberforce for abolishing the 
 British slave trade was finally passed, the his- 
 torian says that Sir Samuel Romilly surprised 
 the staid House of Commons into loud and 
 long acclamations by comparing the greatness 
 and happiness of Napoleon Bonaparte, then 
 in the zenith of his imperial glory, with those 
 of him who would this " day lay his head 
 upon his pillow and remember that the slave 
 trade was no more." So it is the lesson of 
 this editorial life, that public service, the most 
 resplendent and the most justly renowned, on 
 
48 A Commentorative Address. 
 
 sea or shore, in cabinet or Congress, how- 
 ever great, however beneficent, is not a truer 
 service than that of the private citizen Hke 
 Bryant, who for half a century, with con- 
 science and knowledge, with power and un- 
 quailing courage, did his part in holding the 
 hand and heart of his country true to her 
 now glorious ideal. 
 
 During all this time, the sturdy political 
 editor was the chief literary figure in the city. 
 Mr. Bigelow says, that he never mingled or 
 confounded his two vocations, that they were 
 two distinct currents of intellectual life. This 
 is doubtless true. But it is the same breath 
 of the organ that thunders through the trum- 
 pet stop and whispers in the vox humana. 
 In the earlier legends, it is the poet who leads 
 the warriors, and the earlier legends were 
 justified when the poet of Thanatopsis and 
 "The Water-fowl" came down from the hills 
 to the newspaper office. In 1832, he was, as 
 he says, "wandering in Illinois hovering on 
 the skirts of the Indian war," when Washing- 
 ton Irving returned from his long European 
 absence. In the same year a complete edi- 
 
IVilliam Culleii Bryant. 49 
 
 tion of his poems was published in New York, 
 and he went to Europe in 1834 for the first 
 time, returning in 1836. In 1841, and the 
 following year, he travelled in the West and 
 South of the United States. In 1842, " The 
 Fountain " and other poems of seventeen 
 years were published, and in 1844 " The 
 White-footed Deer." He went again to 
 Europe in 1845, seeing England for the first 
 time. The next year a fully illustrated collec- 
 tion of his poems was issued, and in 1848 he 
 read a discourse upon Cole before the 
 National Academy of Design. In the sum- 
 mer of 1849 he went for the third time to 
 Europe, and upon his return, in 1850, he pub- 
 lished his " Letters of a Traveller." Early in 
 1852, he delivered a discourse on Cooper. 
 In the spring he was in Cuba, and during the 
 summer again in Europe. But amid all ac- 
 cumulating interests and duties and renown, 
 his unwearied editorial industry continued; 
 an industry of which his associate says, that 
 for five days out of every week, during forty- 
 two years of the fifty-two that he was the 
 chief editor, he was at his desk before eight 
 3 
 
50 A Coiiuiiemo>ative Address. 
 
 o'clock in the morning, and left upon his 
 journal in some form the daily impression of 
 his character and genius. 
 
 During all this time, also, the literature 
 that he had heralded he had seen arisine 
 around him ; and he greeted with cordial ap- 
 preciation poets, historians, story-tellers, es- 
 sayists, whose names we love and who have 
 made our name honorable. Yet, as his own 
 poems were published from time to time, it 
 was plain that through all the imposing 
 changes of form in English literature his 
 simple and severe genius remained un- 
 changed. Although he was a singularly 
 accomplished student ot the literature of 
 many languages, and while his translations 
 from other tongues are so felicitous that his 
 fellow master, Longfellow, praised some of 
 his Spanish translations, nearly fifty years 
 ago, as ri\'alling the original in beauty, jet 
 his own verse is as free from merely literary 
 influence or reminiscence as the pure air of 
 his native hills from the perfume of exotics. 
 
 Undoubtedly the grandeur and solemnity 
 of Wordsworth, as he told Dana, had stirred 
 
William Culleii Bryant. ' 5 1 
 
 his soul with sympathy. But not the false 
 simplicity that sometimes betrays Words- 
 worth, nor the lurid melodrama of Byron, nor 
 the aerial fervor of Shelley, nor the luxuriant 
 beauty of Keats, in whose line the Greek mar- 
 ble is sometimes suffused with a splendor as 
 of Venetian color, nor, in his later years, the 
 felicity and richness of Tennyson, who has 
 revealed the flexibility and picturesqueness 
 and modulated music of the English language 
 in lines which a line of Keats describes : 
 
 " Like lucent sirops tinct with cinnamon," 
 
 —not all these varying and entrancing strains 
 which captivated the public of the hour, 
 touched in the least the verse of Bryant. 
 His last considerable poem, "The Flood of 
 Years," but echoes in its meditative flow the 
 solemn cadences of Thanatopsis, The child 
 was father of the man. The genius of Bry- 
 ant, not profuse and imperial, neither intense 
 with dramatic passion nor throbbing with lyri- 
 cal fervor, but calm, meditative, pure, has its 
 true symbol among his native hills, a moun-r 
 tain-spring untainted by mineral or slime of 
 
52 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 earth or reptile venom, cool, limpid and se- 
 rene. His verse is the virile expression of 
 the healthy communion of a strong, sound 
 man with the familiar aspects of nature, and 
 its broad, clear, open-air quality has a certain 
 Homeric suggestiveness. It is not the poet- 
 ry of an eager enthusiasm ; it is not fascinat- 
 ing and overpowering to the sensibility of 
 youth. The first considerable collection of 
 1832 was not snatched from the booksellers' 
 hands, and four years had passed before it 
 had reached a fourth edition. Bryant found- 
 ed no school and he belonged to none, except 
 it be to the class of those who are vaguely 
 called poets of nature. His spirit is doubt- 
 less more akin to that of Wordsworth than to 
 any other of the " bards sublime," although 
 he had not Wordsworth's fertility and variety 
 and richness of imagination, and resembled 
 him only in the meditative character of his 
 genius. It is this essentially meditative char- 
 acter which makes the atmosphere of his poet- 
 ic world more striking than its forms ; and 
 thus his contribution of memorable lines to 
 our literature is not great, although there are 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 53 
 
 some lines of an unsurpassed majesty, and 
 again touches of fancy and imagination as 
 airy and delicate as the dance of fairies upon 
 a moonlit lawn. One stanza, indeed, perhaps 
 the most familiar in all his verse, will be long 
 the climax of patriotic appeal ; and for a thou- 
 sand years in the country that he loved, while 
 the absorbing contentions of politics shall 
 continue, and there shall be an ever higher 
 political aspiration and a nobler political en- 
 deavor, Bryant's lines will be the gathering 
 cry and battle song of brave soldiers of hu- 
 manity yet unborn : 
 
 " Truth crushed to earth shall rise again ; 
 The eternal years of God are hers : 
 But Error, wounded, writhes with pain 
 And dies among her worshippers.'' 
 
 Meanwhile, true to his principles, his party 
 associations were again changing, and the 
 close of the administration of Mr. Pierce 
 found Bryant in the opposition. He saw in 
 the situation of the country but one supreme 
 issue. He saw the system of slavery en- 
 trenched in vast interests, traditions, and 
 prejudices, in the spirit of party, in the 
 
54 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 timidity of trade, in constitutional interpreta- 
 tion, in the idolatry of the Union, and in a 
 vague and universal apprehension of the il- 
 limitable evil of resistance. He saw its vast 
 power. He acknowledged every lawful de- 
 fense, every plea of expediency, every appeal 
 of possible calamity. He had deprecated 
 agitation which seemed to him only to exas- 
 perate feeling and rivet bonds more closely. 
 But now he saw — not as a Democrat, not as 
 a New Yorker, not as a Northerner — he saw 
 as a man, that humanity was in danger, 
 where he could help ; he saw as an American, 
 that America was imperilled ; he saw as a 
 life-long lover of liberty, that liberty was 
 vitally assailed ; and as a man, as an Ameri- 
 can, as a lover of liberty, he declared, in the 
 spring of 1856, against the extension of 
 slavery, and five years later his whole political 
 faith burst forth in one indignant peal of 
 patriotism : 
 
 "Our country calls — away, away ! 
 
 To where the blood-stream blots the green ; 
 Strike to defend the gentlest sway 
 That time in all his course has seen. 
 
William Cnllen Bryant. 55 
 
 Strike for that broad and goodly land, 
 
 Blow after blow, till men shall see 
 That might and right move hand in hand, 
 
 And glorious must their triumph be." 
 
 But he renounced none of his political 
 principles, and when the tendency to a more 
 consolidated and powerful central authority 
 was naturally developed by the war, accord- 
 ing to the faith of his life, he counseled the 
 statesmanship of the Sun, not of the Wind, 
 and held that loyalty alienated from the 
 Union could be most surely restored and 
 equal rights most firmly secured only by 
 large dependence upon local law and local 
 feeling, by long patience and slow processes 
 of healing. It was the same man, the same 
 patriot, the same American, asserting the 
 same principles, who, in 1832, praised Jack- 
 son's proclamation against nullification, and, 
 in 1837, spurned all external interference re- 
 specting the qualification of voters in New 
 York; who, in 1863, sustained the Emanci- 
 pation Proclamation, and, in 1875, denounced 
 the interference of the national military power 
 with the Legislature of Louisiana. But as 
 
56 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 he passed through parties, so he passed out 
 of them. With increasing years his party 
 zeal diminished, and under the Hberalizing 
 and mellowing influence of time he gradually 
 became, as was said of Sir Robert Peel, 
 " himself a party." He had been a Federal- 
 ist, a Democrat, and a Republican ; but all 
 were only names of the various uniforms in 
 which he served the same cause, the cause of 
 his youth and of his age, the cause of America 
 and of human nature. 
 
 Bryant made his fifth voyage to Europe in 
 1857, travelling in Spain and Algiers, and he 
 published a volume of Letters from Spain 
 upon his return. He went again in 1865 and 
 1867, seven times in all. It was during his 
 absence, in 1858, that he was baptized in 
 Naples. He had been religiously bred in 
 New England Congregationalism, but when 
 he came to New York he went to the little 
 Ihiitarian church in Chambers Street, near 
 Broadway, of which William Ware, the mild 
 and apostolic author of the Letters from Pal- 
 myra, was pastor. He went afterwards to the 
 Second Church, of which Dr. Dewey and Dr. 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 57 
 
 Osgood were subsequently ministers, and he 
 stayed in that parish until 1863, when he found 
 the church of his old parish, now All Souls' 
 Church, of which the Reverend Dr. Bellows 
 was pastor, more accessible. In that parish 
 he remained, and from that church he was 
 buried. But while his religious, like his politi- 
 cal convictions, were positive, sectarian, like 
 political bonds, did not hold him closely. The 
 spirit of liberty, which was the native air of 
 his soul, fostered the celestial graces of faith, 
 hope, charity, and he was, as his poetry and 
 his life testify, essentially a religious man. 
 The poem called " The Life that is," dated 
 at Castellamare, in May, 1858, commemorates 
 the recovery of his wife from a serious illness. 
 A little time before, in the month of April, 
 after a long walk with his friend, the Rever- 
 end Mr. Waterston, of Boston, on the shore 
 of the Bay of Naples, he spoke with softened 
 heart of the new beauty that he felt in the old 
 truth, and proposed to his friend to baptize 
 him. With prayer and hymn and spiritual 
 meditation, a little company of seven, says 
 Mr. Waterston, in a large upper room, as in 
 
58 A Commemorative Address. 
 
 the Christian story, partook of the commu- 
 nion, and, with his good gray head bowed 
 down, Bryant was baptized. 
 
 During all these busy years he had become 
 a man of threescore and ten. The pleasant 
 city that he knew when he came to New 
 York was now the chief city of the Western 
 Continent, one of the great cities of the 
 world; and the poet whose immortal distinc- 
 tion it was to have written the first memorable 
 American poem, and whose fame was part of 
 the national glory — the editor who, with per- 
 fect unselfishness and unswerving fidelity, had 
 expounded and defended great fundamental 
 principles of national progress and prosperity, 
 became our Patriarch, our Mentor, our most 
 conspicuous citizen. Every movement of art 
 and literature, of benevolence and good citi- 
 zenship, sought the decoration of his name. 
 His presence was the grace of every festival, 
 and although he had always instinctively 
 shrunk from personal publicity, he yielded to 
 a fate, benignant for the community, and to 
 his other distinctions added that of the occa- 
 sional orator. Yet all such associations were 
 
William Cullen Bryant. 59 
 
 not: only gilded with the luster of his renown ; 
 they had not only the advantage of his ample 
 knowledge and various observations, but there 
 was the stimulus of his temperament and 
 character. His companions in society and at 
 the club know that his great literary accom- 
 plishment was absolutely without pedantry, 
 while it gave his conversation and writing the 
 charm of apt allusion and most felicitous 
 quotation ; but they know also how much 
 greater was the man than the scholar, and 
 that his character was as fine as his genius. 
 
 We saw in his life the simple dignity which 
 we associate with the old republics. So Ly- 
 curgus may have ruled in Sparta, so Cato 
 may have walked in Rome — an uncrowned 
 regality in that venerable head, as of one 
 nurtured in Republican air, upon Republican 
 traditions. But here and now, at this season, 
 when our hearts recur to that Pilgrim Land- 
 ing from which so much of America sprang, 
 we may gratefully remember that this son of 
 New England was always, in the most gen- 
 erous and representative sense, an American. 
 He loitered with the sympathy of a poet. 
 
6o A Commemorative Address. 
 
 with the fondness of a scholar, with the -in- 
 terest of a political thinker, in other and 
 historic lands. He saw the Rhine and the 
 Danube, Italy, Germany, England and Spain, 
 Palestine and the West Indies. He was wel- 
 comed and flattered by famous men and beau- 
 tiful women ; but grave and simple, pleased 
 but untouched, he passed through the maze 
 of blandishment as a cool north wind blows 
 through a garden of spices. Whoever saw 
 Bryant saw America. Whoever talked with 
 him felt the characteristic tone of American 
 life. Whoever knew him comprehended the 
 reason and perceived the quality of American 
 greatness. Many Americans have been as 
 warmly welcomed in other lands, many have 
 acknowledged a generous hospitality with as 
 gracious courtesy, but no one ever more fully 
 and truly carried with him the perfectly ap- 
 preciative but undazzled America ; America 
 tranquil, content and expectant, the untitled 
 cousin of the older world, born to as great a 
 heritage and satisfied with her OAvn. You 
 will bear me witness, for you knew him, that 
 in the same way here at home he American- 
 
IVilliam Ciclleii Bryant. 6i 
 
 ized every occasion, every enterprise in which 
 he took part. I have seen him at some offer- 
 ing of homage to a foreign guest, skillfully 
 withstanding the current of excessive compli- 
 ment, natural at such times, yet without 
 morose dissent, and only by a shrewd and 
 playful humor, and with most friendly regard 
 for the rites of hospitality, gently" reminding 
 us that manly and self-respecting courtesy 
 never bows too low. 
 
 From his childhood and through all his 
 eighty-four years his habits of life were tem- 
 perate and careful. The spring in a sheltered 
 upland nook at Cummington is still shown, in 
 which the infant boy was bathed, and the care 
 which was there prefigured was the amulet 
 that charmed his life. A plain, sweet method 
 of living was natural to him, and the same 
 moderation, which was the law of his mental 
 and moral being, asserted itself in every 
 bodily habit. He rose early, took active exer- 
 cise, walked far and easily, spared work at 
 night, yet had time for every duty of a fully 
 occupied life, and at seventy-one sat down in 
 the shadow of the great sorrow of his life to 
 
62 A CoiiuiicDioraiive Address. 
 
 seek a wise distraction in translating the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey. His sobriety was 
 effortless ; it was that of a sound man, not of 
 an ascetic. He was not a vegetarian nor a 
 total abstainer from wine ; but of tobacco, he 
 said, playfully, that he did not meddle with it 
 except to quarrel with its use. No man ever 
 bore the burden of years more lightly, and 
 men of younger generations saw with admira- 
 tion and amazement an agility that shamed 
 their own. At fourscore his eyes were un- 
 dimmed, and his ears had a boy's acuteness. 
 Temperance, regularity, supreme good sense 
 were his only rules of living, and these 
 brought him to that hale and gracious age in 
 which he could have applied to himself most 
 fittingly the lofty lines of Emerson : 
 
 " As the bird trims her to the gale, 
 I trim myself to the storm of time, 
 I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
 Obey the voice at eve, obeyed at prime : 
 
 ' Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
 Right onward drive unharmed. 
 The port well worth the cruise is near. 
 And every wave is charmed ! ' " 
 
William Cjtllcn Bryant. 6^^ 
 
 It is more than time that my voice were 
 stilled, but I linger and linger, for when these 
 words are spoken, the last formal commemo- 
 ration of our poet will have ended, and we 
 shall leave him to history and good fame. 
 The whole earth, said Pericles, is the tomb of 
 illustrious men. But how especially the char- 
 acteristic aspects of American nature become 
 to the imagination and memory memorials of 
 Bryant. The primeval woods, " God's first 
 temples," breathe the solemn benediction of 
 his verse. The rosy splendor of orchards in 
 the bright June sunshine recall the singer of 
 the planting of the apple tree — the kindly 
 eye, the manly heart, 
 
 " Whose part in all the pomp that fills 
 The circuit of the summer hills. 
 Is that his grave is green." 
 
 The water-fowl at evening high in the depths 
 of heaven, "lone wandering, but not lost," 
 figures his lofty, pure, and solitary strain : 
 
 "And poured round all 
 Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste," 
 
64 A Coiujiieniorative Address. 
 
 murmurs his name forever along the shores 
 we love. 
 
 Here, then, we leave him, with tender 
 reverence for the father of our song, with 
 grateful homage to the spotless and faithful 
 citizen, with affectionate admiration for the 
 simple and upright man. Here we leave him, 
 and we — we go forward refreshed, strength- 
 ened, inspired, by the light of the life which, 
 like a star serene and inextinguishable, 
 
 " P'lames in the forehead of our morning sky."