NOVEMBER 3

WM. CULLEN BRYANT

I

Bryant's life was almost contemporary with Bancroft's. He was born six years earlier and died thirteen years earlier, lacking sixteen years of completing a century. He was born Nov. 3, 1794. His father was a western Massachusetts physician of Puritan stock, and his mother was, like Longfellow's, a lineal descendant of John Alden, and Priscilla Mullins. He was precocious from the start. His head was of such abnormal size that his father used to dip it every morning in a spring of cold water. He knew his letters when he was sixteen months old, went to school at four, could repeat Watts's hymns at five, made verse at eight, and at ten delivered a rhymed address, and got ninepence from his grandfather for turning the first chapter of Job into verse. At fourteen

he brought out two political poems, and when a second edition was demanded a certificate of his age was inserted. At seventeen he wrote the poem Thanatopsis, which still gives him his greatest fame. At twenty-five he read the poem before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa society, at thirty-one became editor of the United States Review, and at thirty-five of the Evening Post, on which his main work was to be for half a century.

ter two terms, and studied law. practised for a time in Plainfield and Great Barrington, but gave much of his time to writing. In

GULIAN C. VERPLANCK, 1786-1870 1821 he published his first collection of poems. It was reviewed with warm commendation by Gulian C. Verplanck, the literary authority of the

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time, through whom he was appointed assistant editor of a projected periodical to be called the New York Review. In 1825 he removed to New York, but the magazine did not prove a success, and his poems brought him little. When in his later life a friend spoke of paying $20 for a copy of the first edition of his poems, Mr. Bryant said, "More by a long shot than I ever received for writing the whole work"." So the young poet gave up literature as a profession, writing to his friend Dana, "You know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation"." In 1828 he entered journalism, soon becoming editor-in-chief and part owner of the Evening Post.

III

In this he was eminently successful. The Evening Post when he took it was a strong federalist paper, but he changed it into an organ of democracy and free trade. Journalism was somewhat violent in those days, and he never hesitated to express his opinions with emphasis and to defend them even when personal violence was threatened. On one occasion he attacked another editor,

William L. Stone, with a cowhide. He defended the abolitionists and opposed the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico. The paper was denounced by his party, and he was instrumental in forming the free-soil party in 1848. In 1856 he joined the republican party, and in 1860 was one of the presidential electors of Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the war he was a vehement defender of the Union, and an advocate of the emancipation of the slaves; after the war he counselled a policy of reconciliation. Prosperity followed his adherence to conviction, and in his later life he was able to gratify all his tastes. His residence at Roslyn, Long Island, was known as Cedar

mere.

IV

What might have been his literary rank had the rewards of his strictly literary work been sufficient to warrant him in giving all his time to it, can perhaps hardly be estimated. Certainly the spare time that he gave to poetry in his later life did not produce anything to equal the importance of his early work. When a man who dies at