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William Cullen Bryant)

(This portrait is from "Masterpieces of American Literature", and used by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers)

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

ninety-four is best known by a poem he wrote at seventeen, the promise of his youth has not been fulfilled. He published another edition of his poems in 1832, and still another, somewhat enlarged, in 1842. In 1863 he published "Thirty Poems", which were afterwards incorporated in the regular editions. He never tried to write a long poem, holding the opinion afterwards elaborated by Poe, that a long poem is, like a long ecstasy, impossible, and that the great works of Homer, Dante, Spencer, Tasso, and Milton, are merely a collection of short poems strung together upon a thread of story'.

V

After the death of his wife in 1872 he felt like Longfellow the necessity of some distraction from the sorrows of his loss, and like Longfellow (see page 52) undertook translation, turning the Iliad and the Odyssey into blank verse at the rate of forty lines a day. But the best literary work of his later life was his orations and addresses, many of which showed much power as well as grace. To the last of these addresses he owed his death. He had accepted the invi

A Meditative Poet

301

tation of the Italian residents of New York to speak at the unveiling of the statute of Mazzini in Central Park on May 29, 1878. He was exposed to the sun for some hours, and after walking across the Park fell as he assended the steps of the house of a friend. He was stunned, and died on June 12.

VI

He had a distinct poetic creed that the best poetry was to be found "in the vicissitudes of human life, in the emotions of the human heart, and in the relations of man to man," and that he who can present them in combinations and lights which at once affect the mind with a deep sense of their truth and beauty is the poet." Yet this hardly describes the poems by which he is the best known. He was eminently a meditative poet. As such he is often compared with Wordsworth, whose "Excursion" was written after "Thanatopsis". Stedman says that Wordsworth was the master of Bryant's youth; and quotes him as saying that "Upon opening Wordsworth a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature of a sudden to change into

strange freshness and life1." But while in choice of simple subjects in nature and in manner Bryant resembles Wordsworth, he has no such profundity or breadth of view. VII

Nor has he the same care in expression. Dorothy Wordsworth remarks somewhere in her journal, "William has come back tired: he has spent all day in thinking of an adjective for the cuckoo." But Bryant does not hesitate to write, "The sun was near his set10."

As a recent critic has well pointed out, in Wordsworth we find this sensitive recognition of nature "through the veil that seems to hide",-nature as we would fain believe her, our virgin mother, a Primavera singing out of the very dust of which our bodies are wrought. In Bryant we find that Nature is but a key to himself. High, serene, calm, and sometimes beautifully so, she rises like an eidolon of Bryant1o.

He continues,

VIII

Through Wordsworth we learn love and reverence for nature; he teaches us that she will suffer

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