their author, but neither exhibits the full measure of his powers. The publication of Bryant's little volume of verse was indirectly the cause of his adopting literature as a profession. It was warmly commended, and by no one more so than by Gillian C. Verplanck in the columns of the New York “American.” He was something of a literary authority at the time, a man of fortune and college-bred. Among his friends was Henry D. Sedgwick, a summer neighbor, so to speak, of Bryant's, having a country-house at Stockbridge, a few miles from Great Barrington, and a house in town, which was frequented by the literati of the day, such as Cooper, Halleck, Percival, Verplanck, and others of less note. An admirer of Bryant, Mr. Sedgwick set to work, with the assistance of Mr. Verplanck, to procure him literary employment in New York in order to enable him to escape his bondage to the law; and he was appointed assistant editor of a projected periodical called the “New York Review and Athenæum Magazine.” The at last enfranchised lawyer dropped his barbarous pen, closed his law-books, and in the winter or spring of 1825 removed with his household to New York. The projected periodical was begun, as these sanguine ventures always are, with fair hopes of success. It was well edited, and its contributors were men of acknowledged ability. The June number contained two poems that ought to have made a great hit. One was “A Song of Pitcairn's Island”; the other was “Marco Bozzaris.” There was no flourish of trumpets over them, as there would be now; the writers merely prefixed their initials, “B.” and “H.” The reading public of New York were not ready for the “Review,” so after about a year's struggle it was merged in the “New York Literary Gazette,” which had begun its mission about four years earlier. This magazine shared the fate of its companion in a few months, when it was consolidated with the “United States Literary Gazette,” which in two months was swallowed up in the “United States Review.” The honor of publishing and finishing the last was shared by Boston and New York. Profit in these publications there was none, though Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Dana, Bancroft, and Longfellow wrote for them. Too good, or not good enough, they lived and died prematurely.
Mr. Bryant's success as a metropolitan man of letters was not brilliant so far; but other walks than those of pure literature were open to him as to others, and into one of the most bustling of these he entered in his thirty-second year. In other words, he became one of the editors of the “Evening Post.” Henceforth he was to live by journalism. Journalism, though an exacting pursuit, leaves its skilful followers a little leisure in which to cultivate literature. It was the heyday of those ephemeral trifles, “Annuals,” and Mr. Bryant found time to edit one. with the assistance of his friend Mr. Verplanck and his acquaintance Robert C. Sands; and a very creditable work it was. His contributions to “The Talisman” included some of his best poems. Poetry was the natural expression of his genius, a fact he could never understand, for it always seemed to him that prose was the natural expression of all mankind. His prose was masterly. Its earliest examples, outside of his critical papers in the “North American Review” and other periodicals (and outside of the “Evening Post,” of course), are two stories entitled “Medfield” and “The Skeleton's Cave,” contributed to “Tales of the Glauber Spa” (1832), a collection of original stories by Paulding, Verplanck, Sands, William Leggett. and Catharine Sedgwick. Three years before (1828) he had become the chief editor of the “Evening Post.” Associated with him was Mr. Leggett, who had shown some talent as a writer of sketches and stories, and who had failed, like himself, in conducting a critical publication for which his countrymen were not ready. He made a second collection of his poems at this time (1832), a copy of which was sent by Mr. Verplanck to Washington Irving, who was then, what he had been for years, the idol of English readers, and not without weight with the trade. Would he see if some English house would not reprint it? No leading publisher nibbled at it, not even Murray, who was Irving's publisher; but an obscure bookseller named Andrews finally agreed to undertake it if Irving would put his valuable name on the title-page as editor. He was not acquainted with Bryant, but he was a kind-hearted, large-souled gentleman, who knew good poetry when he saw it, and he consented to “edit” the book. It was not a success in the estimation of Andrews, who came to him one day, by no means a merry Andrew, and declared that the book would ruin him unless one or more changes were made in the text. What was amiss in it? He turned to the “Song of Marion's Men,” and stumbled over an obnoxious couplet in the first stanza:
| “ | The British soldier trembles |
| When Marion's name is told.” |
“That won't do at all, you know.” The absurdity
of the objection must have struck the humorist
comically; but, as he wanted the volume republished,
he good-naturedly saved the proverbial
valor of the British soldier by changing the first
line to
“The foeman trembles in his camp,”
and the tempest in a teapot was over, as far as
England was concerned. Not as far as the United
States was concerned, however, for when the
circumstance became known to Mr. Leggett he
excoriated Irving for his subserviency to a bloated
aristocracy, and so forth. Prof. Wilson reviewed
the book in “Blackwood's” in a half-hearted way,
patronizing the writer with his praise.
The poems that Bryant wrote during the first seven years of his residence in New York (about forty, not including translations) exhibited the qualities that distinguished his genius from the beginning, and were marked by characteristics rather acquired than inherited; in other words, they were somewhat different from those written at Great Barrington. The Hellenic element was still visible in “The Greek Partisan” and “The Greek Boy,” and the aboriginal element in “The Disinterred Warrior.” The large imagination of “The Hymn to the North Star” was radiant in “The Firmament” and in “The Past.” Ardent love of nature found expressive utterance in “Lines on Revisiting the Country,” “The Gladness of Nature,” “A Summer Ramble,” “A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson,” and “The Evening Wind.” The little book of immortal dirges had a fresh leaf added to it in “The Death of the Flowers,” which was at once a pastoral of autumn and a monody over a beloved sister. A new element appeared in “The Summer Wind,” and was always present afterward in Mr. Bryant's meditative poetry — the association of humanity with nature — a calm but sympathetic recognition of the ways of man and his presence on the earth. The power of suggestion and of rapid generalization, which was the key-note of “The Ages,” lived anew in every line of “The Prairies,” in which a series of poems present themselves to the imagination as a series of pictures in a gallery — pictures in which breadth
