INTRODUCTION
By Professor Curtis Hidden Page
Deep were my musings in life's early blossom
'Mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering long,
wrote Bryant in a poem first printed by the New York Review for February, 1826. Bryant had just come to New York, in 1825, to be associate editor of this newly founded magazine. He had at last decided to give up his profession of the law, which was so irksome; no longer to
. . . scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,
And mingle among the jostling crowd,
Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud,
but to return to the "calm life" of thought and poetry—
That won my heart in my greener years,
and to have the courage to be, for better or for worse, a man of letters. This decision had been reached only after much reflection and hesitation, after many nightly wanderings
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