BRYANT was born of good New England stock,

in Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794. His father, Peter Bryant, was a village physician of more than ordinary culture, carefully educated, a student of English and French poetry, and had a respectable talent for rhyming. His mother was descended from John and Priscilla Alden. She was a pious, dignified, sensible woman, whom her son alludes to, in one of his poems, as the "stately lady." The boy was named William Cullen from a celebrated physician in Edinburgh, and his father meant that he should be of that profession, but the son showed such a decided aversion to it that the matter was dropped. The rugged and picturesque hillcountry around the Bryant homestead seems to have developed in the boy that absorbing love of nature which, in after life, was one of his distinguishing characteristics. His grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, was the resident terror of the household. He gloried in his Puritan ancestors; and, as a magistrate, sent offenders, with fierce willingness, to the whipping-post, then a common institution in Massachusetts; and his home rule was hardly less rigorous. From his harsh and severe discipline the boy fled to the hills and woods to be soothed by "the love of nature." He took refuge, in after life, in Unitarianism, and, as he grew to manhood, and beyond, he developed a coldness of manner and of mind that made him appear, outside of his intimates, and the intimate expression of a few poems-somewhat austere.

After a good preparatory education, Bryant entered Williams College, but some family losses prevented his taking a degree. One was afterwards conferred upon him, that of

A. M.; and his name is enrolled as an alumnus of the College. After leaving college he studied law for three years, and, in 1815, he was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of his profession in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Here also he married.

In 1825 Bryant removed to New York and began his real life work, that of journalism; becoming, after some preliminary literary skirmishing, editor of the Evening Post. As head of that singularly elevated and reliable paper he made his mark as the foremost journalist of the United States; the Puritan austerity of his mind showing itself in his choice of words, his exclusion of slang, trivialities, sensationalism, and crude jokes, and in the intellectual clear-cut precision of his editorials. He gave sixty years of his life to newspaper work; became rich and influential; was celebrated as a critic; crossed the ocean several times, and allied himself to the best everywhere. While at home he spent the year between his house in New York, and his beautiful estate at Roslyn, Long Island.

The management of the Evening Post was Bryant's lifework; poetry was his recreation. The lad began to compose verse when he was ten years old, and to publish in his early teens. He wrote his most celebrated poem, "Thanatopsis," when not yet eighteen years of age. The first draft of the poem lay among the author's private papers for nearly five years, was discovered by his father, and sent by him to the North American Review, which accepted and published it in September, 1817. It was received with a sort of rapture here and on the other side of the Atlantic; it was the best poem yet written in America. It was and is unique. It placed Bryant in that goodly company, with Wordsworth and his fellows, who opened to men the life of Nature and the truth of Nature's God.

In 1874 Mr. Bryant was honored with an exquisite silver vase, symbolical of his life and writings, procured by public subscription, presented with appropriate ceremonies, and placed in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. He died suddenly, in June, 1878, after reciting, with marvellous fire and enthusiasm, a passage from Dante, at the unveiling of

the bust of Mazzini, in Central Park. He was in the eightyfourth year of his age.

Bryant wrote altogether one hundred and seventy-one original poems; one hundred of these treat exclusively of Nature, the others, whatever their subject, include expressions of the charms of Nature. He sings little of love, little of humanity, nothing of the wrongs of mankind. Poetry is his retreat, his temple, almost his religion; and many of his verses give that still sense of seclusion as of distant nut-dropping woods. Bryant's best known poems, after "Thanatopsis," are "The Death of the Flowers," "A Forest Hymn," "The Fringed Gentian," "The West Wind," "The Wind and the Stream," "Autumn Woods," "The Flood of Ages," and the hymn, "Blessed are they that Mourn." In his old age he made a noble translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in blank

verse.

THANATOPSIS.

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours.
She has a voice of gladness and a smile.
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
In his darker musings, with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around-
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air-
Comes a still voice-Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone,-nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world-with kings,
The powerful of the earth-the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,

Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings-yet-the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep-the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,

The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man,—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and

sere.

Heaped in the hollows of the groves, the withered leaves lie dead:
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from their shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood

In brighter light and softer airs-a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they are all in their graves: the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie; but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago:
And the briar-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow:
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague

on men,