midshipman, who printed at Baltimore in 1825 a small volume of poems containing the one beginning,

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone."

These were the bardlings and songsters. We turn now to the one man born in America before 1800 whose call to poetry was both high and steadfastly, consistently honored.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, 1794-1878

William Cullen Bryant virtually belongs, like Irving and Cooper, to New York, though he was a native of New England and wrote his earliest poetry there. He was

Early Life.

born in the autumn of 1794 in the little town of Cummington, where the north fork of the Westfield River goes "brawling over a bed of loose stones in a very narrow valley" in the semi-mountainous region of western Massachusetts. He was the second of seven children. His ancestors had been Americans for generations, several of them having been among the passengers of the Mayflower. His father was a pl ysician and surgeon, of abilities quite beyond the small country practice with which he contented himself; he also served several terms in the state legislature. His mother was a model housewife, equally adept, as her diary shows, at "teaching Cullen his letters" and "making him a pair of breeches "

The boy's early schooling was carried on at home and at the district school. At home he had the use of a library exceptionally fine for that time and place, containing, as it did, most of the world's classics from Plutarch to Shakespeare, together with such English classics as Gibbon, Johnson, and Wordsworth. His outdoor sports were many,—trout-fishing, squirrel-hunting, and snow-balling; and there were the time-honored devices for turning work into play at the seasons of making maple-syrup and cider, and husking corn. raisings and singing-schools varied the diversions.

Barn

Few of

these things, however, found their way into young Cullen's verses-for he began to write verses in his ninth year. Boylike, he was ambitious of greater themes and sought exercise in paraphrasing the Book of Job, or in celebrating an eclipse in turgid lines:

moon.

"How awfully sublime and grand to see

The lamp of Day wrapped in Obscurity !"

Of course, in this juvenile verse, the sun's ray is "genial," birds sit upon the spray," "stillness broods," and so forth. It is difficult now to understand how people of taste could ever delight in such circumlocutions as "the lamp of day" or such stately phraseology as "to see the sun remove behind the But so it was. The English poetic models upon which Bryant formed his taste were full of this sort of thing, and he naturally caught the manner. Unfortunately, it was a manner from which he never, even in his best work, entirely escaped. At the age of thirteen he wrote a poem that was published at Boston (1808) in pamphlet form. It was a political satire in five hundred lines, called The Embargo, and was aimed at the unpopular policy of Jefferson's administration in closing our ports to foreign commerce because of certain disputes with Great Britain. In it the President was held up to scorn along with Error and Faction and other monsters that made "injured Commerce weep." There was sufficient reason why the poem should be popular then, though there is no reason why it should be remembered now except as the work of a very precocious little boy.

He was sent away to an uncle to learn Latin; then to a minister in a neighboring township, where he paid a dollar a week for his bodily and mental fare, the former chiefly bread and milk, the latter Greek and mathematics. In the fall of 1810 he went to Williams College, where he remained seven months. This completed his schooling. He made some prepa

ration for continuing his studies at Yale, but his father was unable to send him there, and he had to content himself with chanting Greek choruses among the Hampshire hills, or making his own first essays at poetry.

"Thanatopsis."

It was during a ramble among these hills in the autumn of 1811, when he was not yet quite seventeen years old, that the conception of Thanatopsis ("Vision of Death") came to him; and the composition immediately followed. He had been reading Blair's poem, The Grave, and certain verses of Kirke White's and Southey's, and these may have helped to suggest the sombre theme of his own poem; but the immediate inspiration came from the autumnal scene around him, the subdued colors of earth and sky, the bare branches, the fallen leaves, and the decaying trunks of the forest trees. He went home and, sitting at his father's desk, began to write in the middle of a line;

"Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course."

He broke off, almost as abruptly, in the middle of the forty ninth line, and left the poem in a pigeon-hole of the desk. There it was afterward found by his father, who had always taken a sympathetic interest in his poetical exercises, and who realized at once that this was a good poem, though it is doubtful whether even a father's pride enabled him to realize just how good. He at least thought it worthy to be offered to the North American Review, with the result described earlier in this chapter. It is interesting to turn to that old number of the Review and read the poem in its first form. We miss the

familiar beginning:

"To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.”

We miss also the homily at the close, which, although not the best part of the poem, is the most fréquently quoted:

"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."

These additions were made when Bryant published his first thin volume of poems in 1821, and a few further changes were made afterward. But the central theme, the universality of death, was fully set forth in the original form and required no changes to make it complete. This youth in his seventeenth year had quite unconsciously produced a poem which none of the brilliant galaxy of poets then ascendant in England would have been ashamed to own. If it be true, as we have said, that no American boy can afford not to read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, it is almost equally true that no one who cares to cultivate a love of the best in poetry can afford not to learn by heart the eighty-one lines of Thanatopsis.

Of course the anonymous, fragmentary-looking bit of verse brought no immediate fame to Bryant, who was industriously preparing himself for the very practical life he was destined to lead. He read law, and in 1815 was licensed to practice. The celebrated lines To a Waterfowl were the outcome of an incident of this stage in his career. He was walking to a neighboring village with the object of finding a place to open a law office, and chanced to observe the flight of a lone bird across the evening sky.

"Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths_dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way."

He fancied he saw in this uncompanioned voyage along "that pathless coast, the desert and illimitable air," a likeness to his own situation and, full of the forebodings natural to a young man when first confronting the world, he sought to derive from it consolation:

Public
Career.

"He who from zone to zone

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone

Will lead my steps aright."

After some years of practice at Great Barrington, and after his marriage, which followed upon the lyrical prelude of "Oh fairest of the rural maids," Bryant determined to abandon the law, partly because of his disgust at learning that in that profession mere technicalities could sometimes defeat justice, and partly because he longed for larger opportunities. In 1825 he went to New York and entered upon what proved to be his lifelong career-journalism. He succeeded rather slowly at first, but after his connection with the Evening Post, and especially after his succession to the chief editorship of that journal, his fortunes rapidly mended. He not only made the Evening Post a newspaper of the highest rank, but by the purity of his life and ideals, and the courage with which he always espoused what he believed to be the right, he sensibly elevated the somewhat low tone of the American press, and exercised a profound and wholesome influence upon American politics and public life. He lived and acted in the full conviction that, in his own words, "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers;

But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,

And dies among his worshippers."

For fifty years he faithfully performed the exacting duties that fell to him, finding change and rest in half a dozen voyage