IV WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT In the early summer of 1878 there died at New York, from a sunstroke received just after delivering a speech at the unveiling of a monument in Central Park, William Cullen Bryant, by far the most eminent man of letters in our chief city. The circumstances of his death show how thoroughly he retained his vitality to the end; and his striking personal appearance combined with the extreme physical activity which kept him constantly in the streets to make him a familiar local figure. To any one who can remember New York twentyfive years ago, then, the memory of Bryant must be so vivid as to make startling the truth that if he had lived till now he would have been well past his century. In his later years the younger generation of Americans who were beginning to feel interest in literature had a way of rather deriding him. They were told that he was a great poet; and turning to the numerous collections of his works, they found little which impressed them as better than respectably commonplace. The prolonged life of the man, in fact, had combined with his unusual physical vitality to make people forget that his first published work-a very precocious one, to be sure, had appeared before Brockden Brown died, in the same year with Scott's "Marmion;" and that this remote 1808 had seen the " Quarterly Review" founded in England, and Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. They forgot that Bryant's "Thanatopsis," presented to them as the work of a contemporary and vigorous man of letters, had been printed in 1817, the year in which Byron wrote "Manfred," in which Jane Austen died, in which Coleridge produced his Biographia Literaria," and Keats the first volume of his poems, and Mrs. Shelley her "Frankenstein," and Moore his "Lalla Rookh." They forgot that a collected edition of Bryant's poems had appeared in 1821, the year when Keats died, when the first version of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater " came into existence, when Scott published "Kenilworth" and the "Pirate," and Shelley "Adonais." And incidentally they forgot what Bryant's general bearing rather encouraged them to forget, that besides being what he preferred to think himself, a poet, he was the most admirably successful journalist whom America has yet produced. For a full half-century he was at the head of the New York "Evening Post," which brought him the rare reward of a considerable personal fortune earned by a newspaper in which from beginning to end the editor could feel honest pride. As a journalist, indeed, Bryant belongs almost to our own time. As a poet, however, and it is as a poet that we are considering him here, he belongs to the earliest period of our native letters. He was born, the son of a country doctor, at Cummington, a small town of Western Massachusetts, in 1794. At that time a country doctor, though generally poor, was, like the minister and the squire, an educated man, and so a person of local eminence; and Dr. Bryant, who was occasionally a member of the General Court at Boston, came to have a considerable acquaintance among the better sort of people in Massachusetts. The son was extremely precocious. When he was only thirteen years old, verses of his were printed in a country newspaper; and a year later, in 1808, his satire on President Jefferson, "The Embargo," was brought to Boston by his admiring father and actually published. The only particular merit of this poem is accuracy of rhyme and metre, a trait of deliberate excellence which Bryant preserved until the end. For a year or so the boy went to Williams College, but as his father was too poor to keep him there, he soon entered a lawyer's office. Law, however, proved by no means congenial to him; he wanted to be a man of letters. In this aspiration his father sympathised; and when the son was twenty-three years of age, the father took to Boston a collection of his manuscripts among which was "Thanatopsis," already six years old. These manuscripts Dr. Bryant submitted to Mr. Willard Phillips, one of the three editors of the "North American Review," then lately founded. Delighted with the verses, Phillips showed them to his colleagues, Mr. Richard Henry Dana and Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing. The story of the way in which these gentlemen received the poems throws light on the condition of American letters in 1817. According to Mr. Parke Godwin's biography of Bryant, "they listened attentively to his reading of them, when Dana, at the close, remarked with a quiet smile: Ah! Phillips, you have been imposed upon; no one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses."" Four years later, in 1821, Bryant delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College a poem, "The Ages," which remains his. longest; and in the same year he published in pamphlet form eight poems. There were only forty-four pages in all; but among the poems were both "The Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis." The life of a country lawyer becoming more and more distasteful to him, he determined to move to town. He thought seriously of going to Boston, a city with which at that time his affiliations were stronger than with any other; but instead he cast in his lot with New York, to which he finally removed in 1825. At that time Brockden Brown had been dead for fifteen years, and the reputations of Irving and of Cooper were established. At that time, too, there was in New York a considerable literary activity of which the results are now pretty generally forgotten. Whoever is curious to know something about it may turn to one or two works which may be found in any considerable public library. One is Rufus Wilmot Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America," published in 1842; it was followed within ten years by his "Prose Writers of America" and his "Female Poets of America;" and in 1856 came the first edition of Evert Augustus Duyckinck's "Cyclopedia of American Literature." A comparison of these with Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature" will surprisingly reveal how much has been written in this country which even so catholic a taste as that of these latest editors has already been compelled to reject. Almost the only survival of New York poetry before Bryant came there, indeed, is Samuel Woodworth's accidentally popular "Old Oaken Bucket." The mere name of James Kirke Paulding, to be sure, who was associated with Irving in the Salmagundi Papers," and who subsequently wrote a number of novels, and other prose, is still faintly remembered; and so are the names rather than the actual work of two poets, Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck. Drake, born in 1795, had died in 1820. He was a gentleman and a man of taste. He wrote several pretty things, among them a poem published after his death, entitled "The Culprit Fay." This conventional tale of some tiny fairies, supposed to haunt the Hudson River, is so much better than American poetry had previously been that one is at first disposed to speak of it enthusiastically. An obvious comparison puts it in true perspective. Drake's life happened nearly to coincide with that of Keats. Both left us only broken fragments of what they might have done, had they been spared; but the contrast between these fragments tells afresh the story of American letters. Amid the full fervour of European experience Keats produced immortal work; Drake, whose whole life was passed amid the national inexperience of New York, produced only pretty fancies. When he tried heroics he could make no better verses than such as these from his poem on "The American Flag": "When Freedom from her mountain height She tore the azure robe of night, "Flag of the free heart's hope and home! And all thy hues were born in heaven. Where breathes the foe but falls before us, And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?" Fitz-Greene Halleck, five years older, survived Drake by forty-seven years. If we except his Campbell-like "Marco Bozzaris," however, which was published in 1825, his only surviving lines are comprised in the first stanza of his poem on the death of Drake, written in 1820: "Green be the turf above thee, In 1811, Halleck and Drake contributed to the New York Evening Post" a series of poetical satires entitled "The Croaker Papers;" and Halleck published a mildly satirical poem entitled "Fanny," which may be described as a dilution of Byron with Croton water. In 1827 he brought out "Alnwick Castle" and other poems. In 1832 his poetic career was virtually closed by his acceptance of a clerical position in the employ of Mr. John Jacob Astor. The general insignificance of New York letters at the time when Bryant first |