In June, 1821, Bryant married Miss Frances Fairchild of Great Barrington. In April of this year he had been invited to give the usual poetic 'address' before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. 'The Ages' was written for this occasion and publicly read on August 30. At the instance of his Boston friends, Bryant printed 'The Ages' with seven other pieces in a little pamphlet entitled Poems.

Never in love with the law, the poet began to regard it with aversion. He was intellectually restless and took to play-writing. A farce, 'The Heroes,' in ridicule of duelling, was sent to his friends, the Sedgwicks, in New York, who admitted its merits but doubted its chances of success on the stage. Bryant, at the suggestion of Henry Sedgwick, made two or three visits to the city in search of congenial work. He thought he had found it when he undertook to edit The New York Re'view and Athenæum Magazine,' a periodical made by amalgamating 'The Atlantic Magazine' with the older 'Literary Review.' Bryant wrote to a friend that it was a livelihood, 'and a livelihood is 'all I got from the law.'

The editor of the Review' was active in various ways. He studied the Romance languages, gave a course of lectures on poetry before the Athenæum Society (1825), and annual courses on mythology before the National Academy of the Arts of Design (1826-31). He was amused with

BRYANT'S LIFE

New York life; Great Barrington had not been amusing. He published verse and prose in his own review and helped Sands and Verplanck edit their annual, The Talisman.' Somewhat later he edited Tales of the Glauber Spa (1832), the joint work of Sands, Leggett, Paulding, Miss Sedgwick, and himself.1

The Review' suffered from changes in the business management, and Bryant's prospects became gloomy. At this juncture (1826) he was invited to act as assistant to William Coleman, editor of the New York Evening Post.' In 1828 he became a small proprietor in the estab'lishment,' and when Coleman died (July, 1829) Bryant assumed the post of editor-in-chief and engaged as his assistant William Leggett, a young New Yorker who had shown a marked ability in conducting a weekly journal called 'The Critic.' 'I like politics no better than you do' (Bryant had written to Dana), but . politics and a belly'full are better than poetry and starvation.'

His theory of the journalist's function is well known. He regarded himself as a trustee for the 'public.' Party was much, and Bryant was a strong Democrat, but the people were greater than party.

I

2

Bryant's contributions were the stories entitled Medfield'

and The Skeleton's Cave.' As originally planned the book was to have been called The Sextad, but Verplanck, who would have made the sixth author, withdrew.

2 John Bigelow.

Bryant's handling of public questions belongs to political history. His life-long fight against a protective tariff, his defence of Jackson's policy respecting nullification and the United States Bank, his maintenance of the right to discuss slavery as freely as any other subject about which there is a difference of opinion, his insistence that the question of giving the franchise to negroes in the state of New York be settled on its merits and as a local matter with which neither Abolitionist nor slaveholder had anything to do, his determined stand against the annexation of Texas and enlargement of the area of slavery, his position on a multitude of questions which in his life as a public censor he found it necessary to defend or to attack fully set forth in the two biographies by his coadjutors.

are

From 1856 Bryant acted with the Republican party, giving his cordial support to Frémont and to Lincoln. He was a presidential elector in 1861. He advocated the election of Grant in 1868, and again in 1872, the latter time reluctantly 'as the 'best thing attainable in the circumstances.'

To secure the independence and detachment that would enable him to judge measures fairly, Bryant avoided intercourse with public men, kept away from Washington, took no office, and was otherwise singular. In this way he at least secured a free pen. As to the tone of the comments on men in public life, Bryant approved the theory of

BRYANT'S LIFE

a brother editor who maintained that nothing should be said which would make it impossible for him who wrote and him who was written about to meet at the same dinner-table the next day. It is not pretended, however, that he was uniformly controlled by this theory. What was the prevailing idea of his journalistic manner may be known from Felton's review of The Fountain, in which he marvels that these beautiful poems can be the work of one who deals with wrath, and dips his pen 'daily in bitterness and hate. . . .'

Since 1821 no collection of Bryant's verse had been made. Then after ten years he gathered together eighty-nine pieces, including the eight which had appeared in the pamphlet of 1821, and issued them as Poems, 1832. Through the friendly offices of Irving the book was reprinted in England with a dedicatory letter to Samuel Rogers. Notwithstanding favorable notices, both English and American, Bryant was despondent. Poetic wares,' he said, 'are not for the market of the present day

. . mankind are occupied with politics, railroads, ' and steamboats.' But he found it necessary to reprint the volume in 1834 (with additional poems), and again in 1836.

His work in prose and verse after 1839 includes The Fountain and Other Poems, 1842; The WhiteFooted Deer and Other Poems, 1844; Poems, 1847; Letters of a Traveller, 1850; Poems, 1854; Letters from Spain, 1859; Thirty Poems, 1864; Letters

from the East, 1869; The Iliad of Homer, translated into English blank verse, 1870; The Odyssey, 1871-72; Orations and Addresses, 1873; The Flood of Years, 1878.

The introduction to the Library of Poetry and Song is from Bryant's pen, as is also the preface to E. A. Duyckinck's (still unpublished) edition of Shakespeare. His name appears as one of the authors of A Popular History of the United States (1876), together with that of Sydney Howard Gay, on whom fell the burden of the actual writing. It is unfortunate that no adequate reprint of Bryant's political leaders has been made. As much ought to be done for him as Sedgwick did for Leggett.

Bryant found relief from the strain of editorial work in foreign travel. He was abroad with his family in 1834-36, visiting France, Italy, and Germany. He did his sight-seeing deliberately, spending a month in Rome, two months at Florence, three months in Munich, and so on. He had been four months at Heidelberg, when, says one of his biographers (in phrases which he never learned from Bryant), His studious sojourn at this re'nowned seat of learning was interrupted by in'telligence of the dangerous illness of his editorial 'colleague,' and he returned home. During a visit to England in 1845 Bryant met Rogers, Moore, Herschel, Hallam, and Spedding, heard one of his own poems quoted at a Corn Law meeting, where