Chapter I: His Life

The author of ‘Thanatopsis’ was born at Cummington, a village among the hills of western Massachusetts, on November 3, 1794. Through his father, Doctor Peter Bryant, a physician, he traced his ancestry to Stephen Bryant, an early settler at Duxbury; through his mother, Sarah Snell, he had ‘a triple claim’ to ‘Mayflower’ origin.

Doctor Bryant was a many-sided man. He collected books, read poetry (Horace was his favorite), wrote satirical verse, was a musician and something of a mechanic. He was an ardent Federalist, a member of the Massachusetts legislature for several terms, and then of the senate. He possessed in high degree the art of imparting knowledge. Medical students thought themselves fortunate in being allowed to study under his direction. Doctor Bryant’s father and grandfather were both physicians, and he hoped that his second-born (who was named in honor of the Scottish practitioner, William Cullen) would follow in the ancestral footsteps.

Bryant began to make verses in his eighth year. At ten he wrote an ‘address’ in heroic couplets, which got into newspaper print. The boy used to pray that he might write verses which would endure. A political satire, _The Embargo or Sketches of the Times_, ‘by a youth of thirteen,’ if not in the nature of evidence that the prayer had been answered, so delighted Doctor Bryant that he printed it in a pamphlet (1808). A second issue containing additional poems was brought out the next year. To this the author put his name.

Bryant was taught Greek by his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Snell of Brookfield, and mathematics by the Reverend Moses Hallock of Plainfield. He entered the Sophomore class at Williams College in October, 1810, and left the following May. He was to have spent the two succeeding years at Yale, but the plan had to be abandoned for want of money. Some time during the summer of 1811 ‘Thanatopsis’ was written in its first form and laid aside.

The poet began reading law with Judge Samuel Howe of Worthington, who once reproached his pupil ‘for giving to Wordsworth’s _Lyrical Ballads_ time that belonged to Blackstone and Chitty.’ He continued his studies under William Baylies of Bridgewater, was admitted to the bar at Plymouth in August, 1815, practised awhile at Plainfield, and then removed to Great Barrington. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ were written the night of the young lawyer’s arrival in Plainfield.

He made progress in his profession and was called to argue cases at New Haven and before the supreme court at Boston. The intervals of legal business were given to poetry. Bryant’s father urged him to contribute to the new ‘North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal,’ the editor of which was an old friend. The young lawyer-poet seeming indifferent to the suggestion, Doctor Bryant carried with him to Boston two pieces he had unearthed among his son’s papers, namely, ‘Thanatopsis’ in its first form, and ‘A Fragment’ now called ‘Inscription at the Entrance of a Wood.’ Both were printed in the ‘Review’ for September, 1817. Other poems followed, together with three prose essays (on ‘American Poetry,’ on ‘The Happy Temperament,’ and on the use of ‘Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse’). He also contributed poems to ‘The Idle Man,’ Richard Henry Dana’s magazine, and the ‘United States Literary Gazette.’

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 Review 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 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 establishment,’ 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 bellyfull 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.’[2] Party was much, and Bryant was a strong Democrat, but the people were greater than party.

Bryant’s handling of public questions belongs to political history. His lifelong 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 slave-holder 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--are fully set forth in the two biographies by his coadjutors.

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 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 White-Footed 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 Tears_, 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 renowned seat of learning was interrupted by intelligence 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 among the speakers were Cobden and Bright, and carried a letter of introduction to Wordsworth from Henry Crabb Robinson. He made yet other journeys to Europe and to the East.

Notable among Bryant’s public addresses were the orations on Cooper (1852) and Irving (1860) delivered before the New York Historical Society. He was a founder and the third president of the Century Association, first president of the New York Homœopathic Society, president of the American Free Trade League, and member of literary and historical societies innumerable. He held no public office, but as time went on it might almost be said that an office was created for him--that of Representative American. He seemed the incarnation of virtues popularly supposed to have survived from an older and simpler time. He was a great public character. The word venerable acquired a new meaning as one reflected on the career of this eminent citizen who was born when Washington was president, who as a boy had written satires on Jefferson, and who as a man had discussed political questions from the administration of John Quincy Adams to that of Hayes. Other men were as old as he, Bryant seemed to have lived longer.

‘And when at last he fell, he fell as the granite column falls, smitten from without, but sound within.’[3] His death was the result of an accident. He gave the address at the unveiling of the statue of Mazzini in Central Park. Though wearied with the exertion and almost overcome by the heat, he was able to walk to the house of a friend. As he was about entering the door he fell backward, striking his head violently against the stone step. He never recovered from the effects of this fall, and died on June 12, 1878.