The mention of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant as representatives of New York in the early nineteenth century is likely to mislead students into thinking of them as literary associates. As a matter of fact they seem not to have had any more contact than any other three educated residents of the city. They were not unsociable men, but each went his own social way. Until his period of controversy Cooper was leading member of a literary club of which he had been the founder. Irving, without going to the pains of organizing a group, was the natural center of one which delighted in his company and emulated his ways of thinking and writing. Bryant, instead of being drawn after either of these older men, stepped into journalism, becoming a friend of the great editors and the political leaders. Irving was the only one of the three who was born and bred in town. Cooper and Bryant were not sons of New York; they were among the first of its long list of eminent adopted children.

Bryant (1794–1878) was born at Cummington, Massachusetts. His descent can be traced to the earliest Plymouth families, and, on his mother’s side, to Priscilla Alden. His father was a much-loved country doctor, the third of the family in recent generations to follow this budding profession. He was a man of dignities in his town, a state representative and senator, and a welcome friend of the Boston book-lovers. His services were so freely given, however, that he had little money to spend on his boy’s education. This was carried on, according to a common custom, under charge of clergymen, though not the least important teaching came direct from the father’s guidance of his reading and criticism of his writing. Bryant’s talents began to show promise while he was still a boy, for he read eagerly, and in his early ’teens wrote a number of “pieces” which were more or less widely circulated in print. One of these, “The Embargo,” a political satire addressed to President Jefferson, ran to two editions and roused so much doubt as to its authorship that his father’s friends soberly certified to it as the work of a boy of thirteen. In these years Bryant made Alexander Pope his adored model, and for so young an imitator he succeeded remarkably well. A little later he fell under the influence of a group of minor Englishmen who have rather wickedly been nicknamed the “Graveyard Poets” because of the persistency with which they versified on death, the grave, and the after-life. “Thanatopsis,” written before he was eighteen, was a reflection of and a response to certain lines of Kirke White, who had deeply stirred his imagination.

Once again it was hard to persuade the literary world that young Bryant was the actual author. “Thanatopsis” and the “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” were published in the North American Review without signature, according to the usual custom. The editors had requested contributions from the elder Bryant, and he had found these verses unfinished at home and had sent them on after copying them in his own handwriting. The more famous poem so impressed the editors that, far from believing it the work of an American boy, Richard H. Dana, on hearing it read aloud, said to his colleague, “Ah, Phillips, you have been imposed upon; no one on this side the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses.” In the meantime Bryant had been admitted at fifteen to the sophomore class at Williams College, had withdrawn at the end of a year intending to enter Yale the next autumn, had been unable to carry out the plan through lack of funds, and had studied law and been admitted to the bar. While still in doubt as to his choice of profession he had written the “Lines to a Waterfowl,” which were later published in the North American, following the acceptance of “Thanatopsis.” He became a lawyer not through any love of the profession but because it seemed a reasonable way to earn a living in a period when one could not hope for support from his pen. He practiced for nine years, never with any real enthusiasm, describing himself in the midst of these years as

His discontent was increased by the applause which came with his magazine poems and by the compliment of an invitation to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1821. Finally, in 1825, he went down to New York in the hope of making a success of a new periodical there. In spite of his associate editorship The New York Review and AthenÆum Magazine was as shortlived as scores of others. It was a bad time in America for such a venture. The country was flooded with English publications and American pirated editions of English works. The public was not educated to the idea of magazines, nor the publishers to the methods of financing them. They were unattractive in form and as heavy in contents as the labored name of Bryant’s ill-fated experiment. After the collapse he returned for a short time to the practice of law, but in 1826 he accepted the assistant editorship of the New York Evening Post, three years later became editor, and continued with it until his death in 1878. He was the first nineteenth-century man of letters to enter the field of American journalism, and he played a highly distinguished part in its history.

When Bryant became editor in chief of the New York Evening Post he was thirty-five years old. He had written about one third of the poetry saved in the collected editions and about one half of the better-known poems on which his reputation rests. This much is worth considering by itself, because it has a character of its own and is quite different from the output of the latter fifty years. In the first place it was consciously religious in tone. Bryant came from Puritan ancestry. He was brought up to believe in a stern God who had doomed all mankind to eternal destruction and who ruled them relentlessly, sometimes in sorrow but more often in anger. To the Puritans life on earth was a prelude to eternity, and eternity was to be spent possibly in bliss, but probably in torment. They were truly a people “whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests.” His mind and imagination were therefore wide open to the influence of Kirke White and the other “Graveyard Poets.” “Thanatopsis,” glimpse of death," was composed under the eye of God as Bryant knew him. In setting down “When thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight over thy spirit,” he was not indulging in any far-fetched fancy; he was alluding to what the minister brought home to him in two sermons every Sunday and to the unfailing subject of discussion at the mid-week prayer meeting. And when he wrote of approaching the grave “sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,” he was writing of a trust which needed to be especially strong to face the thought of possible damnation.

In a broad sense all true poetry is religious, for it deals with truths that lie beneath life and leads to higher thinking and better living, but the religion of the youthful Bryant was specialized to a single creed. The point is strikingly illustrated by the “Hymn to Death.” The first four fifths of this poem were written when he was twenty-five years old, a meditation based on Puritan theology. All men die, he said, even those one loves; but death is really God’s instrument to punish the wicked. Oppressors, idolaters, atheists, perjurers, revelers, slanderers, the sons of violence and fraud are struck down.

Then, with the poem left at this stage, Bryant’s father died while still in the height of his powers and as the result of exposure in meeting his duties as a country doctor. In the face of this calamity the young poet’s verses seemed to him a bitter mockery:

This leads to the second characteristic of Bryant’s earlier verse—more often than not it was self-conscious and self-applied. He wrote to “The Yellow Violet” and devoted five stanzas to it, but ended with three more of self-analysis. The stanzas “To a Waterfowl” have a general and beautiful application, but they were pointed in his mind by the thought that he needed aid to “lead my steps aright” in the choice of his life’s vocation. Even the modest autumn flower, the “Fringed Gentian,” reminded him of the autumn of his own life and the hope that he might do as the flower, and look to heaven when the hour of death drew near. This was the voice of youth which takes life as a personal matter and assumes, out of sheer inexperience, that to his concrete wants “the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.” Maturity makes the wise man lift his eyes unto the hills whence cometh his help, instead of continually brooding on his own hopes and fears. But this habit of self-examination was natural not only to the young Puritan, vaguely dissatisfied with the barren existence of a country lawyer; it was closely akin to the sentimentalism of the age (see pp. 125 and 148). Bryant was like many of the late eighteenth-century poets, dramatists, and novelists in his belief that quickness of emotion was admirable in itself and that the tenderer emotions were marks of refinement. After he had settled in the city he looked back with a glance of approval to the days when the springs of feeling were filled to the brim.

There is a slight touch of self-commendation in his continual references to his thrills and awes and adorations and in the “pleasurable melancholy,” as Poe called it, with which he enjoyed life, but we shall see that life in the city changed this for something more positive.

Before turning away from this period, however, the student should take heed of its poetic form. The remarkable thing about “Thanatopsis” was not that Bryant should have entertained the thoughts it contains or that he should have aspired to write them, but that he expressed them in verses that were so beautiful and so different from anything ever written before in America. It was their form at which Dana exclaimed in his much-quoted remark to Phillips in the North American Review office. When Bryant was a boy our native writers were, all but Freneau, in the habit of imitating the English poets and essayists who had set the style a full hundred years before. The young American who felt a drawing to literature saturated himself in the writings of Addison, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and their followers (see pp. 70, 93, 116, etc.). The verses of these men were neat, clean-cut, and orderly, and filed down their pages like regiments of soldiers on dress parade. They went along in rimed pairs, with a place to draw breath near the middle of each line, a slight pause at the end of the first, and a full stop at the end of the second. As a fashion, to be sure, it was no more natural than the high, powdered headdresses and hoop skirts which prevailed with the ladies at the same time, but it was a courtly literary convention, and it could be acquired by any writer who was patient and painstaking. In 1785 the best that John Trumbull could hope for America was that it might produce copyists of these Englishmen, and he expressed his hope in the usual set style—like a boy scout in uniform dreaming of the day when he and his fellows may develop into Leonard Woodses and Pershings (see p. 70). And Joseph Rodman Drake, writing in one of the years when “Thanatopsis” was lying unpublished in Dr. Bryant’s desk, put his desire into an even more complex measure, a modification of the Spenserian stanza (see p. 136).

Bryant, it will be remembered, made his first poetic flights in the style of Pope, and he did well enough to be apparently on the highroad of old-fashioned imitation. Then suddenly, while still a boy, he lifted himself out of the rut of rime and began writing a free, fluent “blank verse.” It is the same five-stressed measure which Pope used,—the measure of Shakespeare too, “If music be the food of love, play on”—but it is without rime, and the pauses come where the sense demands instead of where the versification dictates. In the passages just cited from Trumbull and Drake there is only one line where the sense runs on without a slight pause,—the sense is forced to conform to the rhythm; but in “Thanatopsis,” although the rhythm is quite regular, the pauses occur at all sorts of places, and seldom at the line-ends. As Bryant set down the first seven and four-fifth lines, for example, they read:

but broken into groups, as one would read them, they fall:

This was nothing new in poetry. Shakespeare had written his plays almost entirely in this way, and Milton all of “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained,” and the later English poets, most notably Wordsworth, had just returned to it; but in America it was as unfamiliar as the “free verse” which is puzzling a good many readers to-day partly because it is printed in units of meaning instead of units of measure. No wonder that Dana was surprised, “on this side the Atlantic.”

When Bryant went down into the crowded activity of New York City the general tone of his work began to change. The things that he was doing interested him as the practice of law never had done. The editorship of the Evening Post made him not merely a news vender but a molder of public thought, and his entrance into the world of opinion gave him more of an interest in life itself and less in his own emotions. Very soon he wrote the “Hymn of the City” to record his discovery that God lived in the town as well as in the country and that he was the God of life quite as much as the God of death.

Then in “The Battle Field” (1837) and “The Antiquity of Freedom” (1842) he moved on to what was a new thought in his verse. He was still interested in beauty, whether it were the beauty of nature or the beauty of holiness; but as a man who had plunged into the thick of things he became for the first time wide-awake to the idea that as the world grows older it grows wiser and that the well-rounded life cannot be content simply to contemplate the beauties of June, for it must also have some part in the struggle for justice. He had grown into nothing less than a new idea of God. As a young Puritan he had felt Him to be a power outside, who managed things. He had been content to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and then he had turned his back on earth and meditated about heaven. But now he aspired to do with heaven what Addison had attempted to do with “philosophy,” and bring it down from the clouds into the hearts of men. When he wrote, in "The Battle Field,” “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,” he meant, as the rest of the poem shows, not the old truth of centuries but the unfamiliar truth which the new age must set on its throne.

There is perhaps no more striking illustration of the adoption of so-called new truth than in the world’s attitude toward the holding of property in human life. Up to the time of Bryant’s birth slaveholding had been practiced in all the United States, by the Puritans of New England as well as by the Cavaliers of the South. During the colonial days in both regions the Bible had been accepted as final authority. What it counseled and what it did not prohibit was right, and what it condemned was wrong; and, judged on these grounds, slavery was apparently sanctioned in the Bible. In spite of this, many leaders, both North and South, protested against the practice before 1800. As time went on, largely on account of the climate and the nature of the industries, slavery waned in the North and thrived in the South. Then in New England the great agitation arose; but still, in Massachusetts as well as in Virginia, the men whose bank accounts were involved defended human bondage on Scriptural grounds, protesting violently against

Yet in the end the principle for which the Revolution was fought was reaffirmed in behalf of the slaves who were serving the sons of the Revolution.

Bryant became painfully conscious of the many issues to be fought out in the cause of liberty, and in “The Antiquity of Freedom” he wrote of the eternal vigilance and the eternal conflict needed to maintain it.

That combat is still on; the right of the subject—including woman—to a voice in the government, the right of the laborer to a fair return on his work, and the right of the smaller nation to undisturbed independence are among the uppermost problems that occupy the mind of the world to-day.

Like many of his thoughtful countrymen Bryant founded his loyalty to America on the hope that in this new land the seed of new truth would fall on fertile soil. In “Earth,” composed when he was in Italy, he wrote:

The number and bulk of his poems dedicated to America are not so great as those by Freneau or Whittier and Lowell or Timrod and Lanier, but his smaller group are as distinguished and as representative as an equal number by any of the others except, possibly, Lowell. In “O Mother of a Mighty Race” he alluded again to the envy and unfriendliness of the older nations, which disturbed him as it did Irving and Cooper. In the face of it he tried, with less success than Irving, to keep his own temper, taking comfort in the thought that the downtrodden and oppressed of Europe could find shelter here and a chance to live. As a journalist he was a strong champion of Abraham Lincoln long before the conservative East had given him unreserved support; and when the Civil War came on he sounded “Our Country’s Call” and encouraged all within sound of his voice in “the grim resolve to guard it well.” During the war he wrote from time to time verses that were full of devotion to the right and quite free from the note of hate that poisons most war poetry; and at the end he mourned the death of Lincoln no less fervently than he rejoiced at “The Death of Slavery.”

Aside from these poems and others of their kind, which make the connection between Bryant the editor and Bryant the poet, he continued to write on his old themes—nature and the individual life. There was no complete reversal of attitude; some of the later poems were reminders of some of the earlier ones. Yet a real change came after he had mixed with the world. At first he was inclined to lament the loss of the old life, seeming to forget how irksome it had been when he was in the midst of it. In such personal verses as “I cannot forget with what fervid devotion” and “I broke the spell that held me long” he was indulging in the luxury of mild self-pity. “In my younger days I had lots of time, but no money and few friends. Now I have friends and an income, but alas, I have no time.” This was but a temporary mood, however. It is quite clear from his later poems that he enjoyed life more in town than in country. This is proven by the fact that nature did not continue to suggest mournful thoughts. “The Planting of the Apple Tree” is serenely recorded in “quaint old rhymes.” Instead of saying, as in his earlier manner: “We plant this apple tree, but we plant it only for a few short years. Then it will die, like all mankind. Perhaps I may be buried beneath its shade,” he said: “Come, let us plant it. It will blossom and bear fruit which will be eaten in cottage and palace, here and abroad. And when it is old, perhaps its aged branches will throw thin shadows on a better world than this is now. Who knows?” The stanzas on “Robert of Lincoln” are not merely free from sadness; they are positively jolly.

In the last years of his long career—he lived to be eighty-four—he seems at first glance to have gone back to his youthful sadness; but this is not really the case, for thoughts which are premature or affected in youth are natural to old age. At eighty-two, in “A Lifetime” and “The Flood of Years” he actually looked back over many bereavements and forward but a very short way to the life after death. The two poems taken together are an old man’s farewell to the world. Like the poem with which he won his first fame, they present another glimpse of death, but this time it is a fair prospect of

When Bryant came to his seventieth birthday there was a notable celebration at the Century Club in New York City. At that time three poems were read by three of his fellow-poets—Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier. What they said throws a great deal of light on Bryant’s part in American life and literature. Holmes sang his praises as a poet of nature, a journalist of high ideals, a writer of solemn and majestic verse whose later works fulfilled the promise of his first great poem. Lowell went a step farther in paying his tribute to Bryant as a poet of faith and freedom and as a citizen who gave life and courage to the nation during the crisis of the Civil War. In this respect the author of “The Battle Field” was quite as much of a pioneer as in his poems about birds and flowers. He was far ahead of most of his countrymen in his feeling for America as a nation among nations—not merely in the slightly indignant mood of “O Mother of a Mighty Race,” but better in his feeling that new occasions bring new duties. Finally, Whittier revered Bryant as a man. With all admiration for his art,

In his later years Bryant was one of the best citizens of New York. His striking presence on the streets, with his white hair and beard and his fine vigor, made poetry real to the crowds who were inclined to think of it as something impersonal that existed only in books. On account of his powers as a public speaker and his place in literature he was often called on to deliver memorial addresses, and was affectionately named “the old man eloquent.” His orations on Cooper and Irving were among the first of these. His last was in 1878, at the unveiling of a statue to the Italian patriot Mazzini. As he was returning into his home he fell, receiving injuries from which he died shortly after. It was fitting that his last words should have been in praise of a champion of freedom and that he should have died with the echoes of his countrymen’s applause still ringing in his ears.

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

William Cullen Bryant. The Life and Works of. Parke Godwin, editor. 6 vols. Vols. I and II, Biography, 1883; Vols. III and IV, Poetical Works, 1883; Vols. V and VI, Prose Writings, 1884–1889. Best single-volume edition is The Household, 1909, and The Roslyn, 1910. His poems appeared originally as follows: The Embargo, 1808; Poems, 1821, 1832, 1834, 1836, 1839, 1840; The Fountain and Other Poems, 1842; The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems, 1844; Poems, 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857. A Forest Hymn [1860]; In the Woods, 1863; Thirty Poems, 1864; Hymns [1864]; Voices of Nature, 1865; The Song of the Sower, 1871; The Story of the Fountain, 1872; The Little People of the Snow, 1873; Among the Trees [1874]; The Flood of Years, 1878; Unpublished Poems of Bryant and Thoreau, 1907.

Bibliography

Biography and Criticism

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read the early poems of Bryant with reference to the prevalence of death in them and particularly to the unexpected appearance of this idea.

Read them again with reference to the sentimentalism in them.

Read “A Forest Hymn” and the “Hymn to Death” for a comparison of the blank verse with that in “Thanatopsis.”

Read “The Battle Field” and Wordsworth’s sonnet “Written above Westminster Abbey” for the different but sympathetic developments of the same idea.

Compare Bryant’s “Robert of Lincoln” and “The Planting of the Apple Tree” with Freneau’s “The Wild Honeysuckle” and “To a Caty-did.”

Read Bryant’s “Song of the Sower,” Lanier’s “Corn,” and Timrod’s “The Cotton Boll” for evident points of likeness and difference.

Note in detail the relation between Bryant’s journalistic career and the turn of his mind in the poetry of the journalistic period.

Bryant wrote no journalistic poetry in the sense in which Freneau did, or Whittier, or Lowell. For an explanation see his verses on “The Poet.”