Chapter William Cullen Bryant of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

financially independent, with a political influence national in its scope and a growing reputation as the foremost American journalist, he lived his long and useful life, absorbed in the exacting duties of his profession, universally esteemed and honored by his countrymen, but finding little time for poetic utterance, and producing nothing that compares in beauty or power with the compositions of his earlier years.

Volume of 1832.

In 1832, the poet published a volume of his collected pieces, eighty-nine in all. Here were gathered all of his early poems which he cared to preserve and those contributed to magazines, including a group of compositions which had appeared in The Talisman, a miscellany of prose and verse published under Bryant's supervision as an annual in 1828, 1829, and 1830. Of this group only two poems, The Past and The Evening Wind, are worthy of note; the first was considered by the poet one of his very best; Poe greatly admired the second -- which has been said to be "less a description than the very thing itself which it describes." The Song of Marion's Men and the exquisite lines To the Fringed Gentian were first published in the volume of 1832. During the forty-five years which followed, Bryant's further compositions hardly equaled in amount the verse included in this collection.

Travels.

Bryant traveled much. Three times he visited the middle west, whither his brothers and their mother had removed after Dr. Bryant's death, in 1820. The family was established in central Illinois. The poet's first visit was in 1832. It was in the pioneer period and the country was still to a large extent picturesque and primitively wild.

"The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,"

profoundly impressed his mind. The journey on horseback across the prairies was the inspiration of one of his finest descriptive poems.¹ Here he pictures the encircling vastness swept by the shadow of the clouds, aflame with tossing golden flowers, and still the haunt of wolf and deer. His imagination was stirred also with visions of the future; he saw the "advancing multitude" following fast upon those who had begun already to till and tame this rich garden soil of the waiting West. An interesting incident of the journey was his chance meeting with a company of Illinois volunteers led by a tall, uncouth lad, on their way to help put down an Indian uprising under the famous chief Black Hawk. The young captain whose homely awkwardness and breezy humor had aroused Bryant's interest was introduced to him as young Abe Lincoln; thirty years later Mr. Bryant himself had the pleasure of introducing Mr. Lincoln to a great audience in New York city, as a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

In later years, the editor of the Evening Post made several trips to Europe, one of which included a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. The letters sent by him to his paper, descriptive of his travels, were published under the titles Letters of a Traveller (1850) and Letters from the Far East (1869).

Citizen and Crator.

For practically fifty years, William Cullen Bryant was a distinguished citizen of New York. His position as a leading representative of American letters became more and more conspicuous in spite of the infrequency of his verse. He was one of the most successful of public speakers; and on occasions demanding oratory of an exceptional excellence, he was the natural choice. His most notable addresses were those delivered at the meetings commemorating the work of Cooper, Irving, and Halleck. In all his utterances, private as well as public, two qualities characterized Bryant -- dignity and modesty. At a remarkable banquet given in honor of his seventieth birthday, in 1864, an occasion signalized by the presence and speech of Emerson and by poetical tributes from the distinguished contemporary poets of Cambridge and Boston, Bryant modestly described himself "as one who has carried a lantern in the night and who perceives that its beams are no longer visible in the glory which the morning pours around him."