Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860

by Henrietta Christian Wright

CHAPTER V

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

1794-1878

William Cullen Bryant was born in 1794 in a log farmhouse in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. His father was the country doctor and the child was named after a celebrated physician. He began his school days in a log school-house beside a little brook that crept down from the hills and went singing on its way to the valley.

All around stood the great forest-covered hills, haunted by wolves, bears, deer and wild-cats, which occasionally crept down even to the settlements carrying terror to the hearts of the women and children. Wherever the slopes were cleared, the farm lands had taken possession, the forest often creeping up close to the little homes.

From the door-yard of the Bryant homestead the whole world seemed to be made up of hills and forest, and fertile fields, while in the woods grew the exquisite New England wild flowers, the laurel and azalea, the violet, the tiger lily, and the fringed gentian. Here also lived the summer birds of New England, the robins, the blue bird and the thrush, haunting the woods from early spring until late autumn.

All these sights and sounds sunk into the boy's heart and made themselves into a poem which he wrote down in words many years after, and which is as clear and fresh as the voice of the little brook itself after which it was named. This poem is called The Rivulet and it shows the poet-child standing upon the banks of the little stream listening to the song of the birds or gathering wild flowers.

It was his first lesson in that wonder-book of nature from which he translated so much that was beautiful that he became the distinctive poet of the woods and streams.

Lessons from books he learned in the little log school-house, preparing himself for ordeals when the minister came to visit the school. At these times the pupils were dressed in their best and sat in solemn anxiety while the minister asked them questions out of the catechism and made them a long speech on morals and good behavior. On one of these occasions the ten-year-old poet declaimed some of his own verses descriptive of the school.

In Bryant's boyhood New England farm life was very simple. The farmers lived in log or slab houses, whose kitchens formed the living room, where the meals were generally taken. Heat was supplied by the great fireplaces that sometimes filled one whole side of the kitchen and were furnished with cranes, spits, and pothooks. Behind the kitchen door hung a bundle of birch rods with which mischievous boys were kept in order, and in the recess of the chimney stood the wooden settle where the children sat before bed-time to watch the fire or glance up through the wide chimney at the stars.

Here, when three years old, Bryant often stood book in hand and with painful attention to gesture repeated one of Watts's hymns, while his mother listened and corrected. Here he prepared his lessons, and wrote those first childish poems so carefully criticised by his father, who was his teacher in the art of composition. In the poem called A Lifetime Bryant long afterward described many incidents of his childhood and the influence of his father and mother upon his art, one developing his talent for composition, and the other directing his imagination to and enlisting his sympathies with humanity. This poem shows the boy by his mother's knee, reading the story of Pharaoh and the Israelites, of David and Goliath, and of the life of Christ. As he grew older Bryant shared the usual amusements of country life. In the spring he took his turn in the maple-sugar camp; in the autumn he attended the huskings when the young people met to husk the corn in each neighborhood barn successively, until all was done. He helped at the cider-making bees, and the apple parings, when the cider and apple sauce were prepared for the year's need; and at the house raisings, when men and boys raised the frame of a neighbor's house or barn. In those times the farmers depended upon each other for such friendly aid, and the community seemed like one great family.

On Sunday everyone went three times to meeting, listened to long sermons, and sang out of the old Bay Psalm Book. If any unlucky child fell asleep he was speedily waked up by the tithingman, who would tickle his nose with a hare's-foot attached to a long pole. Once in a while a boy might be restless or noisy, and then he was led out of the meeting-house and punished with the tithingman's rod, a terrible disgrace.

Throughout his childhood Bryant wrote verses upon every subject discussed in the family, and in those days New England families discussed all the great events of the time. The listening children became public-spirited and patriotic without knowing it. At thirteen Bryant wrote a most scathing satire upon the policy of Thomas Jefferson, intended to make the President hang his head in shame. It was quoted in all the newspapers opposed to Jefferson, and a second edition of this pamphlet was called for in a few months. Bryant here prophesies the evils in store for the country if the President insisted on the embargo that was then laid upon American vessels, and advises him to retire to the bogs of Louisiana and search for horned frogs; advice which Jefferson did not feel called upon to follow. It was Bryant's first introduction to the reading public, but it was not that path in literature that he was destined to follow. Only one or two of his earliest verses give any hint of the poet of nature, though it was during this time that he absorbed those influences that directed his whole life. It is from the retrospective poem, Green River, that we really know the boy Bryant to whom the charm of sky and wood and singing brook was so unconscious that it seemed a part of life itself. In Green River, written after he became a man, we hear the echoes of his young days, and we know that the boy's soul had already entered into a close communion with nature.

But Bryant had not yet reached manhood when the true voice of his heart was heard in the most celebrated poem that he ever wrote, and one of the most remarkable ever written by a youth. This was Thanatopsis, which his father discovered among his papers and sent to the North American Review without his son's knowledge, so little did the poet of eighteen, who five years before had published the tirade against Jefferson, realize that he had produced the most remarkable verses yet written in America.

Thanatopsis attracted instant attention in this country and in England. It had appeared anonymously, and American critics insisted that it could not be the work of an American author as no native poet approached it either in sublimity of thought or perfection of style. But Thanatopsis bears no trace of English influence, nor was it strange that an heir of the Puritan spirit, who had lived in daily communion with nature, should thus set to the music of poetry the hopes and inspirations of his race.

Thanatopsis is the first great American poem, and it divides by a sharp line the poetry hitherto written on our soil from that which was to follow. Henceforth the poets of the newer England ceased to find their greatest inspiration in the older land. At the time of the publication of the poem Bryant was studying law in Great Barrington, Mass., having been obliged by poverty to leave college after a two years' course. It was in the brief interval before beginning his office studies that he wrote Thanatopsis putting it aside for future revision.

He was already hard at work upon his profession when his sudden literary success changed all his plans. Destined by nature to be a man of letters, he poured forth verse and prose during the whole time he was studying and practising law. Six months after the publication of Thanatopsis the poem entitled To a Waterfowl, suggested by the devious flight of a wild duck across the sunset sky, appeared.

It is a perfect picture of the reedy river banks, the wet marshes, and the lonely lakes over which the bird hovered, and it is full of the charm of nature herself. From this time on Bryant's touch never faltered. He was the chosen poet of the wild beauty of his native hills and valleys, and his own pure spirit revealed the most sacred meanings of this beauty.

In 1821 he published his first volume of poems under the title, Poems by William Cullen Bryant. It was a little book of forty pages, containing Thanatopsis, Green River, To a Waterfowl, and other pieces, among which was the charming, The Yellow Violet, a very breath of the spring. This little book was given to the world in the same year in which Cooper published The Spy and Irving completed The Sketch Book.

In 1825 Bryant removed to New York to assume the editorship of a monthly review, to which he gave many of his best-known poems. A year later he joined the staff of the Evening Post, with which he was connected until his death.

From this time his life was that of a literary man. He made of the Evening Post a progressive, public-spirited newspaper, whose field embraced every phase of American life. When he became its editor five days were required for the reports of the Legislature at Albany to reach New York, these being carried by mail coach. The extracts printed from English newspapers were a month old, and even this was considered enterprising journalism. All the despatches from different cities of the United States bore dates a fortnight old, while it was often impossible to obtain news at all. The paper contained advertisements of the stage lines to Boston, Philadelphia, and the West; accounts of projects to explore the centre of the earth by means of sunken wells; reports of the possibility of a railroad being built in the United States; advertisements of lottery tickets; a list of the unclaimed letters at the post-office, and usually a chapter of fiction. Such was the newspaper of 1831.

During the fifty-two years of his editorship the United States were developed from a few struggling colonies bound together by common interests into one of the greatest of modern nations. And through all the changes incident to this career Bryant stood always firm to the principles which he recognized as the true foundations of a country's greatness.

When he was born the United States consisted of a strip of land lying between the Atlantic and the Alleghany Mountains, of which more than half was unbroken wilderness. At his death the Republic extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Gulf to Canada. His life-time corresponded with the growth of his country, and his own work was a noble contribution to the nation's prosperity. In all times of national trouble the Evening Post championed the cause of justice, and Bryant was everywhere respected as a man devoted above all to the "cause of America and of human nature."

The conduct of the Evening Post did not, however, interfere with his work as a poet, and in 1832 he published in one volume all the poems which he had written, most of which had previously appeared in magazines. A few months later an edition appeared in London with an introduction by Irving. It was this volume which gave Bryant an English reputation as great as that he enjoyed in America. Like Cooper, he revealed an unfamiliar nature as seen in American forests, hills, and streams, taking his readers with him into those solitary and quiet places where dwelt the wild birds and wild flowers. The very titles of his poems show how closely he lived to the life of the world around him. The Walk at Sunset, The West Wind, The Forest Hymn, Autumn Woods, The Death of the Flowers, The Fringed Gentian, The Wind and Stream, The Little People of the Snow, and many others disclose how Bryant gathered from every source the beauty which he translated into his verses.

Among the poems which touch upon the Indian traditions are The Indian Girl's Lament, Monument Mountain, and An Indian at the Burial-place of his Father. In these he lingers upon the pathetic fate of the red man driven from the home of his race and forced into exile by the usurping whites. They are full of sadness, seeming to wake once again the memories of other times when the forest was alive with the night-fires of savage man and the days brought only the gladness of freedom.

Besides his original work Bryant performed a noble task in the translation of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. He was over seventy when he began this work, and was five years in completing it. The poems are put into blank verse, of which Bryant was a master, and they have caught the very spirit of the old Greek bard; so faithfully did the modern poet understand that shadowy past that he might have watched with Helen the burning of Troy, or journeyed with Ulysses throughout his wanderings in the perilous seas.

The light of Bryant's imagination burned steadily to the end. In his eighty-second year he wrote his last important poem, The Flood of Years. It is a beautiful confession of faith in the nobility of life and the immortality of the soul, and a fitting crown for an existence so beneficent and exalted.

His last public work was to participate in unveiling a monument to the Italian statesman Mazzini in Central Park, when he was the orator of the day. On the same evening he was seized with his last illness. He died on June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, Long Island, one of his favorite country homes.