All have obtained a general idea of the opera by report. But report can give but a faint idea of it. Until it is seen, it will never be believed that a play can be conducted in recitative or singing and yet appear nearly as natural as the ordinary drama. We were last night surprised, delighted, enchanted; and such were the feelings of all who witnessed the performance. The repeated plaudits with which the theater rang were unequivocal, unaffected bursts of rapture.
Would American taste approve of the opera? “We predict,” Coleman ventured, “that it will never hereafter dispense with it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST”
In 1829 Richard H. Dana, the poet and father of the author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” remarked that “If Bryant must write in a paper to get his bread, I pray God he may get a bellyful.” Bryant had entered the office of the Evening Post in the summer of 1826, half by accident and without any intention of making journalism his profession; yet he was to remain there fifty-two years, till the very day he received his death-stroke. No other great figure in American literature save Dr. Franklin has such a record as a publicist. How did it happen that the foremost poet in America, already known as such by “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” became the “junior editor” of the Evening Post in Coleman’s declining years?
The young poet-lawyer had come to New York city from Great Barrington, Mass., at the beginning of 1825, when he was but thirty years old, brought thither by Henry D. Sedgwick and Gulian C. Verplanck, two citizens of substance and influence who had been struck by the genius shown in his first volume of verse. The Sedgwicks were a well-known Berkshire family. Catharine M. Sedgwick, later modestly famous as a novelist, was the first to make Bryant’s acquaintance, and had strongly commended the struggling barrister to her older brother Henry, who was a leader at the New York bar. With neither his profession nor with life in a small town was Bryant contented; and the applause which had been given to “Thanatopsis” in the North American Review, to “The Ages” when he read it before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and to his first thin volume in 1821, seemed to justify his hopes for a metropolitan literary career. “The time is peculiarly propitious,” Henry Sedgwick urged him from New York; “the Athenæum, just instituted, is exciting a sort of literary rage, and it is proposed to set up a journal in connection with it.” If his pen did not yield a full living, he could make an additional sum by giving lessons to foreigners in the English language and literature. Bryant willingly yielded. Leaving his wife and baby behind, he settled in a boarding house that spring, and became one of the two editors of the monthly New York Review, the first number of which appeared in June, 1825.
His arrival to reside in New York had attracted general notice. To all discerning lovers of literature in the city, and they were many, his best poems were well known. Verplanck had given his first volume a cordial review in the New York American, and when he had made a preliminary visit to the city in 1824 the Evening Post had reprinted “Thanatopsis” with a warm word of praise. At the homes of Sedgwick and Verplanck, the former a sort of Holland House for New York, Bryant was at once made acquainted with Fitzgreene Halleck and J. G. Percival, with the aspiring young poets Hillhouse and Robert Sands, with the artists S. F. B. Morse and Dunlap, with Chancellor Kent and President Duer of Columbia. We may be sure that Coleman, who was proud of his friendship with Brockden Brown and Irving, did not fail to seek out the young New Englander who had come from near his former home, and whose poem “Green River” celebrated a stream that Coleman knew well. On Nov. 16, 1825, the Evening Post republished from the New York Review Bryant’s “The Death of the Flowers,” on March 3, 1826, it took from a magazine his “To a Cloud,” and on June 11 it reprinted “The Song of Pitcairn’s Island”; while various flattering references were made to his work.
Yet Bryant’s position was a precarious and anxious one. He wrote his friend Dana that, relieved as he was to get out of his “shabby” profession as a lawyer, in which he had been shocked by a bad miscarriage of justice and by the petty wrangles in which he was involved, he was not sure that he had found a better. Reviewing books was not the most congenial of employments. His salary was at first $1,000 a year; but the Review drooped, and after an effort had been made to bolster it up by amalgamation with two other periodicals, Bryant found himself in the early summer of 1826 co-editor of the United States Review and Literary Gazette, with a quarter ownership and a salary of only $500. His confidence in his ability to live by his pen was so shaken that he obtained a permit to practice law in the city courts, and was actually associated with Henry Sedgwick in a case.
At this juncture, in the middle of June, William Coleman was thrown from his gig by a runaway horse. It was for a time doubted whether he would recover, and as he was confined to his room for ten weeks, it was necessary to find some one to assist his son on the Evening Post. A temporary position was offered Bryant, and Verplanck and others earnestly counselled him to take it. “The establishment is an extremely lucrative one,” wrote Bryant. “It is owned by two individuals—Mr. Coleman and Mr. Burnham. The profits are estimated at about thirty thousand dollars a year—fifteen to each proprietor. This is better than poetry and magazines.”
Throughout July Bryant was busy upon the Evening Post; on Aug. 2 he wrote an account of the Columbia Commencement for it, criticizing the young speakers for confusing “will” and “shall”; and on Aug. 12 he furnished it two brief poetic translations, from Clement Marot and Dante, neither of which is included in his collected works. Immediately thereafter he set out on a trip to Boston, to bear to Richard H. Dana also an offer from the Evening Post of a permanent place on its staff, which Dana, after some hesitation, refused. This trip was made possible by Coleman’s renewed attention to the journal. The poet’s absence gave the Evening Post an opportunity to speak highly of Bryant, whom it now considered a full staff-member. On Aug. 21–22 it republished his poem “The Two Graves” from the United States Review, writing of the accomplished author as one to whom, “by the general assent of the enlightened portion of his countrymen