I heard a bee, on a summer day,
Brisk, and busy, and ripe for quarrel—
Bustling, and buzzing, and bouncing away,
In the fragrant depths of an old tar-barrel.

Do you ask what his buzzing was all about?
Oh, he was wondrous shrewd and critical.
’Twas sport to hear him scold and flout,
And the topics he chose were all political ...

Bryant also is probably to be credited with several of the last New Year’s addresses of the carriers, long rhymed reviews of the year’s events which were then expected annually. He could have tossed off more easily than any one else in the office such hexameters as the following (Jan. 2, 1829):

Since New Year’s day came last about,
The Emperor Nicholas sent out
A potent army, full of fight,
Cossack, and Pole, and Muscovite,
To give the Turks a castigation,
Such as they ne’er had since creation.
They passed the Pruth in fine condition,
And meeting no great opposition,
They thought to make their winter quarters
By Hellespont’s resounding waters ...

There are frequently unsigned poems of a serious character in the Evening Post during these years, but nine in ten are so poor that it is impossible to believe that Bryant wrote them. Now and then occurs one which might be his; such, for example, are the translations of lyrics from the German of Gleim which appeared on Nov. 13, 1827, and Dec. 2, 1828. Bryant did not claim all of his poems in even the United States Review; it has been assumed of these, and it may be assumed of any lost in the Evening Post files, that they were not worth claiming.

As a young man, Bryant took his journalistic duties light-heartedly, and one of his distinctive contributions lay in his literary hoaxes. He and his close friend Robert C. Sands, a talented young assistant of Col. Stone in editing the Commercial Advertiser, delighted in them. “Did you see a learned article in the Evening Post the other day about Pope Alexander VI and Cæsar Borgia?” he wrote Gulian Verplanck, then a Congressman in Washington. “Matt. Patterson undertook to be saucy in the Commercial as to a Latin quotation in it, so we—i. e., Sands and myself—sent him on a fool’s errand.” The editor of the Commercial had corrected the Evening Post’s Latin, and Bryant had replied as follows, inventing the authority he cited:

As to the Latin of the phrase, “Vides, mi fili, quam parva sapientia gubernatur mundus,” he affirms that it is not good. He says that it should be, “Vides, mi fili, quantilla sapientia regitur mundus.” He adds, however, that it was not said by any of the Popes, but by some great statesman, whose name he does not give, probably because he does not know it. As to the correctness of the Latin, that is no business of ours.... If any of the Popes spoke bad Latin, two or three hundred years before we were born, it should be recollected that it was not in our power to help it. As to the fact of the phrase being made use of by one of the Popes, we will only say to the writer in the Commercial, that if he will consult the work entitled Virorum Illustrium Reliquiæ, collected by the learned Reisch and published at the Hague, by John and Daniel Steucker, in 1650, a work well known to scholars, he will find that the words, as we have quoted them, were addressed by Pope Alexander VI to his son Cæsar Borgia.

Upon a more elaborate hoax Bryant and Sands were assisted by Professors Anderson and Da Ponte—“a very learned jeu d’esprit,” he called it. It was a long letter to the Evening Post signed John Smith, in which they took a familiar couplet and translated it through all the principal tongues, ancient and modern, even into several Indian languages. It is hard to believe that these erudite quips had a large audience; but Bryant’s ode to Fanny Wright was much admired, and was generally attributed to Halleck, until that gentleman disclaimed it. In these high-spirited productions we see a side of Bryant that largely disappeared under his growing cares and the dignity that increased with his celebrity. We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and Sands at the house of the latter’s father in the hamlet of Hoboken, and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks, studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had covered the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day. Bryant had his fun-loving side, and the few men whom he found closely congenial had no reason to complain of his coldness, as others often did.

But the new editor’s most effective impress upon the Evening Post was in its political and economic utterances. The journal had already inclined toward a low-tariff policy, for the commercial community of New York opposed protection; but its editorials upon this subject, as upon many others, were feeble. Bryant in the years 1822–24 had been led by his friends the Sedgwicks to study the British economists, Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, and the debates upon tariff questions prominent in Parliament about 1820. Theodore Sedgwick was a pronounced advocate of free trade, and completely converted Bryant. From the young man’s convictions upon this subject flowed his attachment to Jackson as an opponent of protection and monopoly, and his intense dislike of Clay, the leading advocate of the so-called American tariff system. He had once been a Federalist, and as a boy had written a hot Federalist poem, “The Embargo,” but his free-trade views now fast made him an ardent Democrat. His sympathies in commercial legislation were not with his native New England, but with the South.

Martin Van Buren writes in his Autobiography regarding the “American” or protective tariff theories that “To the very exposition of the system and the persistent assaults upon its injustice, and impolicy by the New York Evening Post, the country is more indebted for its final overthrow, in this State [New York] at least, than to any other single influence.” This was true. Bryant, who was to oppose protection till his death in 1878, lost no time in 1826 in aligning the journal against the legislation then proposed for higher duties upon woolens. He characterized the act of 1824 as “our last and worst” tariff, and that autumn supported his friend Verplanck, with C. C. Cambreleng and Jeromus Johnson, for city seats in Congress as “the avowed opponents of restrictive and prohibitory laws.” On Nov. 16 he wrote concerning the woolens bill: