It must also be remembered that Bryant was always severely dignified. If he never commanded a subordinate to do anything, but always requested it, he knew that his request was a command. He always addressed others with the prefix “Mr.,” and no one, not even Bigelow or his son-in-law Parke Godwin, omitted the word in addressing him. When Dom Pedro of Brazil visited the Evening Post, Bryant did not greet the popular Emperor in the hall, but waited to receive him at his desk; and he called a junior to show Dom Pedro the press room.
A certain testiness grew upon the editor in his later years, though it was never more than momentary. He was especially sensitive to any suggestion that he was losing his bodily vigor. Not only would he climb the stairs to his ninth-floor office, but he would now and then seize the frame of his door, and show his ability to “chin” it repeatedly. Once, when he fell in Broadway, he sharply rebuffed a gentleman who stepped up and asked, “Are you hurt, Mr. Bryant?”—and he was a little ashamed of it later. Mr. Towse once saw him consulting the city directory, his face showing plainly that the print was too fine for his eyes. Forgetting Bryant’s pride in using no spectacles, he inquired, “Cannot I help you, Mr. Bryant?” The poet instantly rejoined, “No, sir!” with the angry tone of an insulted man, flung the book on a table, and walked swiftly from the room. Mr. Towse also tells us that if you asked Bryant a question, you were wise to accept his answer as final. “I was not long in finding that out. There had been an argument over the correct spelling of the word ‘peddler.’ As he was at his desk, I referred the matter to him. ‘I shall have to write it,’ he said, ‘to make sure. It is often only by the look of it that I can decide whether a word is rightly spelled.’ He wrote the word in several ways and finally selected the form in which I have given it. I thanked him and asked him whether either of the other spellings was permissible. He turned on me like a flash and said angrily, ‘I thought you asked me how to spell it?’”
Such incidents were an evidence of Bryant’s increasing age. Though he lived to be eighty-three, he gave his strength to the Evening Post till the very day he was stricken down. The only sustained series of editorials which he wrote after his final visit to Europe in 1867 was a series upon reciprocity in trade, but he still contributed many occasional leaders upon questions of the day. He was accustomed to come down in the morning, and whether he wrote an editorial or not, to read all the proofs with care and frequently to make heavy corrections. “He would pass through the editorial rooms with a cheery good morning,” says Eggleston; “he would sit down by one’s desk and talk if there was aught to talk about; or, if asked a question while passing, would stand while answering it, and frequently would relate some anecdote suggested by the question or offer some apt quotation.” Hawthorne, who had seen him abroad, spoke of him as “at once alert and infirm,” and with “a weary look upon his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough energy still to see and do, if need were.” Yet the vigor and fire with which he treated topics of the day, if they seemed really pressing topics to him, was not a whit abated.
It is the testimony of more than one co-worker that his last day in the office, the day he delivered the address at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue, showed him worn and depressed. He went into Eggleston’s room, and asked the latter’s opinion upon two poems sent him by an acquaintance. Eggleston said they were poor stuff. “I supposed so,” Bryant said sadly; “and now I suppose I shall have to write to her on the subject. People expect too much of me—altogether too much.” He chatted also with Watson R. Sperry, the managing editor, who procured a book of reference from the Evening Post library for him. He was as tranquil and physically as strong as ever, but there was a tension in his voice. Finally, says Sperry, “he said to me that it was quite unfair to ask a man of his age to make a public address. There was a petulance and a pathos in his tone which I had never heard before.” A few hours later, after speaking bareheaded in the sun, he collapsed on the steps of Gen. James Wilson’s home.
Bryant’s work for the Post must not be thought of as consisting wholly of editorial writing and management. He filled literally hundreds of its columns with his letters of travel, which covered each of his six trips to Europe, and his tours to the South and the Northwest, and which ultimately were collected into three volumes. The letters are not literature, but good journalism. Bigelow once wrote Bryant that “they are very much liked by the class—of course, not the largest—who can appreciate them, and are of great value to the paper. I like them none the less because they are very different from the style of correspondence which ordinarily finds its way into newspapers from abroad.” By this Bigelow meant that they did not depend upon important events, adventure, or gossip. Their interest lay in a careful observation of scenery and society which often caused them to be widely copied. In the early days the poet wrote reviews and reports of important lectures. His signed poems in the Post did not aggregate a dozen, but they were supplemented by unsigned light verse, of which a good specimen is the poem on “Bully” Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, to be found in Godwin’s biography (II, 92). Brooks had been challenged to a duel in Canada by Anson Burlingame:
To Canada, Brooks was asked to go;
To waste of powder a pound or so;
He sighed as he answered, No, no, no,
They might take my life on the way, you know.
For I am afraid, afraid, afraid,
Bully Brooks is afraid....
Bryant reaped a generous material reward for his labors—the Evening Post made him by far the richest poet the country has had. He possessed a competence and more by 1860, for he had shared equally with Bigelow in profits that enabled the latter, after only twelve years with the paper, to retire worth more than $175,000. The Post’s business history in the Civil War is summarized in the statement that its dividends reached 80 per cent. upon the capital invested, and that at the close of the struggle its value was commonly estimated at $1,000,000.
It made Bryant, with Parke Godwin and Isaac Henderson, wealthy while some other New York journals were scarcely paying expenses. The Tribune in October, 1861, said that the circulation of American dailies was larger than ever, but many had been forced into bankruptcy. “We doubt that a single daily in this city has paid its expenses throughout the last four months, or that a dozen in the Union have done so.” The receipts of the Tribune in 1864 were $747,501, and its expenses were $735,751, the nominal profit not sufficing to pay for the depreciation of the plant. The chief reason for the embarrassment of the morning papers was the enormous cost of paper, especially as the war neared its close. The Tribune’s paper bill during 1864 was $426,000, whereas in 1861 it would not have been more than $200,000 for the same circulation. In the space of only four months, April to July, 1864, the combination of paper-makers in the Eastern States advanced the price from fifteen cents a pound to twenty-seven cents. The Times in 1863 imported paper from Belgium at seven and a half cents. The position of the Post was fortunate in that it used much less paper than the Herald or Tribune—it was still a four-page paper, while they had eight or twelve pages, though of course smaller—while at the beginning of the war it charged three cents a copy, and they only two. Later the prices of all the journals advanced; the Evening Post in 1862 going to four cents a copy and from $9 a year to $10, and in 1864 to five cents a copy and $12 a year.
Just how high the war-time circulation became we do not know. In April, 1861, it exceeded 20,000, and it steadily increased, the demand growing so heavy the first battle summer that whenever important news came it was necessary to issue many copies printed on one side of the sheet alone. To obviate this, in 1862 the journal installed “the largest and most efficient eight-cylinder newspaper press that has ever been constructed,” at a cost of nearly $50,000. We know that in 1864 the total revenue from sales and subscriptions of the daily reached $250,000. Advertising, moreover, had become so extensive that frequently six pages instead of four had to be printed, and they had swollen to enormous size. All of the evening papers were still “blanket sheets,” and one or two morning papers, the most prominent being the Sun, long remained so. At the close of the war the dimensions of the unfolded Evening Post were 30½ by 52 inches—it was not a journal for use in such subways as the Evening Post was already advocating. No newspaper so large, the Post boasted, had ever attained so wide a circulation. Huge as it was, and devoting from 20 to 25 of its 40 columns to advertising, it had constantly to exclude advertisements. The advertising receipts of the Herald in 1865 reached $662,192; of the Tribune, $301,841; of the Times, $284,412; and of the Evening Post, which stood high above the World or Sun, and easily led the evening papers, $222,715.
Bryant, who in the late thirties would probably have sold his interest in the Post for a few thousands clear, thus by 1866 had grown rich far beyond any wish or expectation on his part. He lived very simply; a man who would rather walk than drive, who preferred oatmeal to any procurable dainty, and whose most lavish entertainment was to have the Rev. Dr. Henry Bellows or some other well-loved friend spend a week-end at Roslyn, could not do otherwise. The chief outward signs of his wealth were that he acquired, besides his little estate at Roslyn, a town house, and the ancestral homestead at Cummington, Mass.; while he unostentatiously gave large sums in charity. President Mark Hopkins of Williams College, acknowledging a check from Bryant, wrote that it was a queer world in which poets were able to be lavish philanthropists. It was because of his large gifts that he was able to contradict with some asperity a stranger who wrote him criticizing his tariff views, and denouncing him as a plutocrat because he was said to be worth more than $500,000. Bryant replied, in a hitherto unpublished note: