Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country physician, with liberal preferences in theology, Federalist views in politics, and a library of seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's mother records his birth in her diary in terse words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become a poet. At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, The Embargo, which his proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly one year at Williams College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of Thanatopsis. He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's Grave and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses in a drawer, and five years later his father found them, shed tears over them, and sent them to the North American Review, where they were published in September, 1817.
In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of it, and with the confession that he sometimes read The Lyrical Ballads when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in 1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield—aged twenty-one, and looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before he slept that night he had composed the poem To a Waterfowl. No more authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into chill December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such communicative passion.
Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the stoicism, the reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by material standards. Thanatopsis had been instantly regarded in 1817 as the finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to contribute to the North American Review an essay on American poetry, and this, like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, The Ages, in 1821, the year of Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary strength on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held steadily to his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he allowed himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate a somewhat thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prairies, and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward uncouth lad" of racy conversational powers, who was leading his company of volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to meet again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the country that the former captain of volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. Not so Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years before. "There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things.… He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own." Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted men than Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness caused a fall which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on The Embargo.
Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists. This is the central motive of Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, The Rivulet, A Forest Hymn, An Evening Revery, The Crowded Street, The Flood of Years. All of these tell the same story of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly, as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote The Flood of Years at eighty-two. He is a master of description, though he has slight gift for narrative or drama, and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills in Western Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion have their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human intellect or passion and belonging to another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun."
A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its portraits of the minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time of the Civil War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P. Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only "single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of Home Sweet Home, just as Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, is today a "single-poem" man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos of the dead as Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America and Poe's Literati. They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its very easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are not without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the country as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast with those habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary gatherings, though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker New York. To all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the rest, but the curiosity of the twentieth century sets them apart from their forgotten contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest—and yet luckiest—authors who ever tried to sell a manuscript along Broadway. One of them is Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. They shall have a chapter to themselves.
But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England once more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. During the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to a new life of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary productiveness in this era that it still remains her greatest period, and so completely did New England writers of this epoch voice the ideals of the nation that the great majority of Americans, even today, regard these New Englanders as the truest literary exponents of the mind and soul of the United States. We must take a look at them.
[CHAPTER VI.]
The Transcendentalists