W. A. Bradley: William Cullen Bryant, ‘English Men of Letters,’ 1905.
I
HIS LIFE
The author of ‘Thanatopsis’ was born at Cummington, a village among the hills of western Massachusetts, on November 3, 1794. Through his father, Doctor Peter Bryant, a physician, he traced his ancestry to Stephen Bryant, an early settler at Duxbury; through his mother, Sarah Snell, he had ‘a triple claim’ to ‘Mayflower’ origin.
Doctor Bryant was a many-sided man. He collected books, read poetry (Horace was his favorite), wrote satirical verse, was a musician and something of a mechanic. He was an ardent Federalist, a member of the Massachusetts legislature for several terms, and then of the senate. He possessed in high degree the art of imparting knowledge. Medical students thought themselves fortunate in being allowed to study under his direction. Doctor Bryant’s father and grandfather were both physicians, and he hoped that his second-born (who was named in honor of the Scottish practitioner, William Cullen) would follow in the ancestral footsteps.
Bryant began to make verses in his eighth year. At ten he wrote an ‘address’ in heroic couplets, which got into newspaper print. The boy used to pray that he might write verses which would endure. A political satire, The Embargo or Sketches of the Times, ‘by a youth of thirteen,’ if not in the nature of evidence that the prayer had been answered, so delighted Doctor Bryant that he printed it in a pamphlet (1808). A second issue containing additional poems was brought out the next year. To this the author put his name.
Bryant was taught Greek by his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Snell of Brookfield, and mathematics by the Reverend Moses Hallock of Plainfield. He entered the Sophomore class at Williams College in October, 1810, and left the following May. He was to have spent the two succeeding years at Yale, but the plan had to be abandoned for want of money. Some time during the summer of 1811 ‘Thanatopsis’ was written in its first form and laid aside.
The poet began reading law with Judge Samuel Howe of Worthington, who once reproached his pupil ‘for giving to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads time that belonged to Blackstone and Chitty.’ He continued his studies under William Baylies of Bridgewater, was admitted to the bar at Plymouth in August, 1815, practised awhile at Plainfield, and then removed to Great Barrington. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ were written the night of the young lawyer’s arrival in Plainfield.
He made progress in his profession and was called to argue cases at New Haven and before the supreme court at Boston. The intervals of legal business were given to poetry. Bryant’s father urged him to contribute to the new ‘North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal,’ the editor of which was an old friend. The young lawyer-poet seeming indifferent to the suggestion, Doctor Bryant carried with him to Boston two pieces he had unearthed among his son’s papers, namely, ‘Thanatopsis’ in its first form, and ‘A Fragment’ now called ‘Inscription at the Entrance of a Wood.’ Both were printed in the ‘Review’ for September, 1817. Other poems followed, together with three prose essays (on ‘American Poetry,’ on ‘The Happy Temperament,’ and on the use of ‘Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse’). He also contributed poems to ‘The Idle Man,’ Richard Henry Dana’s magazine, and the ‘United States Literary Gazette.’
In June, 1821, Bryant married Miss Frances Fairchild of Great Barrington. In April of this year he had been invited to give ‘the usual poetic address’ before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. ‘The Ages’ was written for this occasion and publicly read on August 30. At the instance of his Boston friends, Bryant printed ‘The Ages’ with seven other pieces in a little pamphlet entitled Poems.
Never in love with the law, the poet began to regard it with aversion. He was intellectually restless and took to play-writing. A farce, ‘The Heroes,’ in ridicule of duelling, was sent to his friends, the Sedgwicks, in New York, who admitted its merits but doubted its chances of success on the stage, Bryant, at the suggestion of Henry Sedgwick, made two or three visits to the city in search of congenial work. He thought he had found it when he undertook to edit ‘The New York Review and Athenæum Magazine,’ a periodical made by amalgamating ‘The Atlantic Magazine’ with the older ‘Literary Review.’ Bryant wrote to a friend that it was a livelihood, ‘and a livelihood is all I got from the law.’