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Bryant was one of those unusual men who have two distinct callings. Much surprise has been expressed at his apparent ability to carry on his functions of journalist and poet without clash. But is it true, or more than superficially true, that he did so carry them on? To be sure, he wrote his editorial articles at the newspaper office and his verses elsewhere, but this is a mere mechanical distinction. A man of Bryant’s depth of conviction and passionate temperament does not throw off care when he boards a suburban train for his country home.
The history of Bryant’s inner life has not been written, perhaps cannot be. This is not to imply that his character was enigmatic and mysterious, but merely to emphasize the fact of his extraordinary reserve. More than most self-contained men he kept his own counsel. Such a history would show how deep his experience of the world had ploughed into him, and it might explain in a degree the remote and stoical character of his verse.
Bryant’s poetical work as a whole has an impassive quality often described as coldness. Partly due to his genius and accentuated by the excessive retouching to which he subjected his verse, it grew in still larger measure out of his determination not to impart to his verse any of the feverishness of spirit consequent upon a life of political warfare. The poet held himself wonderfully in check, as a man of iron will allows no mark of the strong passion under which he labors to show in his face. Bryant was rarely betrayed into so much of personal feeling as flashed out in that bitter stanza of ‘The Future Life:’—
For me the sordid cares in which I dwell,
Shrink and consume my heart, as heat the scroll;
And wrath has left its scar—that fire of hell
Has left its scar upon my soul.
While the detachment was not complete, Bryant undoubtedly kept his poetic apart from his secular life in a way to command admiration. This he accomplished by extraordinary self-restraint. As a part of the varied and long-continued discipline to which he subjected himself, the self-restraint made for character. The question, however, arises whether the poetry did not, in certain ways, suffer under the very discipline by which the character developed.