Library of the Best American Literature

Transcriber’s Notes

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REPRESENTATIVES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

LIBRARY

OF THE

Best American Literature

CONTAINING

The Lives of our Authors in Story Form
Their Portraits, their Homes, and their Personal Traits
How they Worked and What they Wrote

Choice Selections from Eminent Writers

EMBRACING

GREAT AMERICAN POETS AND NOVELISTS, FOREMOST WOMEN IN AMERICAN LETTERS, DISTINGUISHED CRITICS AND ESSAYISTS, OUR NATIONAL HUMORISTS, NOTED JOURNALISTS AND MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTORS, POPULAR WRITERS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE, GREAT ORATORS AND PUBLIC LECTURERS

ELEGANTLY ILLUSTRATED WITH HALF TONE PORTRAITS

And Photographs of Authors’ Homes, together with Many Other Illustrations in the Text

MONARCH BOOK COMPANY,

Successors to and formerly L. P. Miller & Co.,

CHICAGO, ILL. PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1897, by
W. E. SCULL,
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
All rights reserved.

ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT TO INFRINGE UPON OUR COPYRIGHT BY USING EITHER THE MATTER OR THE PICTURES IN THIS VOLUME.

LITERATURE OF AMERICA.

PART [1.] Great Poets of America [2.] Our Most Noted Novelists [3.] Famous Women Novelists [4.] Representative Women Poets of America [5.] Well-known Essayists, Critics and Sketch Writers [6.] Great American Historians and Biographers [7.] Our National Humorists [8.] Popular Writers for Young People [9.] Noted Journalists and Magazine Contributors [10.] Great Orators and Popular Lecturers [11.] Famous Women Orators and Reformers [12.] Miscellaneous Masterpieces and Choice Gems

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Our obligation to the following publishers is respectfully and gratefully acknowledged, since, without the courtesies and assistance of these publishers and a number of the living authors, it would have been impossible to issue this volume.

Copyright selections from the following authors are used by the permission of and special arrangement with MESSRS. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., their authorized publishers:—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry W. Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Maurice Thompson, Colonel John Hay, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward), Octave Thanet (Miss French), Alice Cary, Phœbe Cary, Charles Dudley Warner, E. C. Stedman, James Parton, John Fiske and Sarah Jane Lippincott.

TO THE CENTURY CO., we are indebted for selections from Richard Watson Gilder, James Whitcomb Riley and Francis Richard Stockton.

TO CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, for extracts from Eugene Field.

TO HARPER & BROTHERS, for selections from Will Carleton, General Lew Wallace, W. D. Howells, Thomas Nelson Page, John L. Motley, Charles Follen Adams and Lyman Abbott.

TO ROBERTS BROTHERS, for selections from Edward Everett Hale, Helen Hunt Jackson, Louise Chandler Moulton and Louisa M. Alcott.

TO ORANGE, JUDD & CO., for extracts from Edward Eggleston.

TO DODD, MEAD & CO., for selections from E. P. Roe, Marion Harland (Mrs. Terhune), Amelia E. Barr and Martha Finley.

TO D. APPLETON & CO., for Wm. Cullen Bryant and John Bach McMaster.

TO MACMILLAN & CO., for F. Marion Crawford.

TO HORACE L. TRAUBEL, Executor, for Walt Whitman.

TO ESTES & LAURIAT, for Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge).

TO LITTLE, BROWN & CO., for Francis Parkman.

TO FUNK & WAGNALLS, for Josiah Allen’s Wife (Miss Holley).

TO LEE & SHEPARD, for Yawcob Strauss (Charles Follen Adams), Oliver Optic (William T. Adams) and Mary A. Livermore.

TO J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., for Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye).

TO GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, for Uncle Remus (Joel C. Harris).

TO TICKNOR & CO., for Julian Hawthorne.

TO PORTER & COATES, for Edward Ellis and Horatio Alger.

TO WILLIAM F. GILL & CO., for Whitelaw Reid.

TO C. H. HUDGINS & CO., for Henry W. Grady.

TO THE “COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE,” for Julian Hawthorne.

TO T. B. PETERSON & BROS., for Frances Hodgson Burnett.

TO JAS. R. OSGOOD & CO., for Jane Goodwin Austin.

TO GEO. R. SHEPARD, for Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

TO J. LEWIS STACKPOLE, for John L. Motley.

Besides the above, we are under special obligation to a number of authors who kindly furnished, in answer to our request, selections which they considered representative of their writings.

American Authors

Hawthorne • Cooper • H. B. Stowe • Prescott • Irving

INTRODUCTION.

HE ink of a Nation’s Scholars is more sacred than the blood of its martyrs,”—declares Mohammed. It is with this sentence in mind, and a desire to impress upon our fellow countrymen the excellence, scope and volume of American literature, and the dignity and personality of American authorship, that this work has been prepared and is now offered to the public.

The volume is distinctly American, and, as such it naturally appeals to the patriotism of Americans. Every selection which it contains was written by an American. Its perusal, we feel confident, will both entertain the reader and quicken the pride of every lover of his country in the accomplishments of her authors.

European nations had already the best of their literature before ours began. It is less than three hundred years since the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock, and the planting of a colony at Jamestown, marked the first permanent settlements on these shores. Two hundred years were almost entirely consumed in the foundation work of exploring the country, settling new colonies, in conflicts with the Indians, and in contentions with the mother country. Finally—after two centuries—open war with England served the purpose of bringing the jealous colonists together, throwing off our allegiance to Europe, and, under an independent constitution, of introducing the united colonists—now the United States of America—into the sisterhood of nations.

Thus, it was not until the twilight of the eighteenth century that we had an organized nationality, and it was not until the dawn of the nineteenth that we began to have a literature. Prior to this we looked abroad for everything except the products of our soil. Neither manufacturing nor literature sought to raise its head among us. The former was largely prohibited by our generous mother, who wanted to make our clothes and furnish us with all manufactured articles; literature was frowned upon with the old interrogation, “Who reads an American book?” But simultaneously with the advent of liberty upon our shores was born the spirit of progress—at once enthroned and established as the guardian saint of American energy and enterprise. She touched the mechanic and the hum of his machinery was heard and the smoke of his factory arose as an incense to her, while our exhaustless stores of raw materials were transformed into things of use and beauty; she touched the merchant and the wings of commerce were spread over our seas; she touched the scholar and the few institutions of learning along the Atlantic seaboard took on new life and colleges and universities multiplied and followed rapidly the course of civilization across the mountains and plains of the West.

But the spirit of progress did not stop here. Long before that time Dr. Johnson had declared, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and our people had begun to realize the force of the truth, which Carlyle afterwards expressed, that “A country which has no national literature, or a literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be to its neighbors, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and unesteemed country.” The infant nation had now begun its independent history. Should it also have an independent literature; and if so, what were the bases for it? The few writers who had dared to venture into print had dealt with European themes, and laid their scenes and published their books in foreign lands. What had America, to inspire their genius?

The answer to this question was of vital importance. Upon it depended our destiny in literature. It came clear and strong. To go elsewhere were to imitate the discontented and foolish farmer who became possessed of a passion for hunting diamonds, and, selling his farm for a song, spent his days in wandering over the earth in search of them. The man who bought this farm found diamonds in the yard around the house, and developed that farm into the famous Golconda mines. The poor man who wandered away had acres of diamonds at home. They were his if he had but been wise enough to gather them.

So was America a rich field for her authors. Nature nowhere else offered such inspiration to the poet, the descriptive and the scientific writer as was found in America. Its mountains were the grandest; its plains the broadest; its rivers the longest; its lakes were inland seas; its water-falls were the most sublime; its caves were the largest and most wonderful in the world; its forests bore every variety of vegetable life and stretched themselves from ocean to ocean; it had a soil and a climate diversified and varied beyond that of any other nation; birds sang for us whose notes were heard on no other shores; we had a fauna and a flora of our own. For the historian there was the aboriginal red man, with his unwritten past preserved only in tradition awaiting the pen of the faithful chronicler; the Colonial period was a study fraught with American life and tradition and no foreigner could gather its true story from the musty tomes of a European library; the Revolutionary period must be recorded by an American historian. For the novelist and the sketch writer our magnificent land had a rich legendary lore, and a peculiarity of manners and customs possessed by no other continent. The story of its frontier, with a peculiar type of life found nowhere else, was all its own.

It was to this magnificent prospect, with its inspiring possibilities that Progress,—the first child of liberty—stood and pointed as she awoke the slumbering genius of independent American Authorship, and, placing the pen in her hand bade her write what she would. Thus the youngest aspirant in literature stood forth with the freest hand, in a country with its treasures of the past unused, and a prospective view of the most magnificent future of the nations of earth.

What a field for literature! What an opportunity it offered! How well it has been occupied, how attractive the personality, how high the aims, and how admirable the methods of those who have done so, it is the province of this volume to demonstrate. With this end in view, the volume has been prepared. It has been inspired by a patriotic pride in the wonderful achievement of our men and women in literature, in making America, at the beginning of her second century as a nation, the fair and powerful rival of England and Continental Europe in the field of letters.

Wonderful have been the achievements of Americans as inventors, mechanics, merchants—indeed, in every field in which they have contended—but we are prepared to agree with Dr. Johnson that “The chief glory of a nation is its authors;” and, with Carlyle, that they entitle us to our greatest respect among other nations. The reading of the biographies and extracts herein contained should impress the reader with the debt of gratitude we as a people owe to those illustrious men and women, who, while wreathing their own brows with chaplets of fame, have written the name, “America,” high up on the literary roll of honor among the greatest nations of the world.

The Poets of New England

THE DISTINCTIVE PURPOSE AND PLAN OF THIS VOLUME.

HIS work has been designed and prepared with a view to presenting an outline of American literature in such a manner as to stimulate a love for good reading and especially to encourage the study of the lives and writings of our American authors. The plan of this work is unique and original, and possesses certain helpful and interesting features, which—so far as we are aware—have been contemplated by no other single volume.

The first and main purpose of the work is to present to our American homes a mass of wholesome, varied and well-selected reading matter. In this respect it is substantially a volume for the family. America is pre-eminently a country of homes. These homes are the schools of citizenship, and—next to the Bible, which is the foundation of our morals and laws—we need those books which at once entertain and instruct, and, at the same time, stimulate patriotism and pride for our native land.

This book seeks to meet this demand. Four-fifths of our space is devoted exclusively to American literature. Nearly all other volumes of selections are made up chiefly from foreign authors. The reason for this is obvious. Foreign publications until within the last few years have been free of copyright restrictions. Anything might be chosen and copied from them while American authors were protected by law from such outrages. Consequently, American material under forty-two years of age could not be used without the consent of the owner of the copyright. The expense and the difficulty of obtaining these permissions were too great to warrant compilers and publishers in using American material. The constantly growing demand, however, for a work of this class has encouraged the publishers of this volume to undertake the task. The publishers of the works from which these selections are made and many living authors represented have been corresponded with, and it is only through the joint courtesy and co-operation of these many publishers and authors that the production of this volume has been made possible. Due acknowledgment will be found elsewhere. In a number of instances the selections have been made by the authors themselves, who have also rendered other valuable assistance in supplying data and photographs.

The second distinctive point of merit in the plan of the work is the biographical feature, which gives the story of each author’s life separately, treating them both personally and as writers. Longfellow remarked in “Hyperion”—“If you once understand the character of an author the comprehension of his writings becomes easy.” He might have gone further and stated that when we have once read the life of an author his writings become the more interesting. Goethe assures us that “Every author portrays himself in his works even though it be against his will.” The patriarch in the Scriptures had the same thought in his mind when he exclaimed “Oh! that mine enemy had written a book.” Human nature remains the same. Any book takes on a new phase of value and interest to us the moment we know the story of the writer, whether we agree with his statements and theories or not. These biographical sketches, which in every case are placed immediately before the selections from an author, give, in addition to the story of his life, a list of the principal books he has written, and the dates of publication, together with comments on his literary style and in many instances reviews of his best known works. This, with the selections which follow, established that necessary bond of sympathy and relationship which should exist in the mind of the reader between every author and his writings. Furthermore, under this arrangement the biography of each author and the selections from his works compose a complete and independent chapter in the volume, so that the writer may be taken up and studied or read alone, or in connection with others in the particular class to which he belongs.

This brings us to the third point of classification. Other volumes of selections—where they have been classified at all—have usually placed selections of similar character together under the various heads of Narrative and Descriptive, Moral and Religious, Historical, etc. On the contrary, it has appeared to us the better plan in the construction of this volume to classify the authors, rather than, by dividing their selections, scatter the children of one parent in many different quarters. There has been no small difficulty in doing this in the cases of some of our versatile writers. Emerson, for instance, with his poetry, philosophy and essays, and Holmes, with his wit and humor, his essays, his novels and his poetry. Where should they be placed? Summing them up, we find their writings—whether written in stanzas of metred lines or all the way across the page, and whether they talked philosophy or indulged in humor—were predominated by the spirit of poetry. Therefore, with their varied brood, Emerson and Holmes were taken off to the “Poet’s Corner,” which is made all the richer and more enjoyable by the variety of their gems of prose. Hence our classifications and groupings are as Poets, Novelists, Historians, Journalists, Humorists, Essayists, Critics, Orators, etc., placing each author in the department to which he most belongs, enabling the reader to read and compare him in his best element with others of the same class.

Part I., “Great Poets of America,” comprises twenty of our most famous and popular writers of verse. The work necessarily begins with that immortal “Seven Stars” of poesy in the galaxy of our literary heavens—Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes and Lowell. Succeeding these are those of lesser magnitude, many of whom are still living and some who have won fame in other fields of literature which divides honors with their poetry. Among these are Bayard Taylor, the noted traveler and poet; N. P. Willis, the most accomplished magazinist of his day; R. H. Stoddard, the critic; Walt Whitman; Maurice Thompson, the scientist; Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Richard Watson Gilder, editors, and Colonel John Hay, politician and statesman. The list closes with that notable group of well-known Western poets, James Whitcomb Riley, Bret Harte, Eugene Field, Will Carleton, and Joaquin Miller.

The remaining nine parts of the book treat in similar manner about seventy-five additional authors, embracing noted novelists, representative women poets of America; essayists, critics and sketch writers; great American historians and biographers; our national humorists; popular writers for young people; noted journalists and magazine contributors; great orators and popular lecturers. Thus, it will be seen that in this volume the whole field of American letters has been gleaned to make the work the best and most representative of our literature possible within the scope of a single volume.

In making a list of authors in whom the public were sufficiently interested to entitle them to a place in a work like this, naturally they were found to be entirely too numerous to be all included in one book. The absence of many good names from the volume is, therefore, explained by the fact that the editor has been driven to the necessity of selecting, first, those whom he deemed pre-eminently prominent, and, after that, making room for those who best represent a certain class or particular phase of our literature.

To those authors who have so kindly responded to our requests for courtesies, and whose names do not appear, the above explanation is offered. The omission was imperative in order that those treated might be allowed sufficient space to make the work as complete and representative as might be reasonably expected.

Special attention has been given to illustrations. We have inserted portraits of all the authors whose photographs we could obtain, and have, also, given views of the homes and studies of many. A large number of special drawings have also been made to illustrate the text of selections. The whole number of portraits and other illustrations amount to nearly one hundred and fifty, all of which are strictly illustrative of the authors or their writings. None are put in as mere ornaments. We have, furthermore, taken particular care to arrange a number of special groups, placing those authors which belong in one class or division of a class together on a page. One group on a page represents our greatest poets; another, well-known western poets; another, famous historians; another, writers for young people; another, American humorists, etc. These groups are all arranged by artists in various designs of ornamental setting. In many cases we have also had special designs made by artists for commemorative and historic pictures of famous authors. These drawings set forth in a pictorial form leading scenes in the life and labors of the author represented.

THE NEW CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY, WASHINGTON, D. C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. [⭘] An Author at Fourteen [⭘] The Influence of his Father [⭘] Bryant’s Best Known Poems [⭘] Personal Appearance [⭘] A Long and Useful Life [⭘] ‘Thanatopsis’ [⭘] ‘Waiting By the Gate [⭘] ‘Blessed are They That Mourn’ [⭘] ‘Antiquity of Freedom’ [⭘] ‘To a Water Fowl’ [⭘] ‘Robert of Lincoln’ [⭘] ‘Drought’ [⭘] ‘The Past’ [⭘] ‘The Murdered Traveler’ [⭘] ‘The Battle-Field’ [⭘] ‘The Crowded Street’ [⭘] ‘Fitz Greene Halleck (Notice of)’ [⭘] ‘A Corn-Shucking in South Carolina’ EDGAR ALLEN POE. [⭘] Comparison with Other American Poets [⭘] Place of Birth and Ancestry [⭘] Career as a Student [⭘] The Sadness of his Life and Its Influence Upon his Literature [⭘] Conflicting Statements of his Biographers [⭘] Great as a Story Writer and as a Poet [⭘] His Literary Labors and Productions [⭘] ‘The City in the Sea’ [⭘] ‘Annabel Lee’ [⭘] ‘To Helen’ [⭘] ‘Israfel’ [⭘] ‘To One in Paradise’ [⭘] ‘Lenore’ [⭘] ‘The Bells’ [⭘] ‘The Raven’ HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. [⭘] His Place in Literature [⭘] Comparison With American and English Poets [⭘] His Education, Collegemates and Home [⭘] His Domestic Life. His Poems [⭘] Prose Works and Translations [⭘] The Wayside Inn (A view of) [⭘] His Critics, Poe, Margaret Fuller, ♦Duyckinck

♦ ‘Duyckink’ replaced with ‘Duyckinck’

♦ ‘Workskip’ replaced with ‘Worship’

♦ ‘Hours’ replaced with ‘Days’

♦ ‘Belamy’s’ replaced with ‘Bellamy’s’

♦ ‘Dakotah’ replaced with ‘Dacotah’

[♦] added work omitted from the TOC

♦ ‘Rebublic’ replaced with ‘Republic’

FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS.

WHOSE WRITINGS, BIOGRAPHIES AND PORTRAITS APPEAR IN THIS VOLUME.

Abbott, Lyman.

Adams, Charles Follen, (Yawcob Strauss).

Adams, Wm. T., (Oliver Optic).

Alcott, Louisa May.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey.

Alger, Horatio, Jr.

Anthony, Susan B.

Artemus Ward, (Charles F. Browne).

Austin, Jane Goodwin.

Bancroft, George H.

Barr, Amelia E.

Beecher, Henry Ward.

Bellamy, Edward.

Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye).

Browne, Charles F., (Artemus Ward).[¹]

Bryant, William Cullen.

[♦]Burdette, Robert J.

[♦] ‘Burdett’ replaced with ‘Burdette’

Burnett, Frances Hodgson.

Cable, George W.

Carleton, Will.

Cary, Alice.

Cary, Phoebe.

Child, Lydia Maria.[¹]

Clay, Henry.

Clemens, Samuel L., (Mark Twain).

Cooper, James Fenimore.

Craddock, Charles Egbert, (Mary N. Murfree).

Crawford, Francis Marion.

Dana, Charles A.

Davis, Richard Harding.

Depew, Chauncey M.

Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth.

Dodge, Mary Abigail, (Gail Hamilton).[¹]

Dodge, Mary Mapes.[¹]

Eggleston, Edward.

Ellis, Edward.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

Everett, Edward.

Field, Eugene.

Finley, Martha.

Fiske, John.[¹]

French, Alice, (Octave Thanet).

Gail Hamilton, (Mary Abigail Dodge).[¹]

Gilder, Richard Watson.

Gough, John B.

Grady, Henry W.

Greeley, Horace.

Grace Greenwood, (Sarah J. Lippincott).

Hale, Edward Everett.

Halstead, Murat.

Harris, Joel Chandler, (Uncle Remus).

Harte, Bret.

Hawthorne, Julian.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.

Hay, John.

Henry, Patrick.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth.

Holley, Marietta, (Josiah Allen’s Wife).[¹]

Holmes, Oliver Wendell.

Howe, Julia Ward.

Howells, William Dean.

Ik Marvel, (Donald G. Mitchell).

Irving, Washington.

Jackson, Helen Hunt.

Joaquin Miller (Cincinnatus Heine Miller).

Josiah Allen’s Wife, (Marietta Holly).[¹]

Josh Billings, (Henry W. Shaw).[¹]

Larcom, Lucy.

Lippincott, Sarah Jane, (Grace Greenwood).

Livermore, Mary A.

Lockwood, Belva Ann.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.

Lowell, James Russell.

Mabie, Hamilton W.

Mark Twain, (Samuel L. Clemens).

Marion Harland, (Mary V. Terhune).

McMaster, John B.

Miller, Cincinnatus Heine, (Joaquin).

Mitchell, Donald Grant (Ik Marvel).

Motley, John L.

Moulton, Louise Chandler.

Murfree, Mary N., (Chas. Egbert Craddock).

Nye, Edgar Wilson, (Bill Nye).

Oliver Optic, (William T. Adams).

Octave Thanet, (Alice French).

Page, Thomas Nelson.

Parkman, Francis.[¹]

Parton, James.

Phillips, Wendell.

Poe, Edgar Allen.[¹]

Prescott, William.

Reid, Whitelaw.

Riley, James Whitcomb.

Roe, Edward Payson.

Shaw, Albert.

Shaw, Henry W., (Josh Billings).

Sigourney, Lydia H.

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence.

Stockton, Frank.

Stoddard, Richard Henry.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher.

Taylor, Bayard.[¹]

Terhune, Mary Virginia.

Thompson, Maurice.[¹]

Wallace, General Lew.[¹]

Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Warner, Charles Dudley.

Watterson, Henry.

Webster, Daniel.

Whitman, Walt.

Whittier, John Greenleaf.

Willard, Frances E.

Willis, Nathaniel Parker.

Whitcher, Mrs. (The Widow Bedott).[¹]

[¹] No Portrait.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands.”

Longfellow.

GREAT POETS OF AMERICA.

WELL KNOWN AMERICAN POETS

N. P. WILLIS
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH • WALT WHITMAN
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
RICHARD WATSON GILDER • COL. JOHN HAY

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE POET OF NATURE.

T is said that “genius always manifests itself before its possessor reaches manhood.” Perhaps in no case is this more true than in that of the poet, and William Cullen Bryant was no exception to the general rule. The poetical fancy was early displayed in him. He began to write verses at nine, and at ten composed a little poem to be spoken at a public school, which was published in a newspaper. At fourteen a collection of his poems was published in 12 mo. form by E. G. House of Boston. Strange to say the longest one of these, entitled “The Embargo” was political in its character setting forth his reflections on the Anti-Jeffersonian Federalism prevalent in New England at that time. But it is said that never after that effort did the poet employ his muse upon the politics of the day, though the general topics of liberty and independence have given occasion to some of his finest efforts. Bryant was a great lover of nature. In the Juvenile Collection above referred to were published an “Ode to Connecticut River” and also the lines entitled “Drought” which show the characteristic observation as well as the style in which his youthful muse found expression. It was written July, 1807, when the author was thirteen years of age, and will be found among the succeeding selections.

“Thanatopsis,” one of his most popular poems, (though he himself marked it low) was written when the poet was but little more than eighteen years of age. This production is called the beginning of American poetry.

William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Hampshire Co., Mass., November 3rd, 1784. His father was a physician, and a man of literary culture who encouraged his son’s early ability, and taught him the value of correctness and compression, and enabled him to distinguish between true poetic enthusiasm and the bombast into which young poets are apt to fall. The feeling and reverence with which Bryant cherished the memory of his father whose life was

“Marked with some act of goodness every day,”

is touchingly alluded to in several of his poems and directly spoken of with pathetic eloquence in the “Hymn to Death” written in 1825:

Alas! I little thought that the stern power

Whose fearful praise I sung, would try me thus

Before the strain was ended. It must cease—

For he is in his grave who taught my youth

The art of verse, and in the bud of life

Offered me to the Muses. Oh, cut off

Untimely! when thy reason in its strength,

Ripened by years of toil and studious search

And watch of Nature’s silent lessons, taught

Thy hand to practise best the lenient art

To which thou gavest thy laborious days,

And, last, thy life. And, therefore, when the earth

Received thee, tears were in unyielding eyes,

And on hard cheeks, and they who deemed thy skill

Delayed their death-hour, shuddered and turned pale

When thou wert gone. This faltering verse, which thou

Shalt not, as wont, o’erlook, is all I have

To offer at thy grave—this—and the hope

To copy thy example.

Bryant was educated at Williams College, but left with an honorable discharge before graduation to take up the study of law, which he practiced one year at Plainfield and nine years at Great Barrington, but in 1825 he abandoned law for literature, and removed to New York where in 1826 he began to edit the “Evening Post,” which position he continued to occupy from that time until the day of his death. William Cullen Bryant and the “Evening Post” were almost as conspicuous and permanent features of the city as the Battery and Trinity Church.

In 1821 Mr. Bryant married Frances Fairchild, the loveliness of whose character is hinted in some of his sweetest productions. The one beginning

“O fairest of the rural maids,”

was written some years before their marriage; and “The Future Life,” one of the noblest and most pathetic of his poems, is addressed to her:—

“In meadows fanned by Heaven’s life-breathing wind,

In the resplendence of that glorious sphere

And larger movements of the unfettered mind,

Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here?

“Will not thy own meek heart demand me there,—

That heart whose fondest throbs to me were given?

My name on earth was ever in thy prayer,

And wilt thou never utter it in heaven?”

Among his best-known poems are “A Forest Hymn,” “The Death of the Flowers,” “Lines to a Waterfowl,” and “The Planting of the Apple-Tree.” One of the greatest of his works, though not among the most popular, is his translation of Homer, which he completed when seventy-seven years of age.

Bryant had a marvellous memory. His familiarity with the English poets was such that when at sea, where he was always too ill to read much, he would beguile the time by reciting page after page from favorite authors. However long the voyage, he never exhausted his resources. “I once proposed,” says a friend, “to send for a copy of a magazine in which a new poem of his was announced to appear. ‘You need not send for it,’ said he, ‘I can give it to you.’ ‘Then you have a copy with you?’ said I. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I can recall it,’ and thereupon proceeded immediately to write it out. I congratulated him upon having such a faithful memory. ‘If allowed a little time,’ he replied, ‘I could recall every line of poetry I have ever written.’”

His tenderness of the feelings of others, and his earnest desire always to avoid the giving of unnecessary pain, were very marked. “Soon after I began to do the duties of literary editor,” writes an associate, “Mr. Bryant, who was reading a review of a little book of wretchedly halting verse, said to me: ‘I wish you would deal very gently with poets, especially the weaker ones.’”

Bryant was a man of very striking appearance, especially in age. “It is a fine sight,” says one writer, “to see a man full of years, clear in mind, sober in judgment, refined in taste, and handsome in person.... I remember once to have been at a lecture where Mr. Bryant sat several seats in front of me, and his finely-sized head was especially noticeable.... The observer of Bryant’s capacious skull and most refined expression of face cannot fail to read therein the history of a noble manhood.”

The grand old veteran of verse died in New York in 1878 at the age of eighty-four, universally known and honored. He was in his sixth year when George Washington died, and lived under the administration of twenty presidents and had seen his own writings in print for seventy years. During this long life—though editor for fifty years of a political daily paper, and continually before the public—he had kept his reputation unspotted from the world, as if he had, throughout the decades, continually before his mind the admonition of the closing lines of “Thanatopsis” written by himself seventy years before.

THANATOPSIS.[¹]

The following production is called the beginning of American poetry.

That a young man not yet 19 should have produced a poem so lofty in conception, so full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery, and, above all, so pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy, may well be regarded as one of the most remarkable examples of early maturity in literary history.

[¹] The following copyrighted selections from Wm. Cullen Bryant are inserted by permission of D. Appleton & Co., the publishers of his works.

O him who, in the love of Nature, holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language; for his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides

Into his darker musings with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice.—Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more