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"BLESSINGS be with them, and eternal praise,

Who gave us nobler lives, and nobler cares,The Poets! who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays!"

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

MEMOIR

OF

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

BY JAMES GRANT WILSON.

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"He had the wisdom of age in his youth, and the fire of youth in his age.'

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MARK HOPKINS. CHILDHOOD-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE DAYS-LEGAL STUDIESMARRIAGE-PUBLICATION OF POEMS.

"fine old

SIR WALTER SCOTT relates that, when some one was mentioned as a man" to Dean Swift, he exclaimed with violence that there was no such thing. "If the man you speak of had either a mind or a body worth a farthing, they would have worn him out long ago." Béranger and Brougham, Goethe and Guizot, Humboldt and Sir Henry Holland, Lyndhurst and Palmerston, Earl Russell and Field-Marshal Moltke, and among Americans, J. Q. Adams and Taney, Professors Henry and Hodge, Horace Binney and Richard Henry Dana, now ninety-one-the age at which Titian said that genius never grows old-may be cited among the men of the nineteenth century in refutation of this theory, which it may be presumed has nothing to do with thews or stature. But if we wanted a bright and shining example of faculties, and faculties of a high order, remaining unimpaired in mind and body till long past the grand climacteric, we might name William Cullen Bryant, the beloved patriarch of American poetry, and "the most accomplished, the most distinguished, and the most universally honored citizen of the United States," who, having lived under every President of our country, completed his fourscore years and three, cheerful and full of conversation, and continued until the last week of May, 1878, to heartily enjoy what Dr. Johnson happily calls "the sunshine of life."

No name in our contemporaneous literature, either in England or America, is crowned with more successful honors than that of William Cullen Bryant. Born among the granite hills of Massachusetts, at a period when our colonial literature, like our people, was but recently under the dominion of Great Britain, he lived to see that literature expand from its infancy and take a proud place in the republic of letters, and he survived to see the Republic itself, starting from its revolutionary birth,

spring up to a giant power, after passing most triumphantly through a giant rebellion. Surrounded by such historic and heroic associations, men like Bryant, who survive, embody in their lives the annals of a people, and represent in their individuality the history of a nation.

Pursuing beyond the age of fourscore an energetic literary career, the poet was also an active co-laborer in all worthy movements to promote the advancement of the arts and literature. A liberal patron of art himself, he was always the judicious and eloquent advocate of the claims of artists. On the completion of the beautiful Venetian temple to art erected by the New York Academy of Design, Mr. Bryant delivered the address inaugurating the building and consecrating it to its uses. Foremost in the literary circles of his adopted city, he was for many years the president of that time-honored institution of New York, the Century Club, which has always embraced among its members men of letters, prominent artists, and leading gentlemen of the liberal professions. The poet's predecessors in that office were Gulian C. Verplanck and George Bancroft. Philanthropic in his nature, Bryant was ever the consistent promoter of all subjects having for their tendency the elevation of the race and the furtherance of the interests of humanity. Connected with the leading evening metropolitan journal, and one of the oldest in the United States, he was enabled to bring the powerful influence of the press to bear with his own great literary renown and personal weight upon whatever measure he supported in the cause of philanthropy, letters, and the promotion of art.

William Cullen Bryant was born in a log-house at Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, November 3d, 1794.* He was a descendant of the English and Scotch families of Alden, Ames, Harris, Hayward, Howard, Keith, Mitchell, Packard, Snell, and Washburn, and through them from several of the Pilgrims who landed from the Mayflower at Plymouth, on the 22d of December, 1620-not a bad genealogy for an American citizen, nor unlike that of his brother-poet Halleck, who was descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, including John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians. Bryant also had a worthy clerical ancestor in the person of James Keith, the first minister of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, who, after having preached from the same pulpit fifty-six years, died in that town in 1719.

Stephen Bryant, the first of the poet's American ancestors of his own name, who is known to have been at Plymouth, Massachusetts, as early as 1632, and who some time before 1650 married Abigail Shaw, had several children, one of whom was also named Stephen. He was the father of Ichabod Bryant, who moved from Raynham

* A general misapprehension exists as to Mr. Bryant's birthplace. He was born, as he told the writer, not in what is now known as the " Bryant Homestead," but in a small house constructed of square logs and long since removed. This fact is further confirmed by the following note from the poet to a friend, dated December 5th, 1876: "Your uncle Eliphalet Packard was quite right in designating my birthplace. As the tradition of my family goes, I was born in a house which then stood at the north-west corner of a road leading north of the burying-ground on the hill, and directly opposite to the burying ground. The house was afterwards removed and placed near that occupied then by Daniel Dawes. I suppose there is nothing left of it now."

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