"And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died, The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. To a generation familiar with all the extravagances of nineteenth-century romanticism, a feeling so restrained, so close to sentimentality, as this expressed, too, with such deliberate luminosity, may well seem unimpassioned. But one cannot dwell on these lines without feeling genuine sweetness of temper, or without finally discerning, in what at first seems chilly deliberation of phrase, what is rather a loving care for every syllable. The allusion in the last stanza is to the early death from consumption of Bryant's sister. Only a few years before, his father had died of the same disease. So he had personal reason for melancholy. As one looks through his work, however, one is apt to wonder whether, even if his life had been destitute of personal bereavement, his verse might not still have hovered sentimentally about the dead. His most successful poem, "Thanatopsis," was apparently written before death had often come near him; and it is hardly excessive to say that if a single name were sought for his collected works, from beginning to end, a version of that barbarous Greek title might be found suitable, and the whole volume fairly entitled "Glimpses of the Grave." Of course he touched on other things; but he touched on mortality so constantly as to make one feel regretfully sure that whenever he felt stirred to poetry his fancy started for the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In this, of course, he was not peculiar. The subject had such fascination for eighteenth-century versifiers that in 1751 Gray's "Elegy" made of it a masterpiece; and we need only remember those mortuary memorials wherein the hair of the departed is woven into the weeping willows of widowed brooches, to be reminded how general this kind of sentimentality has been. This underlying impulse of Bryant's poetry, however, was most general in the eighteenth century; and Bryant's style distinctly affected. by that of Cowper, and still more by that of Wordsworthbelongs rather to the nineteenth. A contemporary of Irving, then, he reverses the relation of substance to style which we remarked in Irving's prose. Irving, imbued with nineteenthcentury romantic temper, wrote in the classical style of the century before; Bryant, writing in the simply luminous style of his own century, expressed a somewhat formal sentimentality which had hardly characterised vital work in England for fifty years. Always simple and always luminous, then, tenderly sentimental, melancholy and sweet, given to commonplace didactic moralising and coolly careful metre and rhyme, Bryant, a far from prolific poet, had done, when he came to New York at the age of thirty-one, as good work as he was ever destined to do. In New York he lived for fifty-three years; and during those years most of what is now called American literature came into existence. His life, indeed, is really coeval with the letters of his country. As a matter of fact, the chief development of these letters centred in Boston. Had Bryant yielded to his first impulse, and gone not to New York, but to the chief city of his native New England, the chances are that his eminence would have suffered. In New York, however, throughout his residence there, it became clearer and clearer that he was not only the most eminent of local journalists, but also the only resident poet of distinction. That accidental word calls to mind a trait which any one who ever saw Bryant must remember. Whatever one thought of his literary merit, — and the great changes in literary fashion which occurred during his lifetime often made his younger contemporaries deem him less of a poet than calm reflection makes him seem now, there can be no question that his aspect was remarkably distinguished. Partly, of course, this was a matter of mere personal appearance. His firm old features, encircled by a cloud of snowy hair and beard, would have impressed anybody; but in the distinction of Bryant's appearance there was something more than accident of feature, and something far more significant in the history of literary America. One does not remember his manner as in the least assertive. Rather to those who, without knowing him, saw him at a distance his aspect was gentle, kindly, calmly venerable. But it had not the simplicity of unconsciousness. Whatever he really felt, he looked like a man who felt himself considerable; and certainly the qualities for which he most valued himself were not those which as journalist and man of business had made him a man of fortune. The thing for which he most respected himself was his work as a poet; and beyond question it was his work as a poet which the public most willingly recognised. The distinction he may have felt, -the distinction which he certainly received from his contemporaries, and which came to be so embodied in his personal appearance, was wholly due to his achievement as a man of letters. In this fact there is something characteristic of America at the time when Bryant's best work was done. Ours was a new country, at last conscious of its national independence. It was deeply and sensitively aware that it lacked a literature. Whoever produced writings which could be pronounced admirable was accordingly regarded by his fellow-citizens as a public benefactor, a great public figure, a personage of whom the nation should be proud. Bryant, fully recognised in early middle life, retained to the end that gracious distinction of aspect which comes from the habit of personal eminence. Such was the eldest of our nineteenth-century poets, the first whose work was recognised abroad. In the nature of things he has never been widely popular; and in the course of a century whose poetry has been chiefly marked by romantic passion, he has tended to seem more and more commonplace. But those of us who used to think him commonplace forgot his historical significance; we forgot that his work was really the first which proved to England what native American poetry might be. The old world was looking for some wild manifestation of this new, hardly apprehended, western democracy. Instead, what it found in Bryant, the one poetic contemporary of Irving and Cooper whose writings have lasted, was fastidious over-refinement, tender sentimentality, and pervasive luminosity. Refinement, in short, and conscious refinement, groups Bryant with Irving, with Cooper, ✓ and with Brockden Brown. In its beginning the American literature of the nineteenth century was marked rather by delicacy than by strength, by palpable consciousness of personal distinction rather than by any such outburst of previously unphrased emotion as on general principles democracy might have been expected to excite. V EDGAR ALLAN POE IN April, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published in “Godey's Lady's Book" a considerable article on William Cullen Bryant. In the six following numbers of the same periodical, whose colored fashion-plates are said to have been highly acceptable to the contemporary female public, appeared that series of comments on the literary personages of the day which has been collected under the name of the "Literati." The personal career of Poe was so erratic that one can hardly group him with any definite literary school. It seems, however, more than accidental that his principal critical work concerned the contemporary literature of New York; and though he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his life in Virginia, he spent in New York rather more of his literary years than anywhere else. On the whole, then, this seems the most fitting place to consider him. Erratic his career was from the beginning. His father, the son of a Revolutionary soldier, had gone wrong and brought up on the stage; his mother was an English actress of whom little is known. The pair, who chanced to be in Boston when their son was born, in 1809, died when he was still a little child. At the age of two, he was adopted by a gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, named Allan, who soon took him to Europe, where he remained from 1815 to 1820. In 1826 he was for a year at the University of Virginia, where his career was brought to an end by a gambling scrape, which in turn brought almost to an end his relations with his adopted father. In 1827 his first verses were published, |