Bryant, William Cullen

Ms., 1794-1878. A poet and journalist of New York city. In early life he began the practice of law, but soon abandoned it for journalism and, removing to New York in 1825, became in 1828 the editor of the Evening Post, with which he remained a ociated until his death. His earliest poem, The Embargo, a political satire, was published when its author was but thirteen, but the first collection of his poems was not made until 1821, the famous Thanatopsis being one of the eight which the volume comprised. The quantity of Bryant’s verse is small, the quality high, but not uniformly so. Its tone is usually calmly philosophic, and it rarely makes any very effective appeal to the sympathies, its coldne arising partly from lack of humour, partly from natural reserve. The Embargo; The Spanish Revolution; The Ages; The Fountain of Youth, and Other Poems; The White-Footed Deer; The Flood of Years; Thirty Poems; translations of the Iliad and Ody ey, both in unrhymed heroic pentameter; Letters of a Traveller, a prose work; Orations and Addre es. See Commemorative Addre by G. W. Curtis; Lives by J. Bigelow, Parke Godwin, A. J. Symington; Stedman’s Poets of America; Applet on’s American Biography; Wilson’s Bryant and his Friends, 1886; Go e’s Questions at I ue; Magazine of American History, vol. 23; Atlantic Monthly, March, 1897. Ap. Cr. Hou.