the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;—not to be reckoned one character;-not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends,-please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

BRYANT was born of good New England stock, in Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794. His father, Peter Bryant, was a village physician of more than ordinary culture, carefully educated, a student of English and French poetry, and had a respectable talent for rhyming. His mother was descended from John and Priscilla Alden. She was a pious, dignified, sensible woman, to whom her son alludes, in one of his poems, as the "stately lady." The boy was named William Cullen from a celebrated physician in Edinburgh, and his father meant that he should be of that profession, but the son showed such a decided aversion to it that the matter was dropped. The rugged and picturesque hillcountry around the Bryant homestead seems to have developed in the boy that absorbing love of nature which, in after life, was one of his distinguishing characteristics. His grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, was the resident terror of the household. He gloried in his Puritan ancestors; and, as a magistrate, sent offenders, with fierce willingness, to the whipping-post, then a common institution in Massachusetts; and his home rule was hardly less rigorous. From his harsh and severe discipline the boy fled to the hills and woods to be soothed by "the love of nature." He took refuge, in after life, in Unitarianism, and, as he grew to manhood, and beyond, he developed a coldness of manner and of mind that made him appear, outside of his intimates, and the intimate expression of a few poems somewhat austere.

After a good preparatory education, Bryant entered Williams College, but some family losses prevented his taking a

degree. One was afterwards conferred upon him, that of A. M.; and his name is enrolled as an alumnus of the College. After leaving college he studied law for three years, and, in 1815, he was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of his profession in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Here also he married.

In 1825 Bryant removed to New York and began his real life work, that of journalism; becoming, after some preliminary literary skirmishing, editor of the Evening Post. As head of that singularly elevated and reliable paper he made his mark as the foremost journalist of the United States; the Puritan austerity of his mind showing itself in his choice of words, his exclusion of slang, trivialities, sensationalism, and crude jokes, and in the intellectual clear-cut precision of his editorials. He gave sixty years of his life to newspaper work; became rich and influential; was celebrated as a critic; crossed the ocean several times, and allied himself to the best everywhere. While at home he spent the year between his house in New York, and his beautiful estate at Roslyn, Long Island.

The management of the Evening Post was Bryant's lifework; poetry was his recreation. The lad began to compose verse when he was ten years old, and to publish in his early teens. He wrote his most celebrated poem, "Thanatopsis," when not yet eighteen years of age. The first draft of the poem lay among the author's private papers for nearly five years, was discovered by his father, and sent by him to the North American Review, which accepted and published it in September, 1817. It was received with a sort of rapture here and on the other side of the Atlantic; it was the best poem yet written in America. It was and is unique. It placed Bryant in that goodly company, with Wordsworth and his fellows, who opened to men the life of Nature and the truth of Nature's God.

In 1874 Mr. Bryant was honored with an exquisite silver vase, symbolical of his life and writings, procured by public subscription, presented with appropriate ceremonies, and placed in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. He died suddenly, in June, 1878, after reciting, with marvelous fire and enthusiasm, a passage from Dante, at the unveiling of the bust of Mazzini, in Central Park. He was in the eighty-fourth year of his age.

Bryant wrote altogether one hundred and seventy-one original poems; one hundred of these treat exclusively of Nature, the others, whatever their subject, include expressions of the charms of Nature. He sings little of love, little of humanity, nothing of the wrongs of mankind. Poetry is his retreat, his temple, almost his religion; and many of his verses give that still sense of seclusion as of distant nut-dropping woods. Bryant's best known poems, after "Thanatopsis," are "The Death of the Flowers," "A Forest Hymn," "The Fringed Gentian," "The West Wind," "The Wind and the Stream," "Autumn Woods," "The Flood of Ages," and the hymn, "Blessed are they that Mourn." In his old age he made a noble translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in blank verse.

THANATOPSIS.

To 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
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone,-nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world-with kings,
The powerful of the earth-the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—

Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings-yet-the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep-the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care