t
was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else
appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in
the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then
a great deal talked about as the author of the _Sparrowgrass Papers_.

This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if
there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be
spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way
the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of
books and opinions, _Arcturus_, for Evert A. Duyckinck was one of the
_habitues_ there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his
brother George was to start the publication of _The Literary World_;
and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this
publication collected material and wrote their _Encyclopaedia of
American Literature_, which gave them fame long after both were dead.

The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of
1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself,
heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made.
James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous
business for a writer's career, projected his _Literary Gazette_, in
which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather
a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he
transferred his _New England Magazine_ to New York under the title of
the _American Monthly Magazine_, the same year established _Our New
World_. He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at
Bartlett's place thought much of the author of _The Old Sexton_.

William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of
Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked
back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city
a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen,
so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that
innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon
the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work.

In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these
memories start. At that corner, in a building long gone now, when
Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the _New York
Review and Athenaeum_, in which his own poem, _Death of the Flowers_,
was pu