all, "Monument Mountain;" the Hellenic element predominated
in "The Massacre at Scio" and "The Song of the Greek Amazon;" the
Hebraic element touched him lightly in "Rizpah" and the "Song of the
Stars;" and the pure poetic element was manifest in "March," "The
Rivulet" (which, by the way, ran through the grounds of the old
homestead at Cummington), "After a Tempest," "The Murdered Traveler,"
"Hymn to the North Star," "A Forest Hymn," "O fairest of the rural
maids," and the exquisite and now most pathetic poem, "June." These
poems and others not specified here, if read continuously and in the
order in which they were composed, show a wide range of sympathies, a
perfect acquaintance with many measures, and a clear, capacious,
ever-growing intellect. They are all distinctive of the genius of their
author, but neither exhibits the full measure of his powers. We can say
of none of them, "The man who wrote this will never write any better."

The publication of Mr. Bryant's little volume of verse was indirectly
the cause of his adopting literature as a profession. It was warmly
commended, and by no one more so than by Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, in the
columns of the _New York American_. He was something of a literary
authority at the time, a man of fortune and college-bred, known in a
mild way as the author of an anniversary discourse delivered before the
New York Historical Society in 1818, of a political satire entitled "The
Bucktail Bards," and later of an "Essay on the Doctrine of Contracts."
Among his friends was Mr. Henry D. Sedgwick, a summer neighbor, so to
speak, of Mr. Bryant's, having a country-house at Stockbridge, a few
miles from Great Barrington, and a house in town, which was frequented
by the _literati_ of the day, such as Verplanck, Halleck, Percival,
Cooper, and others of less note. An admirer of Mr. Bryant, Mr. Sedgwick
set to work, with the assistance of Mr. Verplanck, to procure him
literary employment in New York, in order to enable him to escape his
hated bondage to the law; and he was appointed assistant editor of a
projected periodical called the _New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine_.
The at last enfranchised lawyer dropped his barbarous pen, closed his
law-books, and in the winter or spring of 1825 removed with his
household to New York. The projected periodical was started, as these
sanguine ventures always are, with fair hopes of success. It was well
edited, and its contributors were men of acknowl