am Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest
American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes
of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood by conducting a daily
newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was

"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."

Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the westernmost county of
Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and
practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great
Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social
and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with
Connecticut and New York than with Boston and Eastern Massachusetts.
Accordingly, when, in 1825, Bryant yielded to the attractions of a
literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a
brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review
and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the {514} _Evening Post_,
a Democratic and Free-trade journal, with which he remained connected
till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered
the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had
been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted
immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two
years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a
wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was
not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the
universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank
verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is
extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English
blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it
falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was
characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into
possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and
about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity,
and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in
his own _Hymn to the North Star_:

"And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet,
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp'st thy