and the parrot "Charlie"
that swore when excited, stopped the horses in the street with its cries
of "whoa," and nipped the ankles of unwary visitors. Then, too, he was
always attractive to children, and often preferred their society to that
of older people. But above all else, with each succeeding year he became
more just and compassionate towards others. The kindliness of his nature
was untouched by the sorrow and sickness that he bore. "Love--love to
all the world," he would often repeat in his last years, and the sweet
influence of the benediction is felt by all who read his life and works:

"Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth's noblest tributes to thy name belong.
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song."[390-2]

FOOTNOTES:

[381-1] The poetical quotations given in this article are from
_Snow-Bound_.

[390-2] From an ode written by Oliver Wendell Holmes upon the death of
Whittier.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

Plain indeed was the little home among the hills of Western
Massachusetts, near the town of Cummington, where was born on November
3, 1794, the first great American poet, William Cullen Bryant. His
father was a physician of scholarly tastes, and his mother, though not
highly educated, was a woman of much practical wisdom. Both parents were
kind and affectionate, but followed the custom of that time in treating
their children with a strictness unknown to American boys and girls of
to-day. Even small acts of disrespect or disobedience were promptly
punished, and to aid in the work of correction the Bryant home as well
as that of almost every neighbor was provided with a good-sized bundle
of birch sticks hanging warningly on the kitchen wall. As the poet
himself tells us in a sketch of his early life, the children looked upon
the older people of the family with so much awe that they could not go
to them freely nor act naturally in their presence.

This severity in his home must have made young Bryant, who was by nature
grave and thoughtful, even more serious. Then, too, his mental powers
developed with surprising quickness, so that by the time he had reached
his teens, he was thinking and expressing himself upon subjects usually
discussed by men rather than boys. Having begun to write verses when
only nine years old, he had had enough practice in this kind of exercise
to compose when thirteen years of age a satirical p