poet. It was just seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had
published his boy's verses on "The Embargo."

Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it
has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless
generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this
late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from
boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the
eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the
first colonists. This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a
Waterfowl," "The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The
Crowded Street," "The Flood of Years." All of these tell the same story
of endless change and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the same
mighty stream of human existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly,
as majestically, at seventeen as when he wrote "The Flood of Years" at
eighty-two. He is a master of description, though he has slight gift
for narrative or drama, and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But
everywhere in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter hills
in Western Massachusetts, something austere and elemental which reaches
kindred spirits below the surface on which intellect and passion have
their play, something more primitive, indeed, than human intellect or
passion and belonging to another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed
and ancient as the sun."

A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its portraits
of the minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time
of the Civil War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit
sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake,
of N. P. Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only
"single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of "Home Sweet Home," just as
Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," is today a "single-poem"
man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos
of the dead as Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America" and Poe's
"Literati." They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its very
easily pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the
eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of
passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are
not without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the
country as a whole. Two figure