CHAPTER X

BRYANT AS AN ORATOR AND PROSE WRITER

When Bryant went to New York it was a comparatively small city. As years passed, it grew in size and wealth, and its newspapers became more important. We have seen how Bryant became rich by his ownership of the _Evening Post_. He also gained in honors. He was the editor of a great daily paper, and he was also a noted poet. His poems had been published both in this country and in London, and many thousands of copies were sold. Bryant was often asked to write poems for great celebrations, or in honor of well-known people. This he always refused to do. But he often made public addresses. When James Fenimore Cooper died, he acted, as it were, as the spokesman of the nation’s grief. He pronounced the funeral eulogy upon Irving, and upon many noted people. He was not a great orator like Daniel Webster; but such speeches as these upon the lives of great men have seldom been surpassed.

We must remember, too, that all his life Bryant, in his editorials, was writing prose. From these editorials it would be easy to select some of the finest pieces of prose writing in our language. As most of them were on the passing events of the day, they have never been reprinted,—they have died with the newspaper. But here is a passage on the emancipation of the slaves which has the ring of true eloquence.

President Lincoln had proposed gradual emancipation.

“Gradual emancipation!” exclaims Bryant. “Have we not suffered enough from slavery without keeping it any longer? Has not blood enough been shed? My friends, if a child of yours were to fall into the fire, would you pull him out gradually? If he were to swallow a dose of laudanum sufficient to cause speedy death, and a stomach pump were at hand, would you draw out the poison by degrees? If your house were on fire, would you put it out piecemeal? And yet there are men who talk of gradual emancipation by force of ancient habit, and there are men in the slave states who make of slavery a sort of idol which they are unwilling to part with; which, if it must be removed, they would prefer to see removed after a lapse of time and tender leave-takings.

“Slavery is a foul and monstrous idol, a Juggernaut under which thousands are crushed to death; it is a Moloch for whom the children of the land pass through fire. Must we consent that the number of the victims shall be diminished gradually? If there are a thousand victims this year, are you willing that nine hundred shall be sacrificed next year, and eight hundred the next, and so on until after the lapse of ten years it shall cease? No, my friends, let us hurl the grim image from its pedestal. Down with it to the ground! Dash it to fragments; trample it in the dust. Grind it to powder as the prophets of old commanded that the graven images of the Hebrew idolaters should be ground, and in that state scatter it to the four winds and strew it upon the waters, that no human hand shall ever gather up the accursed atoms and mould them into an image to be worshiped again with human sacrifice.”

This eloquent passage is taken from an editorial in the _Evening Post_. The following is from a speech delivered at a dinner given to Professor Morse, the inventor of the telegraph:

“There is one view of this great invention which impresses me with awe. Beside me at this board, along with the illustrious man whom we are met to honor, and whose name will go down to the latest generations of civilized man, sits the gentleman to whose clear-sighted perseverance, and to whose energy—an energy which knew no discouragement, no weariness, no pause—we owe it that the telegraph has been laid which connects the Old World with the New through the Atlantic Ocean. My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs, strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted.

“Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race.

“A volume of contemporary history passes every hour of the day from one continent to another. An operator on the continent of Europe gently touches the keys of an instrument in his quiet room, a message is shot with the swiftness of light through the abysses of the sea, and before his hand is lifted from the machine the story of revolts and revolutions, of monarchs dethroned and new dynasties set up in their place, of battles and conquests and treaties of peace, of great statesmen fallen in death, lights of the world gone out and new luminaries glimmering on the horizon, is written down in another quiet room on the other side of the globe.

“Mr. President, I see in the circumstances which I have enumerated a new proof of the superiority of mind to matter, of the independent existence of that part of our nature which we call the spirit, when it can thus subdue, enslave, and educate the subtilest, the most active, and in certain of its manifestations the most intractable and terrible, of the elements, making it in our hands the vehicle of thought, and compelling it to speak every language of the civilized world. I infer the capacity of the spirit for a separate state of being, its indestructible essence and its noble destiny, and I thank the great discoverer whom we have assembled to honor for this confirmation of my faith.”