CHAPTER XI

OTHER EVENTS IN BRYANT’S LIFE

Among the remaining important events of the poet’s life, we must first speak of the publication of his poems. In 1822, the year after his marriage and while he was trying to practice law at Great Barrington, he was invited to deliver the usual poetical address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. For this occasion he wrote the poem of “The Ages,” with which his collected works now open. This poem secured him so much reputation that he published a very small volume of his works. There were but forty-four pages, but in that small space were printed some of the finest poems Bryant ever wrote. The copies did not sell very rapidly, and Bryant’s profit was not large. When he was old and famous, a young man said to him, “I have just bought a copy of the first volume of your poems. I paid twenty dollars for it.”

“Hm!” said Bryant. “A good deal more than I got for writing it!”

Of his other poems, a large number were written for the _United States Literary Gazette_, and the various magazines he edited in New York. When he became editor of the _Evening Post_ he continued to edit the _United States Review and Literary Gazette_, until it was discontinued. After that he assisted in editing an annual called _The Talisman_, which appeared regularly until 1829. To this he contributed a considerable number of poems. But now for several years he wrote but little poetry, giving all his time and energy to the newspaper.

In 1831, however, he published a second collection of his poems. There were eighty in the volume. Then he thought he would see how they would be received in England. He had a friend who knew Washington Irving. Irving was a famous writer at this time, and his publisher was John Murray, one of the greatest of English publishers. Bryant obtained an introduction to Irving by letter, and asked him to assist in getting Murray to bring out a London edition of his poems. Murray would not do it, however. But Irving admired Bryant’s work, and after a time he found another publisher who was willing to bring out the volume. He himself wrote an introduction, and dedicated the book to Rogers, the fashionable poet of England at that time. But before the book came out the publisher, a fussy old man, came to Irving and said it would never do to print in England the line,

And the British foeman trembles.

That would be sure to offend the stolid Briton’s pride. So Irving changed the line to

The foeman trembles in his camp.

Years afterward there was some controversy over this change on the part of Irving; but Irving and Bryant always remained good friends.

Other volumes of his collected poems were published from time to time after this; but they are not important. The only other great poetic work that Bryant attempted was his translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. When he translated these grand Greek poems into English blank verse he was already quite an old man. His wife had died, and he wished some regular work, aside from his paper, that would claim his thoughts. So he made it a practice to translate a few lines every day. This he kept up for a number of years, until he had translated the whole of both these long poems.

For this he probably received more money than for all his other poems put together—over seventeen thousand dollars in all.

We must next speak of his travels; for Bryant was a great traveler. His first long journey was made in 1832 to visit his brothers, who had become the proprietors of a large landed estate in Illinois. He was three weeks on the journey out. While crossing the prairies between the Mississippi River and his brothers’ plantation he met a company of Illinois volunteers, who were going to take part in the Black Hawk War. They were led by a tall, awkward, uncouth lad, whose appearance attracted Bryant’s attention, and whose conversation pleased him, it was so breezy and original. He learned many years afterward that this captain was Abraham Lincoln. When in 1860 it was proposed to nominate Lincoln for President, Lincoln came to New York to speak, and Bryant introduced him to the audience.

It was during his visit to his brothers that he wrote of

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name.

He evidently liked the West, for we have seen that later he proposed to sell out his paper and go there to live.

In 1834 he made his first trip to Europe. While he was gone he wrote letters regularly for his paper; but he traveled leisurely and enjoyed himself. He took his wife and daughters with him. He remained two years, when he was called home by the illness of the associate editor, who had charge of the paper in his absence.

After this, at various times, he visited Europe again, crossing the Atlantic in all six times. One of these journeys, made in 1857, was chiefly for Mrs. Bryant’s health. They landed at Havre, and journeyed through Belgium and Holland, France and Spain to Madrid, whence they crossed to Naples, where Mrs. Bryant was ill for four months. She recovered somewhat, but when at last they returned to the United States she was not much better. Bryant had bought the old homestead at Cummington, and had invited all his relatives from Illinois to join him in “hanging the pot.” In July, 1858, he had to notify his brothers, some of whom were already at Cummington, that his wife was too ill to go there; and on the 27th of that month she died. In regard to her death he wrote to a friend, “I lived with my wife forty-five years, and now that great blessing of my life is withdrawn, and I am like one cast out of paradise and wandering in a strange world.”

Nearly ten years before this, in 1849, he made a visit of two months to Cuba, going by way of the Carolinas and Florida. He was “received by the governor-general of Havana, and passed several days on a coffee estate at Matanzas, going then by rail to San Antonio in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked by an American engineer. He breakfasted at the inn of La Punta on rice and fresh eggs and a dish of meat. He witnessed a cock-fight, a masked ball, a murderer garroted, and slavery in some of its most inhuman phases.”

He also visited Mexico, Egypt, and the Shetland Islands, and was everywhere an interested observer of men and manners.