CHAPTER II

BRYANT’S CHILDHOOD

Bryant was the first great American poet, having been born fourteen years before Longfellow. Like Longfellow, he could trace his descent (on his mother’s side) from John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, who came over in the _Mayflower_; and through two other branches he was descended from Pilgrim stock. The first Bryant in America did not come in the _Mayflower_, but he was in Plymouth in 1632, and was chosen town constable in 1663.

The poet’s father and grandfather were both doctors; so when Dr. Peter Bryant was married to “sweet Sallie Snell,” as the poet has it, and their second child was born, the good doctor named him William Cullen, after a great medical authority who had died four years before. This happy event—that is, the birth of William Cullen Bryant—occurred November 3, 1794, in the small town of Cummington, Massachusetts. But instead of growing up to be a doctor the boy became a poet, and his father was rather proud of the fact, too.

Cummington is a small town among the Berkshire hills, in the western part of Massachusetts. The country around it is mountainous, with wide valleys which in the early days were very fertile. Bryant’s grandfather, Snell, had come here in 1774, just before the Revolution, with a handful of other settlers, to take up a homestead. There is a story that Eben Snell, Jr., an uncle of the poet, while working in the cornfield put his ear to the ground and heard the sounds of the distant battle of Bunker Hill.

Little William Cullen was very quick and bright, though puny. In his autobiography he says he could go alone when he was but a year old, and knew all the letters of the alphabet four months later. His older brother, Austin, did even better than this, however; for he began to read the Bible before he was three years old, and in just about a year from the time he began, he had read it all through, from Genesis to Revelation. William Cullen as a small child learned many of Watts’s hymns, and used to recite them as he stood by his mother’s knee.

It is probable that so much study was not good for him, for he suffered from terrible headaches, and was so puny his father and mother thought he would not live long. His head seemed to be too big for his body. There is a story that some medical students, who were studying in Dr. Bryant’s office when William was a child, were ordered to give him a cold bath every morning in a spring near the house. They kept this up so late in the fall that they had to break the first skim of ice on the top of the water. The treatment cured him, and after he was fourteen, he says, he never had a headache in his life.

He began to go to school before he was four years old. It was not unnatural that a little fellow of that age should get sleepy during school hours. One day he woke from a sound nap to find himself in his teacher’s lap. When he realized where he was he became furiously angry at the thought that he should be treated so like a baby.

About this time, too, he was kicked by a horse. A lady had come to call on his mother, and had tied her horse to a tree near the door. There were fresh chips scattered about, and William and his elder brother amused themselves by throwing them at the horse’s heels to make him caper. William got too near and at last the horse kicked him over. He soon recovered, and went to school with a bandaged head, but a scar from the wound on his head he carried to the day of his death.

When he was five years old, the family went to live on Grandfather Snell’s old homestead, where Dr. Peter Bryant remained as long as he lived. Years afterward, when the poet became rich, he bought this place for a country home.

He began now to go regularly to the district school, where he learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, a little grammar and geography, and the Westminster Catechism. He was a fine speller, seldom missing a word, and he got on well in geography. The catechism, however, did not interest him and he could not understand it.

Those were very strict Puritanic days. Says Bryant, in his autobiography: “One of the means of keeping boys in order was a little bundle of birchen rods, bound together with a small cord, and generally suspended on a nail against the kitchen wall. This was esteemed as much a part of the necessary furniture as the crane that hung in the kitchen fireplace, or the shovel and tongs.” And he tells us that sometimes the boy was sent out to cut the twigs with which he himself was to be whipped.

Not only was whipping thought to be good for boys, but even grown-up people were whipped in public for petty crimes.

About a mile from the Bryant home was a public whipping-post. Says the poet: “I remember seeing a young fellow, of about eighteen years of age, upon whose back, by direction of a justice of the peace, forty lashes had just been laid, as the punishment for a theft which he had committed. His eyes were red, like those of one who had been crying, and I well remember the feeling of curiosity, mingled with pity and fear, with which I gazed on him.”

This was the last time the whipping-post was used in that neighborhood, but it stood there for several years longer.