CHAPTER VII

A LITERARY ADVENTURER

Gradually Bryant had become known in the small literary circle that had sprung up around the _North American Review_, though his name was not known outside this small circle in Boston. He had a great desire to become a literary man; but he knew he must support his wife and family, and verse-making offered no money return.

His friends, Richard H. Dana, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, and one or two others, tried to persuade him to go to New York and engage in literature. Finally he made a visit to New York. A publishing firm there offered him two hundred dollars a year to write one hundred lines of poetry a month for them. He thought this might keep him from starvation. He went back to Great Barrington and stayed for some time longer, contributing to the _United States Literary Gazette_, for which Longfellow was then writing.

In 1825 he visited New York again, and was offered the editorship of a monthly periodical, the _New York Review and Athenæum Magazine_, which some publishers were proposing to start. His salary was to be one thousand dollars a year. This offer he accepted, and he went to New York to live, leaving his wife and family in Great Barrington until he should find out whether he was going to succeed. He considered that if literature failed, he could drudge at the law in New York as well as at Great Barrington.

James Fenimore Cooper, who was now becoming a famous novelist, was a friend of Bryant’s. So was William Ware, who wrote a novel based on the life of Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra,—a very famous book in its day and one still worth reading. Bryant worked very hard. He liked literature a great deal better than he did the law; and though it was uncertain, he thought that fortune would favor him in the end. The magazine he edited did not succeed very well, and at the end of a year was united with another one, the _New York Literary Gazette_. A few months later the _United States Gazette_ in Boston was united with the magazine which Bryant was editing, under the title, _United States Review and Literary Gazette_.

Bryant was allowed one quarter interest in the business and five hundred dollars a year salary. The five hundred dollars was probably all he got, and this sum was so small he could not make it support his family very well. If this magazine should succeed, he would get more money; but it did not, and Bryant really thought he would have to quit literature for law once more.

He was licensed to practice in New York; but just then fortune favored him: he was asked to do some work on the New York _Evening Post_. The assistant editor had gone to Cuba, and finally died there. So Bryant was soon made the assistant editor, and was allowed an interest in the paper.

At that time the paper was favorable to the federal party; but a few years later it became decidedly democratic in tone. So long as Mr. Bryant controlled it, it was an advocate of free trade and a bold champion of human liberty.