XXXVIII the Rights and Duties of Human Brotherhood 1878

XXXVIII The Rights and Duties of Human Brotherhood 1878 (LETTERS 2549 TO 2602) IN FEBRUARY 1878 BRYANT WAS ELECTED an honorary member of the Ameri can Library Association, lately founded at Philadelphia. Very likely its presi dent Justin Warner, an historian then librarian of Harvard College, knew of Bryant's gifts of libraries to Cummington and Roslyn, and was instrumental in securing the honor for him. By coincidence, during the week in which Bryant was informed of this election, President Hayes wrote him from Washington that he had been charged with securing plans for a proposed library in his hometown of Fremont, Ohio, and, hearing Bryant had built a library "somewhere in Massachusetts," asked if he might see pictures and plans of that building. Bryant sent these to Hayes, scarcely conceiving of the ultimate import of his act, for the Hayes Library, later housed in limestone and aided by state funds, was the forerunner of other Presidential libraries, and to this extent the little Bryant Library in Cummington became their prototype! In the spring of this year the second volume of the Popular History was in print. Although Bryant had written a preface to the first volume, that for this one was done by his associate. Bryant's insistence that Gay sign his work may be accounted for by the comment therein that the "oldest living and most distinguished American scholar ... has given to every line-read in proof before printing-the benefit of his careful criticism, his ripe judgment, and his candid discrimination." His concern with the History suspended temporarily, Bryant took up other matters. He sat to several portrait painters, notably Wyatt Eaton, a founder with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens of the Society of Ameri can Artists, where the picture was shown in April. He declined to write an ode for Lincoln's birthday-any such verses would have been anticlimactic after his elegy of 1865---or poetry to accompany a ghoulish sketch by cartoonist Thomas Nast of a skeleton in soldier's uniform. But he was persuaded by New Yorkers of Spanish descent to compose a poetic tribute to their compatriot Cervantes, and wrote verses for Washington's birthday. He was beset with requests that he speak or preside at ceremonies. One of these was a Century Club dinner for an old friend, the artist John G. Chapman-it may be remembered that, at the age of eighty-three, Bryant was still the president of the Century. He addressed an Episcopal clergymen's club. And, he complained to Leonice Moulton in April, although he longed for the country, "I have so many dinners to eat and receptions to attend in honor of The Rights and Duties of Human Brotherhood 415 Bayard Taylor that it is impossible to get away long enough to look at Roslyn." A popular travel writer and poet, Taylor, a member of the Century, had been named minister to Prussia and was sent off in April after being breakfasted and dined and given a "Commers" (German students' beer party) at which Bryant spoke, as did others, in German. Perhaps he felt a special responsibil ity for Taylor whom, when an unknown Pennsylvania printer, he had encour aged to try his pen in the world of New York journalism. There were as usual miscellaneous invitations: to a literary congress in Paris, a Vineland festival, an organizing meeting of the Chatauqua Associa tion. And, as Bryant complained to Mrs. Moulton, there were the autograph seekers, the beggars, the would-be poets, the office seekers needing recom mendations-"the annoyances and miseries which ... only cease with death." Heaviest of all pressures that spring was that urged on him by his daughters and son-in-law to consent to a radical restructuring of the Evening Post's fiscal affairs. Bryant's loyalty to his business partner Isaac Henderson had remained constant for many years in the face of the suspicions of Parke Godwin, who had cautioned Bryant eight years before against this "most subtle, adroit, and thorough rascal ... who in less than ten years will, in ways that you will hardly suspect, defraud you of the better part of your interest in the Evening Post." Now it became evident that Godwin's warning had been prescient. A year earlier Bryant had been persuaded to tell Henderson that his own attorney Andrew H. Green would examine the Evening Post's books, while assuring him that this implied "no interruption of the good understanding which has subsisted between us." But after a long inspection of the paper's affairs, first by Green and later by Judge John J. Monell, it was made painfully clear to Bryant that his associate of nearly thirty years had credited to his own account over two hundred thousand dollars which were rightfully Bryant's. As a result, Henderson was forced to resign his post as publisher, and to pledge controlling shares in the firm as security for his indebtedness to Bryant, who, though remaining as editor, turned over the presidency of the company to Monell. Thus control of the property was assured to Bryant's heirs. Suffering that spring under the painful disillusionment of these devel opments, and beset by attacks of lumbago and a persistent cold, Bryant complained to an editorial assistant one day late in May, "People expect too much of me-altogether too much." There was one more expectation, how ever, to which he acceded, though reluctantly. For many years he had been the speaker most in demand to honor writers and other public men in New York City. In Central Park, with which his name had been associated since its inception, he had often been the orator at the unveiling of statues. When he accepted the invitation of several Italian-American societies to join a commit tee planning a monument to the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, it was to be expected that he would speak the main address at its dedication in the park on May 29. Doubtless Bryant recalled with satisfaction an evening in London in 1845 when he had been asked to meet Mazzini after his hostess had characterized the two men as "specimen[s] of the best American" and the "best Italian." 416 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT On Tuesday, May 28, Bryant came in to the city from Roslyn, and on Wednesday morning went to his office, as was still his custom when in town. Here he held a long conversation with the Evening Post's literary editor, George Cary Eggleston, who later termed it a "critical history of American literature in miniature." After a light lunch Bryant was driven in his carriage to a site near the southwest corner of Central Park, where a bronze bust of Mazzini stood on a granite base ready for unveiling. It was a hot, sunny day. Bryant stood in the shade of an elm tree during preliminary ceremonies and speeches. When it came time for his oration, he mounted the platform, and as a bystander tried with difficulty to shield his bald head from the sun with an umbrella, he stepped forward from under this cover to close with the impassioned peroration, "Image of the illustrious champion of civil and religious liberty, cast in enduring bronze to typify the imperishable renown of thy original! Remain for ages yet to come where we place thee, in this resort of millions; remain till the day shall dawn-far distant though it may be-when the rights and duties of human brotherhood shall be acknowledged by all the races of mankind." Years earlier, Bryant had consoled Christiana Gibson on her mother's serious illness, and added, "I hear, with a sort of selfish distress, of the sufferings of people in the decline of life; they seem like a menace of what I must expect. I shrink from the thought of passing to the new life along a path in which Pain is to be my principal companion, and there is nothing which makes such rigorous demands upon our exclusive attention as pain. I therefore ask for myself and for my aged friends that, when our time comes we may 'be with ease I Gathered, not harshly plucked.' " When he had concluded his oration Bryant seemed to some observers to be exhausted, wrote Parke Godwin, and should have been allowed to go straight home, but "a gentleman with whom he had a slight acquaintance ... invited him to go to his house, at a considerable distance across the park." This "gentleman" was James Grant Wilson, a former Chicago journalist who had assiduously cultivated Bryant's acquaintance since coming to New York in 1865. As Wilson later recounted their progress across the Sheep Meadow, along the Mall to the Bethesda Fountain, and out the Seventy-Second Street gate to his brownstone house on East Seventy-Fourth Street, he said, Bryant had shrugged off his offer of a carriage, saying, "I am not tired, and prefer to walk." According to Wilson, Bryant chatted cheerfully and with animation during this ramble of a mile or more, on subjects ranging from the park shepherd and his sheep, and the statues of Halleck, Morse, and others which he had dedicated in past years, to anecdotes of the British nobility, and the shrubs and flowers along their route. Reaching Wilson's home east of Fifth Avenue "arm in arm," they climbed the steep stone front steps. "Disengaging my arm," Wilson continued, "I took a step in advance to open the inner door, and during these few seconds, without the slightest warning of any kind, the venerable poet, while my back was turned ..

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