Introduction

ADDRESSING A WOULD-BE BIOGRAPHER near the dose of his incomparable career, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The letters of a person, ... form the only full and genuine journal of his life; and few can let them go out of their own hands while they live. A life written after these hoards become open to investigation must supercede any previous one." Like Jefferson, whose many-sided public life his own resembled significantly, Wil• liam Cullen Bryant began in old age a narrative of his early years. But, unlike his great democratic precursor, whom he had lampooned in youth and grown in maturity to admire greatly, he refused to undertake an autobiography. When, nearing eighty, he was urged by William Dean Howells to compose an account of his life, he replied, "I have thought a good deal of the reminiscences which you ask me to dish up for the Atlantic [Monthly], and the more I have thought the less am I inclined to the task. I cannot set them down without running into egotism. I remember more of my own experiences than of my associations with other men and the part they took in what fell under my observation." In the absence of a skillful and uniquely informed biographer, the record of Bryant's versatile career has become "thin and shadowy," wrote Vernon Parrington, since his death nearly a century ago. The unusual length of his public life (just seventy years), his extraordinarily various professional and civic activities, and his in• satiable habit of travel, both at home and abroad, pose a stiff challenge to the best of chroniclers. Thus, while it might be supposed that the biography written by his editorial associate and son-in-law, Parke Godwin, five years after Bryant's death in 1878, must be both thorough and authoritative, its imbalance becomes more apparent as its subject's scattered correspondence is brought together for the first time. Bryant was a publishing poet for almost seventy years, from "The Embargo" in 1808 to "The Flood of Years" in 1876. For half a century he was an influential po• litical journalist. Throughout that period-which spanned the tenures of fourteen presidents-his leading editorials in the New York Evening Post expressed opinions often implemented afterward in public policy. His friendships with artists and writers were more numerous than those of any of his contemporary Americans. Landscape painters rendered his themes in half a hundred works, and he sat for nearly that many portraits in his lifetime. His memorial discourses on a dozen of his fellows, notably Thomas Cole, Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, remain in some instances the best existing brief accounts of their lives. In upwards of a hundred public addresses Bryant showed his informed concern with a great va• riety of subjects, from Greek Independence to Municipal Reform, from Public Health to Music in the Public Schools, from Mythology to Pomology. Yet, despite his many preoccupations, he wrote nearly twenty-five hundred identifiable letters, of which more than two thousand have been recovered for the present collection. No previous compilation of Bryant's correspondence has ever been attempted. His first important biographer, Godwin, printed numerous "extracts" from such let• ters as he managed to retrieve; but even of these many were taken from rough drafts without comparison with later final copies, and few were reproduced in their en• tirety. Bryant himself gathered together three volumes of the travel letters he had previously published in the Evening Post. Since his death, letters have appeared from time to time in various periodicals-all too often transcribed and edited inaccurately. In such ephemeral form they have added little to his epistolary reputation. Although Godwin managed to keep the overt expression of animosity out of his family-authorized biography, there is little doubt that he felt an imperfect sym- 2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT pathy for the father-in-law upon whom he had long been financially dependent, and whom he once characterized as a "cold, irritable and selfish man" who "wants human every day sympathies and is a little malignant." This covert bias inevitably led him to ignore or to slight activities central to his subject's career and essential to a rounded image of the man. Among these were Bryant's role in forming cultural or• ganizations and civic institutions such as the National Academy of Design, Sketch Club, American Art Union, Century Association, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his powerful aesthetic influence on the painting of the Hudson River School, both now freely credited by historians; his intimacy with such artists as John James Audubon, Edwin Booth, George Catlin, Thomas Cole, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Andrew Jackson Downing, Asher Durand, Edwin Forrest, Horatio Greenough, Henry Inman, Samuel F. B. Morse, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Weir; his seminal writing as a literary critic, also now generally recognized; his long concern with public health, culminating in his ten-year presidency of the New York Medical College; and the countless personal services he performed for friends and even casual acquaintances which led his longtime partner, John Bigelow, to remark that Bryant "treated every neighbor as if he were an angel in disguise sent to test his loyalty to the golden rule." Godwin's biography was vitiated by its author's failure to recover more than a relative handful of Bryant's letters-so few, indeed, that he could suppose Bryant had not "maintained any extensive correspondence," seldom finding it possible to "engage in discussions of opinions or of the events of the day." Yet, by themselves, more than thirty letters addressed to Abraham Lincoln during his short presidency evidence the contrary. Except for some letters to a few close friends who outlived Bryant and made them available to his biographer, and others to members of his im• mediate family, Godwin relied on initial drafts (though never so designating them), and on copies provided by his sister-in-law Julia Bryant of such letters "as she sup• posed might be useful in the preparation of a memoir of [her father's] life." Barely a third of the nearly two hundred surviving letters from Bryant to his wife, Frances, during their fifty years of courtship and marriage found a place, even in fragmentary form, in Godwin's account. During Bryant's first visit to the British Isles in 1845, for instance, he sent Frances, almost daily, intimate accounts of his experiences, and of meetings with and impressions of prominent persons such as Charles Babbage, Joanna Baillie, Sir John Bowring, John Bright, Francis Buckland, Rev. Robert Candlish, Richard Cobden, Dr. John Conolly, Sir Charles Fellows, Edwin Field, Rev. William Johnson Fox, Henry Hallam, William and Mary Howitt, Leigh Hunt, Harriet Mar• tineau, Rev. James Martineau, Richard Monckton Milnes, first Baron Houghton, James Montgomery, Sir Roderick Murchison, Spencer Joshua Alwyne Compton, sec• ond Marquis of Northampton, John O'Connell, John Poole, Henry Crabb Robinson, Samuel Rogers, Adam Sedgwick, William Guy Wall, William Whewell, and the Wordsworth family. These accounts do not appear in Godwin's biography; we are told instead that Bryant's "brief pocket-Diary ... save a few notes to his newspaper, is all the record we have of his movements." More regrettably, recent biographers seem to have been unaware of the easy availability of such letters, apparently ac• cepting Godwin's statement without question. Many of Bryant's correspondents in public life do not figure in Godwin's pages. Of one hundred letters to a random list of fifteen statesmen and prominent educators, none is quoted therein: Charles Francis Adams, Salmon P. Chase, Cyrus W. Field, Hamilton Fish, Daniel C. Gilman, Mark Hopkins, William L. Marcy, James McCosh, Edwin D. Morgan, Theophilus Parsons, Jared Sparks, Charles Sumner, Samuel J. Tilden, Gideon Welles, and Silas Wright. Letters to Bryant's literary friends and ac• quaintances were most numerous; yet, of nearly five hundred he wrote to sixty such persons, relatively few appear in Godwin's work. In some cases recipients were re- Introduction 3 luctant to make them available; the historian-statesman George Bancroft, to whom Bryant wrote more than fifty letters during a long friendship, admitted to finding but one-a brief invitation to a meeting! Bryant corresponded with almost every president from Jackson to Hayes, and with members of their cabinets, key senators and representatives, state and local officials, and civic leaders throughout the country. His concern with religious matters in the United States and Europe is reflected in dozens of letters addressed to his newspaper and to prominent clergymen among his friends, including Orville Dewey, Andrews Norton, Samuel Osgood, Henry Ware, Sr., William Ware, and Robert Waterston. His analyses of events and personalities in the news provide insights into the positions he took concurrently in Evening Post editorials. These are further il• luminated by frank comments to such intimates as his brother John, John Bigelow, Richard Henry Dana, John Durand, Ferdinand Field, John Goudie, Isaac Henderson, William Leggett, Charles Nordhoff, James Kirke Paulding, Charles and Theodore Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms. While there is much which is fresh and enlightening in Bryant's letters to close associates and public men, his personality is more intimately projected in those to a number of women to whom he addressed some of his most exuberant communications. Early letters to his sister Sally, his mother, and his intended bride show Bryant at times playful, at others prim or moralistic, occasionally sardonic, and frequently lively. As the years went on, and particularly after his wife's death in 1866, he found sympathetic understanding in a number of talented women, several of whom were popular authors-Carolina Coronado, Julia Ward Howe, Caroline Kirkland, Cath• arine Sedgwick; some, the relatives of men friends-Charlotte Dana, Jerusha Dewey, Julia Sands, Anna Waterston; and others-the English widow Susan Renner, the edu• cational writer Eliza Robbins, the Scottish schoolteacher Christiana Gibson, his Roslyn neighbor Leonice Moulton-stimulating conversationalists and warm friends. The bringing together in sequence of over two thousand letters written by Bryant between the ages of fourteen and eighty-four provides the closest possible approxima• tion of an autobiography-the one which he might have been persuaded to undertake, but declined to do so, during his lifetime. It makes more convincing a remark made by Benjamin F. Butler to Martin Van Buren when Bryant had angered the former President by supporting the new Republican party in 1856: "I regard him as one of the brightest luminaries of the age-not only in the department of letters but in that also of politics. Posterity, I think, will place him on the same roll with Miltons, Hampdens and Jeffersons of the last two centuries."