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A Place in the Country 1843-1844 (LETTERS 446 TO 517)

BRYANT's JUBILANT ANNOUNCEMENT to his brother John in February 1843 that he had bought land and planned to build a house on the Long Island shore reflected an overmastering urge to find a permanent home, for, during their eighteen years in New York City, he and Frances had lived at almost an equal number of addresses-not to speak of all the hotels and lodgings they had passed through on their travels. In their impatience to get settled at Hempstead Harbor, renamed Roslyn in 1844, they were occupying before the summer was over an old Quaker farmhouse on the property, and in September Sarah Bryant visited them for several weeks during her first trip to the East since her removal to Illinois in 1835. Having at last acquired their place in the country, Cullen and Frances traveled southward early in 1843, visiting William Gilmore Simms at his plantation, "Woodlands," in the interior of South Carolina, and becoming acquainted with the literary society of Charleston and Savannah, as well as the Spanish-Minorcan culture of St. Augustine, Florida. In July Cullen took his mother to visit his Aunt Charity Bryant at Weybridge, Vermont, and in October escorted her as far as Buffalo on her return to Illinois. For two weeks at the end of November he took a trip to Washington, the purpose of which, though unspecified in his correspondence, was apparently to arrange more effective coverage for his newspaper at the capital. After nearly six years during which such little time as he could spare from the Evening Post's affairs went to writing verse, Bryant had begun to take a renewed interest in community activities. In 1841 he made more evident his earlier commitment to the medical theories of homoeopathy by accepting the presidency of the New York Homoeopathic Society, which he had joined soon after its organization five years earlier, and by publishing an inaugural address he made to the society. In December he joined the executive com• mittee of the Apollo Association, formed in 1839 on the plan of British and German art unions, which encouraged American art by buying pictures from painters for distribution by lot among its members. Within two years Bryant and his fellow-officers, drawn chiefly from the Sketch Club, brought this faltering enterprise to a position of powerful patronage. In December 1843 he assumed the presidency of what was at once rechristened the American Art Union-a position to which he was re-elected in 1844 and 1845. Meanwhile, by the summer of 1843, Bryant's long advocacy of an international copyright agreement had won support from most American authors and some publishers who, distressed by the prevailing "literary piracy," or republication of foreign books without the payment of royalty, organized an American Copyright Club 190 LETTERs OF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT and made Bryant its president. In October the club published An Address to the People of the United States, appealing on behalf of American writers for a just law "equalizing all copyrights, native and foreign." Early in 1844 the reform of prison conditions and opposition to capital punishment were dis• cussed in several Evening Post articles, and in May a general convention of those opposed to the death penalty was presided over by Bryant. Taking the name of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, this group elected Bryant its president. Bryant composed little poetry in 1843-1844, but toward the end of the period he published a pamphlet, The White Footed Deer, of only ten poems, most of which he had written for Graham's Magazine. This was the first title in the Home Library, a series of inexpensive paper books which Bryant and Evert Duyckinck, secretary of the American Copyright Club, projected to provide a vehicle for new books by American authors, and which, in an early metamorphosis, as Wiley & Putnam's Library of American Books, published significant writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Simms, and others. ln the summer of 1844 the reputable Philadelphia firm of Carey & Hart suggested publication of an elegant illustrated collection of Bryant's poems, a project they realized two years later, uniformly with the poems of Halleck and Long• fellow. The Evening Post prospered during this period. Announcing a steady growth in circulation and advertising throughout "all the commercial diffi• culties" of 1842, Bryant attributed this to a "more sober state of public opin• ion, which, chastened by the misfortunes of the times, has been brought to adopt, at last, the views we haYe constantly maintained." Early in 1844 a new, somewhat smaller type was acquired, and a ninth column added to the news• paper's page. Bryant had engaged correspondents in 'Vashington and London, and their letters appeared frequently. One exception to the Evening Post's well-being, however, was the more than $6,000 loss it suffered in supporting an abortive Morning Post which Bryant established for his son-in-law soon after Parke Godwin's marriage to Fanny Bryant in 1842. It was apparently this loss which impelled Bryant later that year to hesitate over buying the property at Hempstead Harbor. Three political issues preoccupied Bryant in 1844. His unceasing opposi• tion to the high tariff law passed in 1842-the "Black Tariff," as many called it-was evident in his first editorial of the year: "This huge and massive custom house, under the shadow of which we are writing, ... is not main• tained for the purpose of taxing the owners of factories. They are privileged persons. It is maintained in order to tax the farmer at his plough, the black• smith at his forge, and the laundress at her wash tub. It is this hard working class, who pay the millions that are annually collected in our national treas• ury, while the manufacturer goes free." Three weeks later he addressed the same subject with fury: "There never was a more foul combination of selfish cunning on the one hand, and corrupt connivance on the other, than that which produced the oppressive revenue law under which we live." The tables of duties, he said, showed "how between the knaves of the mills on the one hand and the knaves of the Halls of Congress on the other, we are fleeced and peeled as mercilessly as if we had a conquering army in the land laying us A Place in the Country 191 under forced contribution." Firing away at the tariff throughout March and April, Bryant became involved in a long exchange with Henry Longfellow's father-in-law, the Massachusetts textile manufacturer and former congressman Nathan Appleton, whose letters, in reply to each of a series of editorials, Bryant published in the Evening Post. The controversy was touched off by Bryant's charge that industrialists such as Appleton made a 30% return on invested capital, while farmers realized less than 3%. In reply, Appleton com• plained that, having "always understood that the Evening Post was conducted by men claiming the character of gentlemen," he was disturbed by Bryant's personal remarks. It is hard at this distance to determine who had the better of the argument, which seems to have ended with Appleton's calling Bryant "indelicate" in his remarks, and Bryant's ironic concession, "Our readers will understand that there are things which it is delicate to do, yet not delicate to speak of. It is a very delicate proceeding, in a person who holds a public trust, to pervert it to his own private interest, but it is shockingly indelicate in any person to call him to account for it." The second issue of great concern to Bryant in 1844 was the rapid growth of "Native Americanism" in both major political parties. A rising anti• Catholic agitation in eastern cities, reflected in the formation of the American Protestant Union in 1841 and the American Protestant Association in 1842, was followed in 1843 by the appearance in New York City political wards of nativist associations, and their capture of the public school board. In August of that year an American Republican Party emerged; in the November elec• tion its candidates for state office, promising to pass a law requiring twenty-one years' residence in this country before voting, and the barring of foreigners from all public office, cut heavily into the vote for both Democratic and Whig parties. The following April this nativist party elected book publisher James Harper mayor of New York City, and gained control of the city council. Bryant, whose advocacy of equal rights for foreign minorities and un• popular religious groups had been a consistent editorial policy ever since he had deplored the criticism of Catholics at the Columbia College commence• ment in 1829, was aroused to strong protest by anti-Catholic riots in New York and Brooklyn during the spring election campaign, and what he termed a "proscriptive war on persons." In May, after a more violent disorder in Phila• delphia, he was indignant at its "disgraceful barbarities," which made him "sick at heart," and which he called the "first fruits of the attempt to establish a party on the ruins of the rights of an immense portion of the inhabitants of the United States." Throughout the balance of 1844 his editorials continued to deplore such a "fanaticism" which would "exterminate a man because he happens to have been born in Europe, or to entertain a religious creed differ• ent from that of his neighbors." And when, in April 1845, on the eve of his departure for Europe, the Democratic Party regained control of the city's major offices, Bryant exulted in the Evening Post, "The odious principle of exclusion from political rights on account of the accident of birth in a foreign land is solemnly disowned, rejected, flung to the ground and trampled on with scorn by the vast population of our city." Bryant's most strenuous political effort in 1844 was made in opposition to the at1nexation of Texas. While a secret treaty negotiated by the Tyler ad- 192 LETTERS oF \VrLLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT

ministration to effect that aim of the slave states was lying in the Senate, it was leaked to Bryant and published in the Evening Post. This exposure, and Bryant's vigorous editorials, together with a series of closely reasoned articles by Theodore Sedgwick III, over the signature VETO, were instrumental in arousing northern anti-slavery men against the measure. With several other New York leaders, Bryant organized a mass meeting to protest annexation, and the Evening Post featured letters from former President Van Buren and others opposed to the extension of slavery. A Senate committee was appointed to investigate in executive session the circumstances surrounding the Evening Post's acquisition of the secret treaty and the accompanying correspondence, which Bryant had also revealed, and which he had characterized as a "deep• laid and dangerous plot," and a futile attempt was made to expel from the Senate Bryant's admitted informant, Abolitionist Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio. But the matter was now exposed and the opposition aroused, and in June the annexation bill was soundly beaten in the Senate. Although Bryant and his radical Democratic associates managed to delay for a time the admission of another large slave state to the Union, they found little prospect of ultimate success in the action of their party's national con• vention at Baltimore two weeks earlier. Despite Bryant's warning that the choice of a presidential candidate who favored annexation would threaten the dissolution of their party, the convention blocked the expected nomination of former President Van Buren through a rule requiring the vote of two-thirds of the delegates for a successful candidate, and then chose James K. Polk of Tennessee. He was "a man of handsome talents," Bryant conceded, and of "right views in regard to the questions on which the two parties of the nation are divided," but one who, "like most southern politicians, is deplorably wrong on the Texas question." Bryant's dilemma was not easily resolved; he had firmly supported Van Buren as offering a fair chance the spread of slavery might be checked, and an unjust conflict with Mexico averted, but Polk's Whig opponent, Henry Clay, though he had spoken against annexation, was on every other issue unacceptable to radical Democrats. So Bryant went uneasily along with his party's choice this time-although, four years later, he would bolt the Democratic ticket over the free soil issue. His reluctant compromise was set forth in July. He would support Polk, repudiate the convention's resolution favoring annexation, and urge the selection for Congress of only those candi• dates who were clearly opposed to it. In November he welcomed Polk's victory as foreshadowing the decline of the Whig Party, which was becoming steadily more susceptible to the repulsive doctrines of nativism. He was pleased, as well, that in George Bancroft, who had been the architect of the compromise on Polk, he would have a close political friend in the President's cabinet. In the summer of 1844 Bryant became the earliest, as he would later be the most persistent, advocate of a large centrally located park in New York City. In his letters from abroad in 1835 he had deplored the lack of facilities for public recreation in the American metropolis, and extolled the beauty and utility of such great European pleasure spots as the English Garden in Munich. "There are none of them," he now wrote, "which have the same natural advantages of the picturesque and beautiful" as have the wooded hills and shores of Manhattan Island; "if the public authorities, who expend so much A Place in the Country 193 of our money in laying out the city, would do what is in their power, they might give our vast population an extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation in these sultry afternoons." He concluded, shrewdly as well as generously, "If any of our brethren of the public press should see fit to support this project, we are ready to resign in their favor any claim to the credit of originally suggesting it." 194 LETTERS OF \VILLIAJ\1 CULLEI'i BRYANT

446. To Azariah C. Flaggl New York Jan. 24, 1843. My dear Sir. As the printing of "the departments" appears to be open to applica• tion on the part of those who are in the habit of entering into such en• gagements I take the liberty of writing this letter to say that the firm of Bryant & Boggs of this city, of which I am one of the partners will be happy to undertake the printing for the department of which you have the charge.2 Yrs respectfully WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL--Azariah Cutting Flagg Papers ADDREss: A. C. Flagg Esq I Comp• troller I Albany POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I JAN I 24 POSTAL ANNOTATioN: Paid DOCKETED: Wm. C. Bryant I Jan. 24, 1843. I. Azariah Cutting Flagg (1790-1873), one of the leaders of the radical wing of the Democratic Party, and a man of widely recognized integrity, had been Controller of the State of New York since 1834. See 274.1. 2. With the new administration of conservative Democratic Governor Bouck, the position of state printer had been awarded in January 1843 to Edwin Croswell (1797- 1871), editor of the Albany Argus. Stewart Mitchell, Horatio Seymour of New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 66. Under a law just passed, the appointment of a state printer was vested in a joint legislative caucus of the Demo• cratic majority, and though Flagg and other administration leaders were opposed to the reappointment of Croswell, who had long held the lucrative office, Bryant lost out to the incumbent by a vote of 66 to 42. Herbert D. A. Donovan, The Barnburners: A Study of the Internal Movements in the Political History of New York State and of the Resulting Changes in Political Affiliation, 1830-1852 (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1974), PP· 40-41.

447. To John Howard Bryant [New York, February 5, 1843] Congratulate me! There is a probability of my becoming a land• holder in New York! I have made a bargain for about forty acres of solid earth at Hempstead Harbor, on the north side of Long Island. There, when I get money enough, I mean to build a house. 1

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT (partial): Life, I, 406. I. Though Bryant had told Joseph Moulton in September 1842 that he could not afford country property for at least another year (Letter 435), within a little more than three months he contracted to buy from Moulton forty acres of farm land at Hemp• stead Harbor, twenty-five miles east of New York City. "Memorandum of an agreement made between William C. Bryant of New York and Jacob Titus of Hempstead Harbour," dated February 23, 1843, Bryant Library, Roslyn, Long Island. Bryant's reassessment of his finances reflected a continued increase in the profits of the EP, as well, no doubt, as the enthusiastic reception given his new volume, The Fountain and A Place in the Country 195

Other Poems (1842), whid1 drew from the editor of the Knickerbocker the encomium, "It is our belief that Mr, Bryant is not only the very first of American poets, but that, with perhaps one eminent living exception [Wordsworth?], he is the first living poet in the world." "Editor's Table," Knickerbocker, 20 (September 1842), 296. Bryant's annual New Year editorial announced on January I, 1843, that his journal had been "steadily prosperous" through "all the commercial difficulties" of the past year; it was "a matter of some pride" to him that during a "series of years of commercial embarrass• ment" the EP had grown more "flourishing" annually. Although he suggests in this letter fragment that he has still to build a home on his property, it included an old farmhouse on the water's edge which he later couverted into the home he called at first "Springbank," and later "Cedarmere." See illustration. Goddard, Roslyn Harbor, pp. 58-61.

448. To Richard H. Dana New York, February 20 1843. My dear sir I have been told lately that there is on the books of the Treasurer of the State of Massachusetts a credit to my father Dr. Peter Bryant of fifty dollars. vVill you do me the favour to call at the office and inquire if this is so, and whether my order would obtain the money, or my receipt be sufficient, or if not, what method my father's heirs or representatives should take to obtain it. If my order will be sufficient, I enclose it.1 I expect to sail for Charleston in a few days. My wife goes with me. We shall return, I suppose in the beginning of April. I am glad to hear from your daughter so good an account of her docility to the homoeopathic regimen. She obeyed the more willingly, I doubt not, because the Doctor was not very strict in what he required. Remember me kindly to all the Danas. Yrs truly vVM C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-Berg ADORESS: R. H. Dana Esq. 1. Peter Bryant was a member of the Massachusetts legislature for most of the period between 1806 and 1818, two years before his death. He seems also to have given medical treatment to paupers who were wards of the state, and for whose care it was therefore liable (Peter to Sarah Snell Bryant, January 31, 1814, BCHS). There is no indication whether this claim against the state was for legislative or medical fees. Bryant enclosed to Dana the following note (manuscript in LH): To the Treasurer of the State of Massachusetts. Please to pay over to Richard H. Dana Esq. whatever sum may appear due to my late father Dr. Peter Bryant of Cum• mington Massachusetts, on the accounts of your office, and his receipt for the same shall be valid. \VILLIA!\I CULLEN BRYANT New York February 20, 1843. 196 LETTERS OF \VILLIAJ\1 CULLEN BRYANT

449. To Richard H. Dana New York Feb. 21 1843. My dear sir I sent you yesterday a letter respecting a credit for fifty dollars to my father on the books of the Treasurer of Massachusetts. On referring to the letter of my brother in which it is mentioned I find that it is "either on the books of the Treasurer or the Secretary of State." As the order I sent in the other letter was addressed to the Treasurer, I have thought it would be well to give another on the Secretary, in case the balance should be on his books, though probably neither of the [two] will be sufficient to obtain the money.1 Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: MHS ADDREss: R. H. Dana Esq. I. The enclosed order addressed to the Secretary of State (manuscript in UVa) is similar in wording to that quoted in 448.1. There is no evidence that Dana was able to collect this money for Bryant.

450. To John Howard Bryant New York February 23 1843. Dear Brother.

You ask about the capacity of Edward Harte1 to conduct a paper. I think very well of his capacity and his opinions are of the right stamp. He is now our Washington correspondent, and I am very well satisfied with his letters. There are one or two things in his character however which it would be well for you to consider. He is rather quick to take a disgust to the treatment of persons in whose employment he is and to leave them precipitately. Neither is he very economical or attentive to the main chance as it is called. Mr. Zeiber2 might however try him, with• out entering into any very intimate partnership with him, until he should have satisfied himself how far that was prudent, retaining always in his hands the management of the business part of the concern. I know of nobody at present who would be likely to answer his purpose as a political writer so well as Mr. Harte. He is sensible, well read, much interested in political questions, and able to take strong views of them. I think him also a very honest man, which as times go, is a very [... ] 3 other hand he is wanting in [... ] intercourse, and is often much [.... ] His habits and moral character [... ] if they are able to pay such a tax [... ] valu• able. I am at this moment on the point of setting out for South Carolina with my wife on a journey of some six weeks, taking Washington in my way, and perhaps if it can be conveniently done, running down to St. A Place in the Country 197

Augustine in Florida. Our things are already packed, and we take the rail road cars to Philadelphia this evening. We shall probably be in New York again by the middle of April. We hope that Mother will find her• self able and think herself so to make that visit next spring. Perhaps you will come with her. Frances intended to have written to her before making this journey but she has been so busy in getting ready that she has not had time. Will you be so good as to tell Cyrus that I have written to Boston, to Mr. Dana, to examine the books of the Secretary or Treasurer of State in regard to the fifty dollars which stands there to my father's account, and see what steps it is necessary to take in order to get it. I will write to Cyrus about it on my return. Tell him that Brande's Encyclopaedia is now in the course of publication, as well as Alison's History, but the latter is printed very close and in very small characters which are bad for the eye. It is said to be an able work but much disfigured by political prejudices, in all that relates to France or this country.4 My wife desires her love for all ...5

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-BFP ADDREss: John H. Bryant Esq. I Princeton I Bureau County I Illinois POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I FEB I 28 POSTAL ANNOTATION: 20. 1. See 371.2. 2. Unidentified. 3. Here, and elsewhere below as indicated, the manuscript has been mutilated, presumably in clipping from it Bryant's complimentary close and signature. 4. William Thomas Brande (1788-1866), ed., A Dictionary of Science, Literature, and Art (London, 1842); Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), History of Europe During the French Revolution, 10 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1842). This was reprinted in four volumes by the Harpers in 1842-1843. 5. Conclusion and signature missing.

451. To the EvENING PosT Richmond, Virginia, March 2, 1843. I arrived at this place last night from Washington, where I had ob• served little worth describing. The statue of our first President, by Greenough, was, of course, one of the things which I took an early op• portunity of looking at, and although the bad light in which it is placed prevents the spectator from properly approaching the features, I could not help seeing with satisfaction, that no position, however unfavorable, could impair the majesty of that noble work, or, at all events, destroy its grand general effect.1 The House of Representatives I had not seen since 1832, and I per• ceived that the proceedings were conducted with less apparent decorum than formerly, and that the members no longer sat with their hats on. Whether they had come to the conclusion that it was well to sit un• covered, in order to make up, by this token of mutual respect, for the 198 LETTERS OF WILtiAM CULLEN BRYANT

too frequent want of decorum in their proceedings, or whether the change has been made because it so often happens that all the members are talk• ing together, the rule being that the person speaking must be bareheaded, or whether, finally, it was found, during the late long summer sessions, that a hat made the wearer really uncomfortable, are questions which I asked on the spot, but to which I got no satisfactory answer.2 I visited the Senate Chamber, and saw a member of that dignified body, as some• body calls it, in preparing to make a speech, blow his nose with his thumb and finger without the intervention of a pocket-handkerchief. The speech, after this graceful preliminary, did not, I confess, disappoint me. Whoever goes to ·washington should by all means see the Museum at the Patent office, enriched by the collections lately brought back by the expedition sent out to explore the Pacific.3 I was surprised at the ex• tent and variety of these collections. Dresses, weapons, and domestic implements of savage nations, in such abundance as to leave, one would almost think, their little tribes disfurnished; birds of strange shape and plumage; fishes of remote waters; whole groves of different kinds of coral; sea-shells of rare form and singular beauty from the most distant shores; mummies from the caves of Peru; curious minerals and plants: whoever is interested by such objects as these should give the museum a more leisurely examination than I had time to do. The persons engaged in arranging and putting up these collections were still at their task when I was at Washington, and I learned that what I saw was by no means the whole. The night before we set out, snow fell to the depth of three inches, and as the steamboat passed down the Potomac, we saw, at sunrise, the grounds of Mount Vernon lying in a covering of the purest white, the snow, scattered in patches on the thick foliage of cedars that skirt the river, looking like clusters of blossoms. About twelve, the steamboat came to land, and the railway took us through a gorge of the woody hills that skirt the Potomac. In about an hour, we were at Fredericksburg, on the Rappa• hannock. The day was bright and cold, and the wind keen and cutting. A crowd of negroes came about the cars, with cakes, fruit, and other refresh• ments. The poor fellows seemed collapsed with the unusual cold; their faces and lips were of the color which drapers call blue-black. As we proceeded southward in Virginia, the snow gradually became thinner and finally disappeared altogether. It was impossible to mistake the region in which we were. Broad inclosures were around us, with signs of extensive and superficial cultivation; large dwellings were seen at a distance from each other, and each with its group of smaller build• ings, looking as solitary and chilly as French chateaus; and, now and then, we saw a gang of negroes at work in the fields, though oftener we passed miles without the sight of a living creature. At six in the afternoon, we arrived at Richmond. A Place in the Country 199

A beautiful city is Richmond, seated on the hills that overlook the James River. The dwellings have a pleasant appearance, often standing by themselves in the midst of gardens. In front of several, I saw large magnolias, their dark, glazed leaves glittering in the March sunshine. The river, as yellow as the Tiber, its waters now stained with the earth of the upper country, runs by the upper part of the town in noisy rapids, embracing several islands, shaded with the plane-tree, the hackberry, and the elm, and prolific, in spring and summer, of wild-flowers. I went upon one of these islands, by means of a foot-bridge, and was pointed to another, the resort of a quoit-club comprising some of the most distinguished men of Richmond, among whom in his lifetime was Judge Marshall/ who sometimes joined in this athletic sport. We descended one of the hills on which the town is built, and went up another to the east, where stands an ancient house of religious worship, the oldest Episcopal church in the state.5 It is in the midst of a burying-ground, where sleep some of the founders of the colony, whose old graves are greenly overgTown with the trailing and matted periwinkle. In this church, Patrick Henry, at the com• mencement of the American Revolution, made that celebrated speech, which so vehemently moved all who heard him, ending with the sentence: "Give me liberty or give me death." We looked in at one of the windows; it is a low, plain room, with small square pews, and a sounding board over the little pulpit. From the hill on which this church stands, you have a beautiful view of the surrounding country, a gently undulating surface, closed in by hills on the west; and the James River is seen wandering through it, by distant plantations, and between borders of trees. A place was pointed out to us, a little way down the river, which bears the name of Powhatan; and here, I was told, a flat rock is still shown as the one on which Captain Smith was placed by his captors, in order to be put to death, when the intercession of Pochahontas saved his life. I went with an acquaintance to see the inspection and sale of tobacco. Huge, upright columns of dried leaves, firmly packed and of a greenish hue, stood in rows, under the roof of a broad, low building, open on all sides-these were the hogsheads of tobacco, stripped of the staves. The inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a tie behind, went very quietly and expeditiously through his task of de• termining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants. Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations, whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to understand. I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me, though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of 200 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

tobacco is composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting the leaves according to the quality, and others again were ar• ranging the leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice. In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared, rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and thus became ready for market. As we entered the room we heard a murmur of psalmody running through the sable as• sembly, which now and then swelled into a strain of very tolerable music. "Verse sweetens toil-" says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so found of quoting, and really it is so good that I will transcribe the whole of it- "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound• All at her work the village maiden sings, Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things."6 Verse it seems can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory. "We encourage their singing as much as we can," said the brother of the proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us, and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; "we encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing. Sometimes they will sing all day with great spirit; at other times you will not hear a single note. They must sing wholly of their own accord, it is of no use to bid them do it." "What is remarkable," he continued, "their tunes are all psalm tunes, and the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred music; they will sing nothing else. Almost all these persons are church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists." I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these peo• ple worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of the constitution. It has a congregation of twenty-seven hundred per• sons, and the best choir, I heard somebody say, in all Richmond. Near it is the Monumental church, erected on the site of the Richmond theatre, after the terrible fire which carried mourning into so many families. 7 In passing through an old part of Main-street, I was shown an ancient stone cottage of rude architecture and humble dimensions, which was once the best hotel in Richmond. Here, I was told, there are those in Richmond who remember dining with General Washington, .Judge A Place in the Country 201

Marshall, and their cotemporaries. I could not help comparing it with the palace-like building put up at Richmond within two or three years past, named the Exchange Hotel, with its spacious parlors, its long dining• rooms, its airy dormitories, and its ample halls and passages, echoing to the steps of busy waiters, and guests coming and departing. The Ex• change Hotel is one of the finest buildings for its purpose in the United States, and is extremely well-kept. I paid a visit to the capitol, nobly situated on an eminence which overlooks the city, and is planted with trees. The statue of Washington, executed by Houdon for the state of Virginia, in 1788, is here.8 It is of the size of life, representing Gen. ·washington in the costume of his day, and in an ordinary standing posture. It gratifies curiosity, but raises no particular moral emotion. Compared with the statue by Greenough, it pre• sents a good example of the difference between the work of a mere sculptor-skillful indeed, but still a mere sculptor-and the work of a man of genius. I shall shortly set out for Charleston, South Carolina.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR (draft) TEXT: LT I, pp. 69-76; first published in EP for March I 4, 1843. I. In 1832 Horatio Greenough had been commissioned by Congress, at the insist• ence of Cooper, Verplanck, and other friends, to carve a "pedestrian" statue of Wash• ington for the Capitol Rotunda. He worked for eight years on this, at his studio in Florence, discussing his conception of its form and symbolism with one visitor after another as it took shape. Seeing it in early stages during his residence in Italy in 1834-1835, Bryant urged his friend to ignore a supposed popular taste, and to "do it according to your own notions of what is true and beautiful." Letter 299. The resultant colossal figure of a seated Washington in Roman drapery, with arm raised in benediction, was shipped to Washington with great difficulty, and in the fall of 1842 Greenough came home to supervise its installation. It was so huge, however, that the entrance to the Capitol had to be enlarged to admit it, and, in position, its weight of over twenty tons threatened to collapse the floor's foundations. Seeing that it stood in poor light as well, Greenough persuaded Congress to move it outside onto the east plaza. There it stood for sixty-five years until, in 1908, it was permanently housed in the Smithsonian Institution. Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press [1963]), pp. 141-157; Cooper, Letters & journals, II, 235, 244-245, 439-440; George C. Hazel• ton, Jr., The National Capitol: Its Architecture, Art, and History (New York, 1897), pp. 74-79. 2. The earlier custom of keeping the head covered except when speaking had followed that in the British House of Commons. 3. The South Seas Surveying and Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842; see 354.1. 4. John Marshall (1755-1835), Chief Justice of the United States, 1801-1835. 5. St. John's, built in 1741. 6. This stanza, which Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) quoted in his Dictionary in 1755, was taken from the poem "Contemplation," published two years earlier by Richard Gifford (1725-1807). Gifford's second line, however, read, "She feels no biting pang the while she sings." 7. The burning of the Richmond Theatre on the evening of December 26, 18ll, 202 LETTERS OF \VILLIAl\1 CULLE:\ BRYANT with appalling loss of life, "wrought disastrous evil to stage interests throughout the country. People, horror-striken at the calamity, simply ceased to go to the play." Odell, Annals, II, 381. 8. The French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) came to the United States in 1785 and took casts and measurements from Washington's person for this full-length statue. DAA.

452. To the EvENING PosT Charleston, March 6, 1843. I left Richmond, on the afternoon of a keen March day, in the rail• way train for Petersburg, where we arrived after dark, and, therefore, could form no judgment of the appearance of the town. Here we were transferred to another train of cars. Among· the passengers was a lecturer on Mesmerism, with his wife, and a young woman who accompanied them as a mesmeric subject. The young woman, accustomed to be easily put to sleep, seemed to get through the night very comfortably; but the spouse of the operator appeared to be much disturbed by the frequent and capricious opening of the door by the other passengers, which let in tor• rents of intensely cold air from without, and chid the offenders with a wholesome sharpness. About two o'clock in the morning, we reached Blakely on the Roanoke, where we were made to get out of the cars, and were marched in long procession for about a quarter of a mile down to the river. A negro walked before us to light our way bearing a blazing pine torch, which scattered sparks like a steam-engine, and a crowd of negroes followed us, bearing our baggage. We went down a steep path to the Roanoke, where we found a little old steamboat ready for us, and in about fifteen minutes were struggling upward against the muddy and rapid current. In little more than an hour, we had proceeded two miles and a half up the river, and were landed at a place called Weldon. Here we took the cars for Wilmington, in North Carolina, and shabby vehicles they were, denoting our arrival in a milder climate, by being extremely uncomfortable for cold weather. As morning dawned, we saw ourselves in the midst of the pine forests of North Carolina. Vast tracts of level sand, overgrown with the long-leaved pine, a tall, stately tree, with sparse and thick twigs, ending in long brushes of leaves, murmuring in the strong cold wind, ex• tended everywhere around us. At great distances from each other, we passed log-houses, and sometimes a dwelling of more pretensions, with a piazza, and here and there fields in which cotton or maize had been planted last year, or an orchard with a few small mossy trees. The pools be• side the roads were covered with ice just formed, and the negroes, who like a good fire at almost any season of the year, and who find an abundant supply of the finest fuel in these forests, had made blazing fires of the resinous wood of the pine, wherever they were at work. The tracts of sandy soil, we perceived, were interspersed with marshes, crowded A Place in the Country 203 with cypress-trees, and verdant at their borders with a growth of ever• greens, such as the swamp-bay, the gallberry, the holly, and various kinds of evergreen creepers, which are unknown to our northern climate, and which became more frequent as we proceeded. We passed through extensive forests of pine, which had been boxed, as it is called, for the collection of turpentine. Every tree had been scored by the axe upon one of its sides, some of them as high as the arm could reach down to the roots, and the broad wound was covered with the turpentine, which seems to saturate every fibre of the long-leaved pine. Sometimes we saw large flakes or crusts of the turpentine, of a light-yellow color, which had fallen, and lay beside the tree on the ground. The collec• tion of turpentine is a work of destruction; it strips acre after acre of these noble trees, and, if it goes on, the time is not far distant when the long-leaved pine will become nearly extinct in this region, which is so sterile as hardly to be fitted for producing any thing else. We saw large tracts covered with the standing trunks of trees already killed by it; and other tracts beside them had been freshly attacked by the spoiler. I am told that the tree which grows up when the long-leaved pine is destroyed, is the loblolly pine, or, as it is sometimes called, the short-leaved pine, a tree of very inferior quality and in little esteem. About half-past two in the afternoon, we came to Wilmington, a little town built upon the white sands of Cape Fear, some of the houses standing where not a blade of grass or other plant can grow. A few ever• green oaks, in places, pleasantly overhang the water. Here we took the steamer for Charleston. I may as well mention here a fraud which is sometimes practiced upon those who go by this route to Charleston. Advertisements are dis• tributed at New York and elsewhere, informing the public that the fare from Baltimore to Charleston, by the railway through Washington and Richmond, is but twenty-two dollars. I took the railway, paying from place to place as I went, and found that this was a falsehood; I was made to pay seven or eight dollars more. In the course of my journey, I was told that, to protect myself from this imposition, I should have purchased at Baltimore a "through ticket," as it is called; that is, should have paid in advance for the whole distance; but the advertisement did not inform me that this was necessary. No wonder that "tricks upon travellers" should have become a proverbial expression, for they are a much-enduring race, more or less plundered in every part of the world. The next morning, at eight o'clock, we found ourselves entering Charleston harbor; Sullivan's Island, with Fort Moultrie, breathing rec• ollections of the revolution, on our right; James Island on our left; in front, the stately dwellings of the town, and all around, on the land side, the horizon bounded by an apparent belt of evergreens-the live• oak, the water-oak, the palmetto, the pine, and, planted about the dwell- 204 LETTERS OF \VILLIAM CULLE:'\ BRYANT ings, the magnolia and the wild orange-giving to the scene a summer aspect. The city of Charleston strikes the visitor from the north most agreeably. He perceives at once that he is in a different climate. The spacious houses are surrounded with broad piazzas, often a piazza to each story, for the sake of shade and coolness, and each house generally stands by itself in a garden planted with trees and shrubs, many of which pre• serve their verdure through the winter. We saw early flowers already opening; the peach and plum-tree were in full bloom; and the wild orange, as they call the cherry-laurel, was just putting forth its blossoms. The buildings-some with stuccoed walls, some built of large dark-red bricks, and some of wood-are not kept fresh with paint like ours, but are allowed to become weather-stained by the humid climate, like those of the European towns. The streets are broad and quiet, unpaved in some parts, but m none, as with us, offensive both to s1ght and smell. The public buildings are numerous for the size of the city, and well-built in general, with sufficient space about them to give them a noble aspect, and all the advantage which they could derive irom their architecture. The inhabit• ants, judging from what I have seen of them, which is not much, I con• fess, do not appear undeserving of the character which has been given them, of possessing the most polished and agreeable manner::; of all the American cities. I may shortly write you again from the interior of South Carolina.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT !, pp. 77-81; first published in EP for April I, 1843.

453. To the EvENING PosT Barnwell District, South Carolina, March 29,1843. Since I last wrote, I have passed three weeks in the interior of South Carolina; visited Columbia, the capital of the state, a pretty town; roamed over a considerable part of Barnwell district, with some part of the neighboring one of Orangeburg; enjoyed the hospitality of the plant• ers-very agreeable and intelligent men; been out in a racoon hunt; been present at a corn-shucking; listened to negro ballads, negro jokes, and the banjo; witnessed negro dances; seen two alligators at least, and eaten bushels of hominy.1 Whoever comes out on the railroad to this district, a distance of seventy miles or more, if he were to judge only by what he sees in his passage, might naturally take South Carolina for a vast pine-forest, with here and there a clearing made by some enterprising settler, and would wonder where the cotton which clothes so many millions of the human race, is produced. The railway keeps on a tract of sterile sand, overgrown with pines; passing, here and there, along the edge of a morass, A Place in the Country 205 or crossing a stream of yellow water. A lonely log-house under these old trees, is a sight for sore eyes; and only two or three plantations, properly so called, meet the eye in the whole distance. The cultivated and more productive lands lie apart from this tract, near streams, and interspersed with more frequent ponds and marshes. Here you find plantations com• prising several thousands of acres, a considerable part of which always lies in forest; cotton and corn fields of vast extent, and a negro village on every plantation, at a respectful distance from the habitation of the proprietor. Evergreen trees of the oak family and others, which I men• tioned in my last letter, are generally planted about the mansions. Some of them are surrounded with dreary clearings, full of the standing trunks of dead pines; others are pleasantly situated in the edge of woods, inter• sected by winding paths. A ramble, or a ride-a ride on a hand-gallop it should be2-in these pine woods, on a fine March day, when the weather has all the spirit of our March days without its severity, is one of the most delightful recreations in the world. The paths are upon a white sand, which, when not frequently travelled, is very firm under foot; on all sides you are surrounded by noble stems of trees, towering to an im• mense height, from whose summits, far above you, the wind is drawing deep and grand harmonies; and often your way is beside a marsh, verdant with magnolias, where the yellow jessamine, now in flower, fills the air with fragrance, and the bamboo-briar, an evergreen creeper, twines itself with various other plants, which never shed their leaves in winter. These woods abound in game, which, you will believe me when I say, I had rather start than shoot,-flocks of turtle-doves, rabbits rising and scudding before you; bevies of quails, partridges they call them here, chirping almost under your horse's feet; wild ducks swimming in the pools, and wild turkeys, which are frequently shot by the practiced sports• man. But you must hear of the corn-shucking. The one at which I was present was given on purpose that I might witness the humors of the Carolina negroes. A huge fire of light-wood was made near the corn• house. Light-wood is the wood of the long-leaved pine, and is so called, not because it is light, for it is almost the heaviest wood in the world, but be• cause it gives more light than any other fuel. In clearing land, the pines are girdled and suffered to stand; the outer portion of the wood decays and falls off; the inner part, which is saturated with turpentine, re• mains upright for years, and constitutes the planter's provision of fuel. When a supply is wanted, one of these dead trunks is felled by the axe. The abundance of light-wood is one of the boasts of South Carolina. Wherever you are, if you happen to be chilly, you may have a fire ex• tempore; a bit of light-wood and a coal give you a bright blaze and a strong heat in an instant. The negroes make fires of it in the fields where they work; and, when the mornings are wet and chilly, in the pens where 206 LETTERS oF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYAl'iT

they are milking the cows. At a plantation, where I passed a frosty night,. I saw fires in a small inclosure, and was told by the lady of the house that she had ordered them to be made to warm the cattle. The light-wood fire was made, and the negroes dropped in from the neighboring plantations, singing as they came. The driver of the planta• tion, a colored man, brought out baskets of corn in the husk, and piled it in a heap; and the negroes began to strip the husks from the ears, singing with great glee as they worked, keeping time to the music, and now and then throwing in a joke and an extravagant burst of laughter. The songs were generally of a comic character; but one of them was set to a singularly wild and plaintive air, which some of our musicians would do well to reduce to notation. These are the words: Johnny come down de hollow. Oh hollow! Johnny come down de hollow. Oh hollow! De nigger-trader got me. Oh hollow! De speculator bought me. Oh hollow! I'm sold for silver dollars. Oh hollow! Boys, go catch de pony. Oh hollow! Bring him round de corner. Oh hollow! I'm goin' away to Georgia. Oh hollow! Boys, good-by forever! Oh hollow!3 The song of "Jenny gone away," was also given, and another, called the monkey-song, probably of African origin, in which the principal singer personated a monkey, with all sorts of odd gesticulations, and the other negroes bore part in the chorus, "Dan, dan, who's de dandy?" One of the songs, commonly sung on these occasions, represents the various animals of the woods as belonging to some profession or trade. For example- De cooter is de boatman- The cooter is the terrapin, and a very expert boatman he is. De cooter is de boatman. John John Crow. De red-bird de soger. John John Crow. A Place in the Country 207

De mocking-bird de lawyer. John John Crow. De alligator sawyer. John John Crow. The alligator's back is furnished with a toothed ridge, like the edge of a saw, which explains the last line. When the work of the evening was over the negroes adjourned to a spacious kitchen. One of them took his place as musician, whistling, and beating time with two sticks upon the floor. Several of the men came forward and executed various dances, capering, prancing, and drumming with heel and toe upon the floor, with astonishing agility and persever• ance, though all of them had performed their daily tasks and had worked all the evening, and some had walked from four to seven miles to attend the corn-shucking. From the dances a transition was made to a mock military parade, a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became neces• sary for the commander to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he called upon a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the wall, looking upon the frolic with an air of superiority. He consented, came forward, demanded a bit of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in his day. He spoke of "de majority of Sous Carolina," "de interests of de state," "de honor of ole Ba'nwell district," and these phrases he connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make nothing. At length he began to falter, when the captain with admirable presence of mind came to his relief, and inter• rupted and closed the harangue with an hurrah from the company. Toby was allowed by all the spectators, black and white, to have made an excellent speech. The blacks of this region are a cheerful, careless, dirty race, not hard worked, and in many respects indulgently treated. It is, of course, the desire of the master that his slaves shall be laborious; on the other hand it is the determination of the slave to lead as easy a life as he can. The master has power of punishment on his side; the slave, on his, has invincible inclination, and a thousand expedients learned by long prac• tice. The result is a compromise in which each party yields something, and a good-natured though imperfect and slovenly obedience on one side, is purchased by good treatment on the other. I have been told by planters that the slave brought from Africa is much more serviceable, though more high-spirited and dangerous than the slave born in this country, and early trained to his condition. I have been impatiently waiting the approach of spring, since I came 208 LETTERS OF \VILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT to this state, but the weather here is still what the inhabitants call winter. The season, I am told, is more than three weeks later than usual. Fields of Indian corn which were planted in the beginning of March, must be re-planted, for the seed has perished in the ground, and the cotton plant• ing is deferred for fine weather. The peach and plum trees have stood in blossom for weeks, and the forest trees, which at this time are usually in full foliage, are as bare as in December. Cattle are dying in the fields for want of pasture. I have thus had a sample of the winter climate of South Carolina. If never more severe or stormy than I have already experienced, it must be an agreeable one. The custom of sitting with open doors, however, I found a little difficult to like at first. A door in South Carolina, except perhaps the outer door of a house, is not made to shut. It is merely a sort of flapper, an ornamental appendage to the opening by which you enter a room, a kind of moveable screen made to swing to and fro, but never to be secured by a latch, unless for some purpose of strict privacy. A door is the ventilator to the room; the windows are not raised except in warm weather, but the door is kept open at all seasons. On cold days you have a bright fire of pine-wood blazing before you, and a draught of cold air at your back. The reason given for this practice is, that fresh air is wholesome, and that close rooms occasion colds and consumptions.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT I, pp. 82-89; first published in EP for April 12, 1843. I. After passing several days in Charleston, the Bryants visited William Gilmore Simms and his family at Woodlands for about three weeks, before returning to Charles• ton to board the steamboat for Savannah. Simms gave Bryant letters to several friends in the Orangeburg and Barnwell districts. Among these were the lawyer and poet Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847); George Frederick Holmes (1820-1897), British• educated scholar from British Guiana who became the first president of the University of Mississippi; Dr. Jefferson Goodwyn, a state legislator; James Henry Hammond (1807-1864), Democratic governor of South Carolina; Dr. Robert Henry (1792-1856), a clergyman then serving as president of South Carolina College; Major John Myers Felder (1782-1851), Yale groduate and a lawyer who had been a state senator and a member of Congress; and Richard Yeadon (1802-1870, South Carolina College 1824?), editor of the Charleston Daily Courier. Simms also provided his guests with introduc• tions to several friends in Savannah. Simms, Letters, I, 341-346; Simms to Bryant, March 18, 1843, NYPL-GR; see Letter 395. 2. I.e., an easy gallop, with the horse kept well in hand. 3. This is somewhat suggestive of the Negro capstan songs, sung by sailors heaving on anchor chains or mooring lines, "Johnny come down the backstay," and "Johnny come to Hilo." However, none of the songs Bryant records here seems to have found its way into popular collections. See Patricia P. Havlice, Popular Song Index (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1975), p. 378. A Place in the Country 209

454. To Israel K. Tefftl [Savannah, Georgia] April3, 1843 My dear sir. We shall certainly do ourselves the pleasure of accepting your invita• tion to dinner tomorrow. I thank you for the volumes containing the collections of the Georgia Historical Society of which I learn that you are the founder. I was already prepared to be interested by them having read the notice of them in the Southern Review.2 Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: Andrew B. Myers ADDREss: I. K. Tefft Esq./ Savannah. I. Israel Keech Tefft (1794-1862), a transplanted Rhode Islander, was a Savannah banker and a principal founder of the Georgia Historical Society. He was a close friend of Simms, who helped him develop one of the finest autograph collections in the United States. Simms, Letters, I, cxxxix. 2. The Southern Quarterly Review, later (1849-1854) edited by Simms. Ibid., lxxiii.

455. To Robert M. Charltont Savannah Apri15, 1843. My dear sir. I already possess a copy of your poems, but I am happy to receive them in a more perfect form, with your last revisions.2 The sight of your volume, aside from the poetic merit of the contents, will always remind me most agreeably of the person of its author and of the hospitalities of your beautiful city. Yours sincerely WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Hon. R. M. Charlton. I. Robert Milledge Charlton (1807-1854), poet and son of a Georgia jurist, to whom Bryant was introduced during his visit to Savannah. 2. Poems, by Robert Milledge Charlton and Thomas ]. Charlton (Boston, 1839), and 2d ed., with Alterations and Additions (Boston, 1842). Bryant had included one of Charlton's poems, "To the River Ogeechee," in his Selections from the American Poets (1840), pp. 248-249. See 390.1.

456. To the EvENING PosT Picolata, East Florida, April 7, 1843. As I landed at this place, a few hours since, I stepped into the midst of summer. Yesterday morning when I left Savannah, people were com• plaining that winter was not over. The temperature which. at this time 210 LETTERS o.F WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT of the year, is usually warm and genial, continued to be what they called chilly, though I found it agreeable enough, and the showy trees, called the Pride of India, which are planted all over the city, and are generally in bloom at this season, were still leafless. Here I find every thing green, fresh, and fragrant, trees and shrubs in full foliage, and wild roses in flower. The dark waters of the St. John's, one of the noblest streams of the country, in depth and width like the St. Lawrence, draining almost the whole extent of the peninsula, are flowing under my window. On the op• posite shore are forests of tall trees, bright in the new verdure of the season. A hunter who has ranged them the whole day, has just arrived in a canoe, bringing with him a deer, which he has killed. I have this moment returned from a ramble with my host through a hammock, he looking for his cows, and I, unsuccessfully, for a thicket of orange-trees. He is some• thing of a florist, and gathered for me, as we went, some of the forest plants, which were in bloom. "We have flowers here," said he, "every month in the year." I have used the word hammock, which here, in Florida, has a peculiar meaning. A hammock is a spot covered with a growth of trees which require a richer soil than the pine, such as the oak, the mulberry, the gum-tree, the hickory, &c. The greater part of East Florida consists of pine barrens-a sandy level, producing the long leaved pine and the dwarf palmetto, a low plant, with fan-like leaves, and roots of a prodigious size. The hammock is a kind of oasis, a verdant and luxurious island in the midst of these sterile sands, which make about nine-tenths of the soil of East Florida. In the hammocks grow the wild lime, the native orange, both sour and bitter-sweet, and the various vines and gigantic creepers of the country. The hammocks are chosen for plantations; here the cane is cultivated, and groves of the sweet orange planted. But I shall say more of Florida hereafter, when I have seen more of it. Meantime let me speak of my journey hither. I left Charleston on the 30th of March, in one of the steamers which ply between that city and Savannah. These steamers are among the very best that float-quiet, commodious, clean, fresh as if just built, and furnished with civil and ready-handed waiters. :we passed along the nar• row and winding channels which divide the broad islands of South Carolina from the main-land-islands famed for the rice culture, and particularly for the excellent cotton with long fibres, named the sea-island cotton. Our fellow-passengers were mostly planters of these islands, and their families, persons of remarkably courteous, frank, and agreeable manners. The shores on either side had little of the picturesque to show us. Extensive marshes waving with coarse water-grass, sometimes a cane• brake, sometimes a pine grove or a clump of cabbage-leaved palmettoes; here and there a pleasant bank bordered with live-oaks streaming with moss, and at wide intervals the distant habitation of a planter-these were A Place in the Country 211 the elements of the scenery. The next morning early we were passing up the Savannah river, and the city was in sight, standing among its trees on a high bank of the stream. Savannah is beautifully laid out; its broad streets are thickly planted with the Pride of India, and its frequent open squares shaded with trees of various kinds. Oglethorpe1 seems to have understood how a city should be built in a warm climate, and the people of the place are fond of remind• ing the stranger that the original plan of the founder has never been departed from. The town, so charmingly embowered, reminded me of New Haven, though the variety of trees is greater. In my walks about the place I passed a large stuccoed building of a dull-yellow color, with broad arched windows, and a stately portico, on each side of which stood a stiff-looking palmetto, as if keeping guard. The grim aspect of the build• ing led me to ask what it was, and I was answered that it was "the old United States Bank." It was the building in which the Savannah branch of that bank transacted business, and is now shut up until the time shall come when that great institution shall be revived. Meantime I was pained to see that there exists so little reverence for its memory, and so little gratitude for its benefits, that the boys have taken to smashing the win• dows, so that those who have the care of the building have been obliged to cover them with plank.2 In another part of the city I was shown an African church, a neat, spacious wooden building, railed in, and kept in excellent order, with a piazza extending along its entire front. It is one of the four places of worship for the blacks of the town, and was built by negro workmen with materials purchased by the contributions of the whites. South of the town extends an uninclosed space, on one side of which is a pleasant grove of pines, in the shade of which the members of a quoit• club practice their athletic sport. Here on a Saturday afternoon, for that is their stated time of assembling, I was introduced to some of the most distinguished citizens of Savannah, and witnessed the skill with which they threw the discus. No apprentices were they in the art; there was no striking far from the stake, no sending the discus rolling over the green; they heaped the quoits as snugly around the stakes as if the amusement had been their profession. In the same neighborhood, just without the town, lies the public cemetery surrounded by an ancient wall, built before the revolution, which in some places shows the marks of shot fired against it in the skirmishes of that period. I entered it, hoping to find some monuments of those who founded the city a hundred and ten years ago, but the in• scriptions are of comparatively recent date. Most of them commemorate the death of persons born in Europe, or the northern states. I was told that the remains of the early inhabitants lie in the brick tombs, of which there are many without any inscription whatever. 212 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

At a little distance, near a forest, lies the burial-place of the black population. A few trees, trailing with long moss, rise above hundreds of nameless graves, overgrown with weeds; but here and there are scattered memorials of the dead, some of a very humble kind, with a few of marble, and half a dozen spacious brick tombs like those in the cemetery of the whites. Some of them are erected by masters and mistresses to the memory of favorite slaves. One of them commemorates the death of a young woman who perished in the catastrophe of the steamer Pulaski, of whom it is recorded, that during the whole time that she was in the service of her mistress, which was many years, she never committed a theft, nor uttered a falsehood. A brick monument, in the shape of a little tomb, with a marble slab inserted in front, has this inscription: "In memory of Henrietta Gatlin, the infant stranger, born in East Florida, aged 1 year 3 months." A graveyard is hardly the place to be merry in, but I could not help smiling at some of the inscriptions. A fair upright marble slab com• memorates the death of York Fleming, a cooper, who was killed by the explosion of a powder-magazine, while tightening the hoops of a keg of powder. It closes with this curious sentence: "This stone was erected by the members of the Axe Company, Coopers and Committee of the 2nd African Church of Savannah for the purpose of having a Herse for benevolent purposes, of which he was the first sexton." A poor fellow, who went to the other world by water, has a wooden slab to mark his grave, inscribed with these words: "Sacred to the memory of Robert Spencer who came to his Death by A Boat, July 91\ 1840, aged 21 years. Reader as you am now so once I And as I am now so Mus you be Shortly. An1en." Another monument, after giving the name of the dead, has this sentence: "Go home Mother dry up your weeping tears. Gods will be done." Another erected to Sarah Morel, aged six months, has this ejacula- tion: "Sweet withered lilly farewell." One of the monuments is erected to Andrew Bryan, a black preacher, of the Baptist persuasion. A long inscription states that he was once im• prisoned "for preaching the Gospel, and, without ceremony, severely whipped"; and that, while undergoing the punishment, "he told his perse• cutors that he not only rejoiced to be whipped, but was willing to suffer death for the cause of Christ." He died in 1812, at the age of ninety-six; A Place in the Country 213

his funeral, the inscription takes care to state, was attended by a large concourse of people, and adds: "An address was delivered at his death by the Rev. Mr. Johnson, Dr. Kollock, Thomas Williams, and Henry Cunningham." While in Savannah, I paid a visit to Bonaventure, formerly a coun• try seat of Governor Tatnall,3 but now abandoned. A pleasant drive of a mile or two, through a budding forest, took us to the place, which is now itself almost grown up into forest. Cedars and other shrubs hide the old terraces of the garden, which is finely situated on the high bank of a river. Trees of various kinds have also nearly filled the space between the noble avenues of live-oaks which were planted around the mansion. But these oaks-I never saw finer trees-certainly I never saw so many majestic and venerable trees together. I looked far down the immense arches that overshadowed the broad passages, as high as the nave of a Gothic cathedral, apparently as old, and stretching to a greater distance. The huge boughs were clothed with gray moss, yards in length, which clung to them like mist, or hung in still festoons on every side, and gave them the appearance of the vault of a vast vapory cavern. The cawing of the crow and the scream of the jay, however, reminded us that we were in the forest. Of the mansion there are no remains; but in the thicket of magnolias and other trees, among rosebushes and creeping plants, we found a burial-place with monuments of some persons to whom the seat had belonged. Savannah is more healthy of late years than it formerly was. An arrangement has been made with the owners of the plantations in the immediate vicinity, by which the culture of rice has been abandoned, and the lands are no longer allowed to be overflowed within a mile from the city. The place has since become much less subject to fevers than in former years. I left, with a feeling of regret, the agreeable society of Savannah:' The steamboat took us to St. Mary's, through passages between the sea• islands and the main-land, similar to those by which we had arrived at Savannah. In the course of the day, we passed a channel in which we saw several huge alligators basking on the bank. The grim creatures slid slowly into the water at our approach. We passed St. Mary's in the night, and in the morning we were in the main ocean, approaching the St. John's, where we saw a row of pelicans standing, like creatures who had nothing to do, on the sand. We entered the majestic river, the vast current of which was dark with the infusion of the swamp turf, from which it is drained. We passed Jacksonville, a little town of great activity, which has sprung up on the sandy bank within two or three years. Beyond, we swept by the mouth of the Black Creek, the water of which, probably from the color of the mud which forms the bed of its channel, has to the eye an ebony blackness, and reflects objects with all the distinctness of the 214 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT kind of looking-glass called a black mirror. A few hours brought us to Picolata, lately a military station, but now a place with only two houses.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR (draft fragment) TEXT: LT I, pp. 90-98; first published in EP for May 4, 1843. I. James Edward Oglethorpe (1696-1785), British soldier and member of Parlia• ment who founded the ~;olony of Georgia in I 733. 2. A reader unaware of the EP's unwavering war on the Bank of the United States, until its final suspension in 1839, might have missed the irony in these remarks. But Bryant's obituary comment the following year on the bank's long-time president, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), would have set him straight. Under a caption which slyly modified the familiar Latin apothegm De mortuis nil nisi bonum ("[Say] nothing but good of the dead") to De mortuis nil nisi verum ("Of the dead nothing but the truth"), Bryant decried the extravagant eulogies of Biddle appearing in some newspapers. "The praise of goodness bestowed upon bad men," he wrote, "is an offence of morals, and should not be allowed to pass unquestioned." As a financier, Biddle was, he continued, "incapable, blundering and dishonest," a man whose principal talent was in "keeping alive a willing credulity in other men .... After bringing thousands to utter poverty, by the frauds and extravagances of his bank, he passed the close of his life in an elegant leisure at his country seat on the Delaware. If he had met with his deserts, he would have passed it in the penitentiary." EP, Febmary 28, 1844. Of the furious reaction among conservatives to this article, surely the most entertaining was Philip Hone's diary entry the same evening: "Bryant, the editor of the 'Evening Post,' in an article of this day, virulent and malignant as are usually the streams which flow from that polluted source, says that Mr. Biddle 'died at his country-seat, where he passed the last of his days in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.' This is the first instance I have known of the vampire of party-spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim before its interment. ... How such a black-hearted misanthrope as Bryant should possess an imagination teeming with beautiful poetic images astonishes me; one would as soon expect to extract drops of honey from the fangs of the rattlesnake.'' The Dim-y of Philip Hone, 1828-1851, ed. Allan Nevins, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), II, 206. 3. Josiah Tatnall (1764-1803), United States senator, 1796-1799, and governor of Georgia, 1801-1802. BDAC. 4. Simms had recommended Bryant by letter to Dr. William Bacon Stevens (1815-1887) of Savannah, who was then completing the first volume of his A History of Georgia from Its Fi1·st Discovery (New York and Savannah, 1847). Bryant later read this and commented on it at some length in a letter to Israel Tefft on April 27, 1849 (DuU). See Simms to Stevens, :\[arch 30 Ll813], Simms, Letters, I, 344.

457. To the EvENING PosT St. Augustine, East Florida, April [1]2, 1843. When we left Picolata, on the 8th of April, we found ourselves journeying through a vast forest. A road of eighteen miles in length, over the level sands, brings you to this place. Tall pines, a thin growth, stood wherever we turned our eyes, and the ground was covered with the dwarf palmetto, and the whortleberry, which is here an evergreen. Yet there were not wanting sights to interest us, even in this dreary and sterile A Place in the Country 215 region. As we passed a clearing, in which we saw a young white woman and a boy dropping corn, and some negroes covering it with their hoes, we beheld a large flock of white cranes which rose in the air, and hovered over the forest, and wheeled, and wheeled again, their spotless plumage glistening in the sun like new-fallen snow. \Ve crossed the track of a recent hurricane, which had broken off the huge pines midway from the ground, and whirled the summits to a distance from their trunks. From time to time we forded little streams of a deep-red color, flowing from the swamps, tinged, as we were told, with the roots of the red bay, a species of mag• nolia. As the horses waded into the transparent crimson, we thought of the butcheries committed by the Indians, on that road, and could almost fancy that the water was still colored with the blood they had shed.1 The driver of our wagon told us many narratives of these murders, and pointed out the places where they were committed. He showed us where the father of this young woman was shot dead in his wagon as he was going from St. Augustine to his plantation, and the boy whom we had seen, was wounded and scalped by them, and left for dead. In another place he showed us the spot where a party of players, on their way to St. Augustine, were surprised and killed. The Indians took possession of the stage dresses, one of them arraying himself in the garb of Othello, another in that of Richard the Third, and another taking the costume of Falstaff. I think it was Wild Cat's gang who engaged in this affair, and I was told that after the capture of this chief and some of his warriors, they recounted the circumstances with great glee. At another place we passed a small thicket in which several armed Indians, as they afterward related, lay concealed while an officer of the United States army rode several times around it, without any suspicion of their presence. The same men com• mitted, immediately afterward, several murders and robberies on the road. At length we emerged upon a shrubby plain, and finally came in sight of this oldest city of the United States, seated among its trees on a sandy swell of land where it has stood for three hundred years. I was struck with its ancient and homely aspect, even at a distance, and could not help likening it to pictures which I had seen of Dutch towns, though it wanted a windmill or two, to make the resemblance perfect. We drove into a green square, in the midst of which was a monument erected to com• memorate the Spanish constitution of 1812, and thence through the narrow streets of the city to our hotel. I have called the streets narrow. In few places are they wide enough to allow two carriages to pass abreast. I was told that they were not originally intended for carriages, and that in the time when the town belonged to Spain, many of them were floored with an artificial stone, composed of shells and mortar, which in this climate takes and keeps the hardness of rock, and that no other vehicle than a hand-barrow was allowed to pass over them. In some places you 216 LETTERS OF v\'ILLIA~l CULLEN BRYANT see remnants of this ancient pavement, but for the most part it has been ground into dust under the wheels of the carts and carriages, introduced by the new inhabitants. The old houses, built of a kind of stone which is seemingly a pure concretion of small shells, overhang the streets with their wooden balconies, and the gardens between the houses are fenced on the side of the street with high walls of stone. Peeping over these walls you see branches of the pomegranate and of the orange-tree, now fragrant with flowers, and, rising yet higher, the leaning boughs of the fig, with its broad luxuriant leaves. Occasionally you pass the ruins of houses-walls of stone, with arches and staircases of the same material, which once be• longed to stately dwellings. You meet in the streets with men of swarthy complexions and foreign physiognomy, and you hear them speaking to each other in a strange language. You are told that these are the remains of those who inhabited the country under the Spanish dominion, and that the dialect you have heard is that of the island of Minorca. "Twelve years ago," said an acquaintance of mine, "when I first visited St. Augustine, it was a fine old Spanish town. A large proportion of the houses, which you now see roofed like barns, were then flat-roofed, they were all of shell-rock, and these modern wooden buildings were not yet erected. That old fort, which they are now repairing, to fit it for re• ceiving a garrison, was a sort of ruin, for the outworks had partly fallen, and it stood unoccupied by the military, a venerable monument of the Spanish dominion. But the orange groves were the ornament and wealth of St. Augustine, and their produce maintained the inhabitants in com• fort. Orange-trees, of the size and height of the pear-tree, often rising higher than the roofs of the houses, embowered the town in perpetual verdure. They stood so close in the groves that they excluded the sun, and the atmosphere was at all times aromatic with their leaves and fruit, and in spring the fragrance of the flowers was almost oppressive." These groves have now lost their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance-an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean, stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and destroying the upper branches. The trunks are now putting out new sprouts and new leaves, but there is no hope of fruit for this year at least. The old fort of St. Mark, now called Fort Marion,2 a foolish change of name, is a noble work, frowning over the Matanzas, which flows be• tween St. Augustine and the island of St. Anastasia, and it is worth making a long journey to see. No record remains of its original construction, but it is supposed to have been erected about a hundred and fifty years since, A Place in the Country 217 arid the shell-rock of which it is built is dark with time. We saw where it had been struck with cannon-balls, which, instead of splitting the rock, became imbedded and clogged among the loosened fragments of shell. This rock is, therefore, one of the best materials for a fortification in the world. We were taken into the ancient prisons of the fort-dungeons, one of which was dimly lighted by a grated window, and another entirely without light; and by the flame of a torch we were shown the half• obliterated inscriptions scrawled on the walls long ago by prisoners. But in another corner of the fort, we were taken to look at two secret cells, which were discovered a few years since, in consequence of the sinking of the earth over a narrow apartment between them. These cells are deep under ground, vaulted overhead, and without windows. In one of them a wooden machine was found, which some supposed might have been a rack, and in the other a quantity of human bones. The doors of these cells had been walled up and concealed with stucco, before the fort passed into the hands of the Americans. "If the Inquisition," said the gentleman who accompanied us, "was established in Florida, as it was in the other American colonies of Spain, these were its secret chambers." Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and in the morning I attended the services of the Catholic church. One of the ceremonies was that of pro• nouncing the benediction over a large pile of leaves of the cabbage-palm, or palmetto, gathered in the woods. After the blessing had been pro• nounced, the priest called upon the congregation to come and receive them. The men came forward first, in the order of their age, and then the women; and as the congregation consisted mostly of the descendants of Minorcans, Greeks, and Spaniards, I had a good opportunity of ob• serving their personal appearance. The younger portion of the congrega• tion had, in general, expressive countenances. Their forms, it appeared to me, were generally slighter than those of our people; and if the cheeks of the young women were dark, they had regular features and brilliant eyes, and finely formed hands. There is spirit, also, in this class, for one of them has since been pointed out to me in the streets, as having drawn a dirk upon a young officer who presumed upon some improper freedoms of behavior. The services were closed by a plain and sensible discourse in English, from the priest, Mr. Rampon, a worthy and useful French ecclesiastic, on the obligation of temperance; for the temperance reform has penetrated even hither, and cold water is all the rage. I went again, the other evening, into the same church, and heard a person declaiming, in a language which, at first, I took to be Minorcan, for I could make nothing else of it. After listening for a few minutes, I found that it was a Frenchman preach• ing in Spanish, with a French mode of pronunciation which was odd enough. I asked one of the old Spanish inhabitants how he was edified 218 LETTERS oF WILUAM CuLLEN BRYANT by this discourse, and he acknowledged that he understood about an eighth part of it. I have much more to write about this place, but must reserve it for another letter.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT I, pp. 99-105; first published in EP for May 10, 1843 (there dated April 15, 1843). 1. The Second Seminole War, 1835-1842 (the first, of shorter duration, was fought by General Andrew Jackson's troops in 1817-1818) took the lives of 1,500 United States soldiers and many civilians-the most costly Indian war in our history. 2. Castillo de San Marcos, construction of which was begun in 1672, was called Fort Marion from 1825 to 1942, when the original name was restored.

458. To the EvENING PosTl St. Augustine, April24, 1843. You can not be in St. Augustine a day without hearing some of its inhabitants speak of its agreeable climate. During the sixteen days of my residence here, the weather has certainly been as delightful as I could imagine. We have the temperature of early June, as June is known in New York. The mornings are sometimes a little sultry, but after two or three hours, a fresh breeze comes in from the sea, sweeping through the broad piazzas and breathing in at the windows. At this season it comes laden with the fragrance of the flowers of the Pride of India, and some• times of the orange-tree, and sometimes brings the scent of roses, now in full bloom. The nights are gratefully cool, and I have been told, by a person who has lived here many years, that there are very few nights in the summer when you can sleep without a blanket. An acquaintance of mine, an invalid, who has tried various climates and has kept up a kind of running fight with Death for many years, re• treating from country to country as he pursued, declares to me that the winter climate of St. Augustine is to be preferred to that of any part of Europe, even that of Sicily, and that it is better than the climate of the West Indies. He finds it genial and equable, at the same time that it is not enfeebling. The summer heats are prevented from being intense by the sea-breeze, of which I have spoken. I have looked over the work of Dr. Forry2 on the climate of the United States, and have been surprised to see the uniformity of climate which he ascribes to Key West. As appears by the observations he has collected, the seasons at that place glide into each other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer, reaches that extreme which is felt in higher latitudes of the American continent. The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. I do not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; it would be A Place in the Country 219 more so if the softness of its atmosphere and the beauty and serenity of its seasons were generally known. Nor should it be supposed that accommoda• tions for persons in delicate health are wanting; they are in fact becoming better with every year, as the demand for them increases. Among the acquaintances whom I have made here, I number many who, having come hither for the benefit of their health, are detained for life by the amenity of the climate. "It seems to me," said an intelligent gentleman of this class, the other day, "as if I could not exist out of Florida. When I go to the north, I feel most sensibly the severe extremes of the weather; the climate of Charleston itself, appears harsh to me." Here at St. Augustine we have occasional frosts in the winter, but at Tampa Bay, on the western shore of the peninsula, no further from this place than from New York to Albany, the dew is never congealed on the grass, nor is a snow-flake ever seen floating in the air. Those who have passed the winter in that place, speak with a kind of rapture of the benignity of the climate. In that country grow the cocoa and the banana, and other productions of the West Indies. Persons who have explored Florida to the south of this, during the past winter, speak of having re• freshed themselves with melons in January, growing where they had been self-sown, and of having seen the sugar-cane where it had been planted by the Indians, towering uncropped, almost to the height of the forest trees. I must tell you, however, what was said to me by a person who had passed a considerable time in Florida, and had journeyed, as he told me, in the southern as well as the northern part of the peninsula, "That the climate is mild and agreeable," said he, "I admit, but the annoyance to which you are exposed from insects, counterbalances all the enjoyment of the climate. You are bitten by mosquitoes and gallinippers, driven mad by clouds of sand-flies, and stung by scorpions and centipedes. It is not safe to go to bed in southern Florida without looking between the sheets, to see if there be not a scorpion waiting to be your bed-fellow, nor to put on a garment that has been hanging up in your room, without turning it wrong side out, to see if a scorpion has not found a lodging in it." I have not, however, been incommoded at St. Augustine with these "varmint," as they call them at the south. Only the sand-flies, a small black midge, I have sometimes found a little importunate, when walking out in a very calm evening. Of the salubrity of East Florida, I must speak less positively, although it is certain that in St. Augustine emigrants from the north enjoy good health. The owners of the plantations in the neighborhood, prefer to pass the hot season in this city, not caring to trust their constitutions to the experiment of a summer residence in the country. Of course they are settled on the richest soils, and these are the least healthy. The pine barrens are safer; when not interspersed with marshes, the sandy lands that bear the pine are esteemed healthy all over the south. Yet there are 220 LETTERS oF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT plantations on the St. John's where emigrants from the north reside throughout the year. The opinion seems everywhere to prevail, and I believe there is good reason for it, that Florida, notwithstanding its low and level surface, is much more healthy than the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. The other day I went out with a friend to a sugar plantation in the neighborhood of St. Augustine. As we rode into the inclosure we breathed the fragrance of young orange-trees in flower, the glossy leaves of which, green at all seasons, were trembling in the wind. A troop of negro children were at play at a little distance from the cabins, and one of them ran along with us to show us a grove of sour oranges which we were looking for. He pointed us to a copse in the middle of a field, to which we proceeded. The trees, which were of considerable size, were full of flowers, and the golden fruit was thick on the branches, and lay scattered on the ground below. I gathered a few of the oranges, and found them almost as acid as the lemon. We stopped to look at the buildings in which the sugar was manufactured. In one of them was the mill where the cane was crushed with iron rollers, in another stood the huge cauldrons, one after another, in which the juice was boiled down to the proper consist• ence; in another were barrels of sugar, of syrup-a favorite article of consumption in this city-of molasses, and a kind of spirits resembling Jamaica rum, distilled from the refuse of the molasses. The proprietor was absent, but three negroes, well-clad young men, of a very respectable ap• pearance and intelligent physiognomy, one of whom was a distiller, were occupied about the buildings, and showed them to us. Near by in the open air lay a pile of sugar cane, of the ribbon variety, striped with red and white, which had been plucked up by the roots, and reserved for planting. The negroes of St. Augustine are a good-looking specimen of the race, and have the appearance of being very well treated. You rarely see a negro in ragged clothing, and the colored children, though slaves, are often dressed with great neatness. In the colored people whom I saw in the Catholic church, I remarked a more agreeable, open, and gentle physiognomy than I have been accustomed to see in that class. The Spanish race blends more kindly with the African, than does the English, and produces handsomer men and women. I have been to see the quarries of coquina, or shell-rock, on the island of St. Anastasia, which lies between St. Augustine and the main ocean. We landed on the island, and after a walk of some distance on a sandy road through the thick shrubs, we arrived at some huts built of a frame-work of poles thatched with the radiated leaves of the dwarf pal• metto, which had a very picturesque appearance. Here we found a circular hollow in the earth, the place of an old excavation, now shaded with red-cedars, and the palmetto-royal bristling with long pointed leaves, which bent over it and embowered it, and at the bottom was a spring A Place in the Country 221 within a square curb of stone, where we refreshed ourselves with a draught of cold water. The quarries were at a little distance from this. The rock lies in the ridges, a little below the surface, forming a stratum of no great depth. The blocks are cut out with crowbars thrust into the rock. It is of a delicate cream color, and is composed of mere shells and fragments of shells, apparently cemented by the fresh water percolating through them and depositing calcareous matter brought from the shells above. When• ever there is any mixture of sand with the shells, rock is not formed. Of this material the old fort of St. Mark and the greater part of the city are built. It is said to become harder when exposed to the air and the rain, but to disintegrate when frequently moistened with sea-water. Large blocks were lying on the shore ready to be conveyed to the fort, which is undergoing repairs. It is some consolation to know that this fine old work will undergo as little change in the original plan as is consistent with the modern improvements in fortification. Lieutenant Benham,3 who has the charge of the repairs, has strong antiquarian tastes, and will preserve as much as possible of its original aspect. It must lose its battlements, how• ever, its fine mural crown. Battlements are now obsolete, except when they are of no use, as on the roofs of churches and Gothic cottages. In another part of the same island, which we visited afterward, is a dwelling-house situated amid orange-groves. Closely planted rows of the sour orange, the native tree of the country, intersect and shelter orchards of the sweet orange, the lemon, and the lime. The trees were all young, having been planted since the great frost of 1835, and many of them still show the ravages of the gale of last October, which stripped them of their leaves. "Come this way," said a friend who accompanied me. He forced a passage through a tall hedge of the sour orange, and we found ourselves in a little fragrant inclosure, in the midst of which was a tomb, formed of the artificial stone of which I have heretofore spoken. It was the resting• place of the former proprietor, who sleeps in this little circle of perpetual verdure. It bore no inscription. Not far from this spot, I was shown the root of an ancient palm-tree, the species that produces the date, which formerly towered over the island, and served as a sea-mark to vessels approaching the shore. Some of the accounts of St. Augustine speak of dates as among its fruits; but I believe that only the male tree of the date• palm has been introduced into the country. On our return to the city, in crossing the Matanzas sound, so named probably from some sanguinary battle with the aborigines on its shores, we passed two Minorcans in a boat, taking home fuel from the island. These people are a mild, harmless race, of civil manners and abstemious habits. Mingled with them are many Greek families, with names that de• note their origin, such as Geopoli, Cercopoli, &c., and with a cast of features equally expressive of their descent. The Minorcan language, the 222 LETTERS oF \VILLL\M CuLLEN BRYA;>;T

dialect of Mahon,4 el Mahones, as they call it, is spoken by more than half of the inhabitants who remained here when the country was ceded to the United States, and all of them, I believe, speak Spanish besides. Their children, however, are growing up in disuse of these languages, and in another generation the last traces of the majestic speech of Castile, will have been effaced from a country which the Spaniards held for more than two hundred years. Some old customs which the Minorcans brought with them from their native country are still kept up. On the evening before Easter Sunday, about eleven o'clock, I heard the sound of a serenade in the streets. Going out, I found a party of young men, with instruments of music, grouped about the window of one of the dwellings, singing a hymn in honor of the Virgin in the Mahonese dialect. They began, as I was told, with tapping on the shutter. An answering knock within had told them that their visit was welcome, and they immediately began the sere• nade. If no reply had been heard they would have passed on to another dwelling. I give the hymn as it was kindly taken down for me in writing by a native of St. Augustine. I presume this is the first time that it has been put in print, but I fear the copy has several corruptions, occasioned by the unskillfulness of the copyist. The letter e, which I have put in italics, represents the guttural French e, or perhaps more nearly the sound of u in the word but. The sh of our language is represented by sc followed by an i or an e; the g both hard and soft has the same sound as m our language. Disciarem lu dol, Cantarem anb'alagria, Y n'arem a d;i Las pascuas a Maria. 0 Maria! Sant Gabriel, Qui portaba la anbasciada; Des nostro rey del eel Estarau vos preiiada. Ya omiliada, Tu o vais aqui serventa, Fia del Deu contenta, Para fe lo que el vol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Y a milia nit, Pariguero vos regina; A un Deu infinit, Dintra una establina. Y a millo dia, Que los Angles van cantant A Place in the Country 22!1

Pau y abondant De la gloria de Deu sol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Y a Libalam, Alla la terra santa, Nus nat Jesus, Anb'alagria tanta. Infant petit Que tot lu mon salvaria; Y ningu y bastaria, N u mes un Deu tot sol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Cuant d'Orien lus Tres reys la stralla veran, Deu omnipotent, Adora lo vingaran. Un present inferan. De mil encens y or, A lu beneit Sefio, Que conesce cual se vol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Tot fu gayant Para cumpli lu prumas; Y lu Esperit sant De un angel fau gramas. Gran foe ences, Que crama lu curagia; Deu nos da lenguagia, Para fe lo que Deu vol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Cuant trespasa De quest mon nostra Senora, AI eel s'empugia Sun filla matescia ora. 0 emperadora, Que del eel sou eligida! Lu rosa florida, Me resplanden que un sol. Disciarem lu dol, &c. Y el tercer giorn Que Jesus resunta, Deu y Aborama, Que Ia mort triumfa. De alii se balla Para perldra Lucife, 224 LETTERS OF VVILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

An tot a seu peuda, Que de nostro ser el sol Disciarem lu dol, &c. • After this hymn, the following stanzas, soliciting the customary gift of cakes or eggs, are sung: Ce set sois que vam cantant, Regina celastial! Dunus pau y alagria, Y bonas festas tingau. Yo vos dou sus bonas festas, Danaus dines de sus nous; Sempre tarem Ius mans llestas Para recib{ un grapat de ous. Y el giorn de pascua florida Alagramos y giuntament; As qui es mort par darnos vida Ya viu gloriosament. Aquesta cosa esta empedrada, Bien halla que la empedro; Sun amo de aquesta casa Baldria duna un do. Furmagiada, o empanada, Cucutta o flao; Cual se vol cosa me grada, Sol que no me digas que no. • • The shutters are then opened by the people within, and a sunply of cheese-cakes, or other pastry, or eggs, is dropped into a bag carried by one of the party, who acknowledge the gift in the following lines, and then depart: Aquesta casa esta empedrada, Empedrada de cuatro vens; Sun amo de aquesta casa, Es omo de compliment. • • • If nothing is given, the last line reads thus: Noes omo de compliment. [Bryant's notes] • The following is a Spanish translation of this hymn as taken down in writing from the mouth of one of the Mahonese, as they call them• selves, a native of St. Augustine. The author does not hold himself respon• sible for the purity of the Castilian. Dejaremos el duelo, Cantaremos con alegria, A Place in the Country 225

E iremos a dar Las pascuas a Maria. 0 Maria. San Gabriel Aca port6la embajada. De nuestro rey del ciel Estareis prefiada. Ya humillada Tu que vais aqui servente, Hija de Dios contenta Para hacer lo que el quiere. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. y a media noche, Paristeis reyna A un Dios infinito Dentro de un establo. Y a medio dia Los Angeles van cantando Paz y abundancia De la gloria de Dios solo. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. Ya Belem Alia en la tierra santa, Nos naci6 Gesus Con alegria tanta. Nifio chiquito, Que todo el mundo salvaria; Y ningun bastaria Sino un Dios todo solo. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. Cuando del Oriente los Tres reyes la estrella vieron, Dios omnipotente, Para adorario vinieron. Un regalo inferieron, De mil inciensos y oro AI bendito Sefior Que sabe qualquiera cosa. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. Todo fu pronto Para cumplir la promesa; Del Espiritu Santo Un Angel fue mandado. Gran fuego encendido Que quema el corage; Dios nos de lenguage 226 LETTERS OF VVILLIA:\1 CULLEN BRYANT

Para hacer lo que quiere. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. Cuando se fue De este mundo nuestra Senora, AI ciel se empuj6 Su hi jo la misma hora. 0 emperadora, Que del ciel sois elijidal La rosa florida, Mas resplendiente que un sol! Dejaremos el duelo, &a. Y el tercer dia Que Gesus resuscit6, Dios y Veronica De Ia morte triun£6. De alii se baj6 Para perder a Lucifer, Con todo su poder, Que de nuestro ser el sol. Dejaremos el duelo, &a. **Thus in the Spanish translation furnished me: Estos seis versos que cantamos Reyina celestial! Dadnos paz y alegria, Y buenos fiestas tengais. Yo vos cloy sus buenas fiestas; Dadnos dinero de nuestras nueces. Siempre tendremos las manos prestas, Para recibir un cuatro de huevos. Y el dia de pascua florida, Alegremonos juntamente, El que mori para darnos vida Ya vive gloriosamente. Aquesta casa esta empredrada, Bien halla que la em pedro; El amo de aquesta casa, Quisiera darnos un don. Quesadilla, o empanada, Cucuta, o flaon, Qualquiera cosa me agrada, Solo que no me digas que no. ***Thus in the Spanish: Aquesta casa esta empedrada, Empedrada de cuatro vientos; A Place in the Country 227

El amo de aquesta casa Es hombre de cortesia.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT !, pp. 106-120; first published in EP for May 24, 1843. 1. Stanley Williams thought this letter the "most original" of Bryant's Spanish "travelogues," for at that time "other American writers were interested in the Minor• cans, but little or nothing had been written about their literary traditions." Spanish Background, II, 141, 332. 2. Samuel Forry (181 1-1844), The Climate of the United States and its Endemic Influences. Based Chiefly on the Records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General's Office, United States Army ... (New York and Philadelphia, 1842). 3. Henry W. Benham (1817-1884, United States Military Academy 1837) of the United States Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of repairs at Fort Marion, 1839-1844. He was later distinguished in the Mexican War, and during the Civil War rose to the rank of major general in reward for important innovations in the construc• tion of fortifications and pontoon bridges. ACAB. 4. Chief city on the Spanish island of Minorca, in the western Mediterranean, from which many inhabitants emigrated to Florida in I 767, during British occupation of the island.

459. To the EvENING PosT Savannah, April 28, 1843. On the morning of the 24th, we took leave of our good friends in St. Augustine, and embarked in the steamer for Savannah. Never were softer or more genial airs breathed out of the heavens than those which played around us as we ploughed the waters of the Matanzas Sound, pass• ing under the dark walls of the old fort, and leaving it behind us, stood for the passage to the main ocean. It is a common saying in St. Augustine, that "Florida is the best poor man's country in the world," and, truly, I believe that those who live on the shores of this sound find it so. Its green waters teem with life, and produce abundance of the finest fish, ". ----- of shell or fin, And exquisitest name."l Clams are dug up on the pure sands along the beach, where the fishermen drag their boats ashore, and wherever the salt water dashes, there is an oyster, if he can find aught upon which to anchor his habitation. Along the edge of the marshes, next to the water, you see a row-a wall I should rather say-of oysters, apparently sprouting one out of another, as high as the tide flows. They are called here, though I do not know why, ratoon oysters. The abundance of fish solves the problem which has puzzled many, how the Minorcan population of St. Augustine live, now that their orange-trees, upon which they formerly depended, are unproduc• tive. In the steamboat were two or three persons who had visited Florida 228 LETTERS OF W'ILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT with a view of purchasing land. Now that the Indian war is ended, colonization has revived, and people are thronging into the country to take advantage of the law which assigns a hundred and sixty acres to every actual settler. In another year, the influx of population will prob• ably be still greater, though the confusion and uncertainty which exist in regard to the title of the lands, will somewhat obstruct the settlement of the country. Before the Spanish government ceded it to the United States [in 1819], they made numerous grants to individuals, intended to cover all the best land of the territory. Many of the lands granted have never been surveyed, and their situation and limits are very uncertain. The settler, therefore, if he is not very careful, may find his farm overlaid by an old Spanish claim. I have said that the war is ended. Although the Seminole chief, Sam Jones,2 and about seventy of his people remain, the country is in pro• found peace from one end to the other, and you may traverse the parts most distant from the white settlements without the least danger or molestation from the Indians. "How is it," I asked one day of a gentle• man who had long resided in St. Augustine, "that, after what has hap• pened, you can think it safe to let these people remain?" "It is perfectly safe," he answered. "Sam Jones professes, and I be• lieve truly, to have had less to do with the murders which have been committed than the other chiefs, though it is certain that Dr. Perrine,3 whose death we so much lament, was shot at Indian Key by his men. Besides, he has a quarrel with one of the Seminole chiefs, whose relative he has killed, and if he were to follow them to their new country,4 he would certainly be put to death. It is his interest, therefore, to propitiate the favor of the whites by the most unexceptionable behavior, for his life depends upon being allowed to remain. "There is yet another reason, which you will understand from what I am about to say. Before the war broke out, the Indians of this country, those very men who suddenly became so bloodthirsty and so formidable, were a quiet and inoffensive race, badly treated for the most part by the whites, and passively submitting to ill treatment without any appearance of feeling or spirit. When they at length resolved upon war, they concealed their families in the islands of the Everglades, whither they supposed the whites would never be able to follow them. Their rule of warfare was this, never to endanger the life of one of their warriors for the sake of gaining the greatest advantage over their enemies; they struck only when they felt themselves in perfect safety. If they saw an opportunity of de• stroying twenty white men by the sacrifice of a single Indian, the whites were allowed to escape. Acting on this principle, if their retreat had been as inaccessible as they supposed it, they would have kept up the warfare until they had driven the whites out of the territory. "When, however, General vVorth5 introduced a new method of A Place in the Country 229 prosecuting the war, following up the Indians with a close and perpetual pursuit, chasing them into their great shallow lake, the Everglades, and to its most secret islands, they saw at once that they were conquered. They saw that further hostilities were hopeless, and returned to their former submissive and quiet demeanor. "It is well, perhaps," added my friend in a kind of postscript, "that a few Indians should remain in Florida. They are the best hunters of run• away slaves in the world, and may save us from a Maroon6 war." The Indian name of the Everglades, I am told, signifies Grass-water, a term which well expresses its appearance. It is a vast lake, broader by thousands of acres in a wet than in a dry season, and so shallow that the grass everywhere grows from the bottom and overtops its surface. The bot• tom is of hard sand, so firm that it can be forded almost everywhere on horseback, and here and there are deep channels which the traveller crosses by swimming his horse. General Worth's success in quelling the insurrection of the Seminoles, has made him very popular in Florida, where the energy and sagacity with which the closing campaign of the war was conducted are spoken of in the highest terms. He has lately fixed his head-quarters at St. Augus• tine. In the afternoon, our steamer put in between two sandy points of land and we arrived at St. Mary's, formerly a buccaneer settlement, but now so zealous for good order that our captain told us the inhabitants objected to his taking in wood for his steamboat on Sunday. The place is full of groves of the orange and lime-young trees which have grown up since 1835, and which, not having suffered, like those of St. Augustine, by the gale, I found beautifully luxuriant. In this place, it was my fate to experience the plague of sand-flies. Clouds of them came into the steam• boat alighting on our faces and hands and stinging wherever they alighted. The little creatures got into our hair and into our eyes, and crawled up our sleeves and down our necks, giving us no rest, until late in the night the vessel left the wharf and stood out into the river, where the current of air swept most of our tormentors away. The next morning, as we were threading the narrow channels by which the inland passage is made from St. Mary's to Savannah, we saw, from time to time, alligators basking on the banks. Some of our fellow• passengers took rifles and shot at them as we went by. The smaller ones were often killed, the larger generally took the rifle-balls upon their impenetrable backs, and walked, apparently unhurt, into the water. One of these monstrous creatures I saw receive his death-wound, having been fired at twice, the balls probably entering at the eyes. In his agony he dashed swiftly through the water for a little distance, and turning rushed with equal rapidity in the opposite direction, the strokes of his strong arms throwing half his length above the surface. The next moment he 230 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

had turned over and lay lifeless, with his great claws upward. A sallow• complexioned man from Burke county, in Georgia, who spoke a kind of negro dialect, was one of the most active in this sport, and often said to the bystanders, "I hit the 'gator that time, I did." We passed where two of these huge reptiles were lying on the bank among the rank sedges, one of them with his head towards us. A rifle-ball from the steamer, struck the ground just before his face, and he immediately made for the water, dragging, with his awkward legs, a huge body of about fifteen feet in length. A shower of balls fell about him as he reached the river, but he paddled along with as little apparent concern as the steamboat we were in. The tail of the alligator is said to be no bad eating, and the negroes are fond of it. I have heard, however, that the wife of a South Carolina cracker once declared her dislike of it in the following terms: "Coon and collards is pretty good fixins, but 'gator and turnips I can't go, no how." Collards, you will understand, are a kind of cabbage. In this country, you will often hear of long collards, a favorite dish of the planter. Among the marksmen who were engaged in shooting alligators, were two or three expert chewers of the Indian weed-frank and careless spitters-who had never been disciplined by the fear of woman into any hypocritical concealment of their talent, or unmanly reserve in its exhibi• tion. I perceived, from a remark which one of them let fall, that somehow they connected this accomplishment with high breeding. He was speaking of four negroes who were hanged in Georgia on a charge of murdering their owner. "One of them," said he, "was innocent. They made no confession, but held up their heads, chawed their tobacco, and spit about like any gentlemen." You have here the last of my letters from the south. Savannah, which I left wearing almost a wintry aspect, is now in the full verdure of summer. The locust-trees are in blossom; the water-oaks, which were shedding their winter foliage, are now thick with young and glossy leaves; the Pride of India is ready to burst into flower, and the gardens are full of roses in bloom.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT I, pp. 121-128; first published in EP for May 30, 1843. I. Quotation unidentified. 2. Ar-pe-ik, or "Sam Jones," chief of the Mickasukie tribe, was then, at the age of about seventy-seven, thought to be the oldest Indian living in Florida. His home was at Silver Spring, where he was known as "Sam Jones the Fisherman." To American army officers, against whom he had fought, he was noted for his "obstinate ill-nature." John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War; _ .. (New York, 1848), p. 99. 3. Dr. Henry Perrine (1797-1840), an American consular representative who intro• duced sisal hemp from Mexico to southern Florida in 1833. A Place in the Country 2!11

4. Present-day Oklahoma, to which all save a few of the Seminoles were banished by the government in 1841-1842. 5. William Jenkins Worth (1794-1849), in command of United States forces against the Seminoles from 1838. A veteran of the War of 1812, he later distinguished himself in the Mexican War. 6. Term applied to fugitive slaves or their descendants, of whom there were many living among the Indians in Florida.

460. To William Gilmore Simms Charleston April29, 1843 My dear sir. I regret not to be able to see you on my hasty way to the North from St. Augustine, where my wife has been a prisoner for nearly a fortnight with an indisposition which confined her to her bed for nearly the whole time. They have a saying at St. Augustine that it is one of the most difficult places to get out of in the world. I found that to be true, and I also had a good deal of delay in getting in to it. You remember what the person told us at the boat-namely that there was a steamboat at Savannah which received the passengers of the William Seabrook and conveyed them im• mediately to Picolata. When I reached Savannah I found that I must wait five days for a boat. On my return I was again delayed three days at Savannah. Our visit to St. Augustine was an agreeable one, except for Mrs. Bry• ant's illness, and our impatience at the inconvenience of being detained so long beyond the time when it was important that we should return. We found the temperature as delightful as could be imagined. The old fort is an interesting monument of the Spanish dominion, and I was entertained in observing the manners of the ancient inhabitants, the Minorcans who make up half the population. Dr. Simmons1 expressed his disappointment that you did not come with me, and actually persisted in looking out for you by every arrival. I found him a very intelligent gentleman. Mr. Tefft and his lady-I per• ceive you are quite a favorite with them-also regretted that you did not accompany me. Your other friends at Savannah seemed also to have made up their minds to see you. Our visit to Savannah was quite an agreeable one. Do not forget that you are to come to the North this summer- When you do, come to our house, No. 326 Ninth Street. My regards and those of Mrs. B. to Mrs. Simms, and Mr. Roach and Miss Steele, and Augusta, and Washy and Chevy.2 We are extremely sorry and somewhat disappointed not to find any of them here, though our stay is but for a few hours. We arrived this morning and go out this after• noon. Mrs. Bryant desires her affectionate remembrances.3 Yrs faithfully W .. C. BRYANT 232 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: DuU PUBLISHED: John C. Guilds, "Bryant in the South: A New Letter to Simms," Georgia Historical QuarteTly, 37 (l\Iarch 1953), 143-144. 1. Simms had given Bryant a letter to Dr. William Hayne Simmons (1784-1870), a South Carolina poet and frequent contributor to the Southern Quarterly Review during Simms's editorship, who was long settled on a Florida plantation. Author of a history of the Seminoles, Simmons was doubtless the informant Bryant quotes at length in Letter 459. 2. See 395.1. Mary Rivers Steele was Nash Roach's niece; Washy and Chevy were her sisters, Anna Washington Govan Steele and Chevillette Simms Steele. John C. Guilds, "Bryant in the South: A New Letter to Simms," GeoTgia HistoTical QuaTterly, 37 (March 1953), 144n. 3. Replying on May 13, Simms regretted the brevity of the Bryants' visit to Woodlands, but was pleased to report, "vVherever you have been, you have secured the esteem of all who have met with you. I hear this expression from all quarters." Simms, Letters, I, 348-349.

461. To Charles Edwards1 [New York] May 20, 1843 My dear sir I thank you for your very hospitable invitation, and shall avail myself of it by taking the boat for Hastings tomorrow morning. Mrs. Bryant is somewhat indisposed or she would accompany me. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Charles Edwards Esq /Barrow Street. I. Charles Edwards (I 797-1868), British-born and Cambridge educated, settled in New York in the 1820s, where he was admitted to the bar and served for twenty-five years as counsel to the British Consulate General. An amateur artist as well, he was a member of the Sketch Club and an honorary member of the National Academy, where he lectured several seasons on antique statuary. He wrote a number of legal works, including Edwards' Chancery Reports, 1833-1851. DAA; information from Professor James T. Callow.

462. To Richard H. Dana New York May 26, 1843. Dear Dana, We have been at home, now for about three weeks. Our visit to the south was a most agreeable one; new modes of life and a new climate could not fail to make it interesting and the frank, courteous, hospitable manners of the southern people made it pleasant. Whatever may be the state of the comparison in other respects the south certainly has the ad• vantage over us in point of manners. We were detained in St. Augustine by my wife's illness, ten days beyond the time we had fixed for leaving it. The climate was not to blame this time, for the weather was as fine as can be imagined, -the weather of early summer, as we have it- A Place in the Country 233

We are not afraid of the climate at Rockport, and both my wife and myself remember the time we passed there as among the pleasantest days of our lives, and so I am sure does Julia who would have been glad to stay there the year round. But we have been long absent from home, and it will not do for me to take another long vacation so soon. We think of passing a part of the summer in the neighbourhood, so near to the city that I can come to it daily.1 I must therefore give up the thought of going to Rock• port this season. I saw Dr. Okie2 at Savannah. He seemed proud of having your daughter as a patient, and well satisfied with her obedience to his pre• scriptions. So, having her account of her conformity attested by her physician, I believe it fully and heartily, and acknowledge that it has raised her in my opinion. The wife of the Mayor of Savannah, who is himself a practising physician of the old school, expressed a strong desire to try the homoeopathic remedies for a pulmonary complaint under which she was suffering-a bad case at it seemed to me. I tried to per• suade her husband to employ Dr. Okie, but he put it off till he left the city-when of course it was too late. On my return from St. Augustine her husband called on me and asked me to suggest something. I did so, and left some medicines, never expecting of course to hear that they had done any good, but yesterday I received a letter from him informing me that his wife was better of her cough than she had been at any time during the two years she had had it. He intends now to give the system a trial.3 You speak of Griswold. What you have heard is true as he told me himself, and one morning I saw him when he had been walking all night on the Rockaway beach, where he had formerly been with his wife. I saw him a day or two since. I believe his mind is calmer now.4 Of the result of the copy right question I cannot form any conjecture. The booksellers and publishers appear to have taken to underbidding each other, and publishing books in such a form that you cannot put them in your library, and in such a character that they cannot be read. They are so busy in ruining one another that they seem to have forgotten the copy right question. I am waiting for them to come to their senses. I am astonished at the bargain which Prescott has made with the Harpers. Perhaps your suggestion furnishes the true explanation, but it is one of those things which I am always unwilling to believe of any body.5 Remember me to your sisters and daughter and the rest. Yrs sincerely WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESs: Richard H. Dana Esq I Boston ENDORSED: Wm C. Bryant, May I 26, 1843. Ans. June 26. PUBLISHED (brief quotation): Life, I, 407- 408. I. By 1843 there was fairly regular, if slow, daily transportation from New York ;Ci~v to Hempstead Harbor. where Bryant's new country _property was lo.cated, eithe.r 234 LETTERS oF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT

by steamboat, twenty-seven miles, or a combination of railroad and stagecoach, twenty• five miles. Goddard, Roslyn Harbor, pp. 14, 22-23. 2. Dr. A. Howard Okie; see Letter 440. 3. Richard Dennis Arnold (1808-1876), a physician and politician, was later, in 1846, among the founders of the American Medical Association. But in his letter of May 19 to Bryant he had asked that more homoeopathic medicines be sent him to try out in the Savannah hospital. NYPL-GR. 4. Rufus Griswold's wife had died very suddenly the previous November. Cooper, Letters & journals, IV, 321-322. 5. On April 25, 1843, William H. Prescott contracted with the Harpers for the publication of his Conquest of Mexico, and received an advance of $7,500 upon publi• cation, with the stipulation that he should be paid a royalty of 25% on an anticipated sale of 15,000 copies, at $6 each, over the next four years. Bryant's astonishment and disbelief at this apparent windfall may have been increased by the knowledge that Prescott was at that time still under contract with Little, Brown of Boston to publish exclusively with that firm. See Exman, Brothers Harper, pp. I 74-176.

463. To Israel K. Tefft New York June 27, 1843. My dear sir

I was diligent in looking up Professor Robinson1 on my return to New York that I might secure the autograph of Luther for you, but he had already disposed of it. It was a paper which contained the hand• writing both of Luther and Melanchthon.2 He said, however that he would look up for me the autographs of several eminent modern German scholars which he possessed and give them to me for you. I accepted his offer of course, and last evening I called in hopes of getting the autographs, but he was not in, and Mrs. Robinson told me that he had been too busy to look for them. I hope to have the pleasure of forwarding them to you hereafter. Your son called upon us the other day in good health. He dines with us tomorrow. My best regards to Mrs. Tefft. My wife desires to be kindly remem• bered to both of you. We often talk of the pleasant visit we made to Savannah, and of your many kindnesses. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: BPL ADDREss: I. K. Tefft Esq. I. Edward Robinson; see 399.2. 2. Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), German scholar, and, after Martin Luther (1483-1546), the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. A Place in the Country 235

464. To the EvENING Posr Addison County, Vermont, July 10, 1843. I do not recollect that I ever heard the canal connecting the Hudson with Lake Champlain praised for its beauty, yet it is actually beautiful• that part of it at least which lies between Dunham's Basin and the lake, a distance of twenty-one miles, for of the rest I cannot speak.1 To form the canal, two or three streams have been diverted a little from their original course, and led along a certain level in the valley through which they flowed to pour themselves into Champlain. In order to keep this level, a perpetually winding course has been taken, never, even for a few rods, approaching a straight line. On one side is the path beaten by the feet of the horses who drag the boats, but the other is an irregular bank, covered sometimes with grass and sometimes with shrubs or trees, and sometimes steep with rocks. I was delighted, on my journey to this place, to exchange a seat in a stage-coach, driven over the sandy and dusty road north of Sara• toga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top of the canal• packet. The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of shrubs in flower. A canal, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the most apparently natural meanders. Goldsmith could find no more picturesque epithet for the canals of Holland, than "slow":

"The slow canal, the yellow blossomed vale-"2

but if the canals of that country had been like this, I am sure he would have known how to say something better for them. On the left bank, grassed over to the water's edge, I saw strawberries peeping out among the clover, and shortly afterward a young man belonging to the packet leaped on board from the other side with a large basket of very fine strawberries. "I gathered them," said he "down in the swamp; the swamp is full of them." We had them afterwards with our tea. Proceeding still further, the scenery became more bold. Steep hills rose by the side of the canal, with farm-houses scattered at their feet; we passed close to perpendicular precipices, and rocky shelves sprouting with shrubs, and under impending woods. At length, a steep broad mountain rose before us, its sides shaded with scattered trees and streaked with long horizontal lines of rock, and at its foot a cluster of white houses. This was Whitehall; and here the waters of the canal plunge noisily through a rocky gorge into the deep basin which holds the long and narrow Lake Champlain. There was a young man on board who spoke English imperfectly, and whose accent I could not with certainty refer to any country or lan• guage with which I was acquainted. As we landed, he leaped on shore, and 23G LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT was surrounded at once by half a dozen persons chattering Canadian French. The French population of Canada has scattered itself along the shores of Lake Champlain for a third of the distance between the north• ern boundary of this state and the city of New York, and since the late troubles in Canada,3 more numerously than ever. In the hotel where I passed the night, most of the servants seemed to be emigrants from Canada. Speaking of foreigners reminds me of an incident which occurred on the road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham's Basin. As the public coach stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just re• suming their journey. The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty years of age; the mother a buxom dame; the children, some six or seven, of various ages, with flaxen hair, light-blue eyes, and broad ruddy cheeks. "They are Irish," said one of my fellow-passengers. I main• tained on the contrary that they were Americans. "Git ap," said the man to his horses, pronouncing the last word very long. "Git ap; go 'lang." My antagonist in the dispute immediately acknowledged that I was right, for "git ap," and "go 'lang" could never have been uttered with such purity of accent by an Irishman. \Ve learned on inquiry that they were emi• grants from the neighborhood, proceeding to the vVestern [Erie] Canal, to take passage for Michigan, where the residence of a year or two will prob• ably take somewhat from the florid ruddiness of their complexions. I looked clown into the basin which contains the waters of the Champlain, lying ccnsiclerably below the level on which Whitehall is built, and could not help thinking that it was scooped to contain a wider and deeper collection of waters. Craggy mountains, standing one behind the other, surround it on all sides, from whose feet it seems as if the water had retired; and here and there, are marshy recesses between the hills, which might once have been the bays of the lake. The Burlington, one of the model steamboats for the whole world, which navigates the Cham• plain, was lying moored below. My journey, however, was to be by land. At seven o'clock in the morning we set out from ·whitehall, in a strong wagon, to cross the mountainous country lying east of the lake. "Git ap," said our good-natured driver to his cattle, and we climbed and descended one rugged hill after another, passing by cottages which we were told were inhabited by Canadian French. vVe had a passenger from Essex county, on the west side of the lake, a lady who, in her enthusiastic love of a mountainous country, seemed to wish that the hills were higher; and another from the prairies of the western states, who, accustomed for many years to the easy and noiseless gliding of carriages over the smooth summer roads of that region, could hardly restrain herself from exclaim• ing at every step against the ruggedness of the country, and the roughness of the ways. A third passenger was an emigrant from Vermont to Cha- A Place in the Country 237

taque county, in the state of New York, who was now returning on a visit to his native county, the hills of Vermont, and who entertained us by singing some stanzas of what he called the Michigan song, much in vogue, as he said, in these parts before he emigrated, eight years ago. Here is a sample: "The talk about Vermont, They say no state's like that; 'Tis true the girls are handsome, The cattle too are fat. But who amongst its mountains Of cold and ice would stay, When he can buy paraira In Michigan-i-a?" By "paraira" you must understand prairie. "It is a most splendid song," continued the singer. "It touches off one state after another. Connecticut, for example:" "Connecticut has blue laws, And when the beer, on Sunday, Gets working in the barrel, They flog it well on Monday." At Benson, in Vermont, we emerged upon a smoother country, a country of rich pastures, fields heavy with grass almost ready for the scythe, and thick-leaved groves of the sugar-maple and the birch. Benson is a small, but rather neat little village, with three white churches, all of which appear to be newly built. The surrounding country is chiefly fitted for the grazing of flocks, whose fleeces, however, just at present. hardly pay for the shearing.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT I, pp. 128-133: first published in EP for July 15, 1843. I. The Champlain Canal, a sixty-mile waterway, was opened in 1819, the first finished unit in the New York State barge canal system. 2. From The Traveller (1764). 3. A dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the boundary of Maine with Canada, following a Canadian insurgency which received much unofficial American aid during the period 1838-1842, seemed for a time to threaten hostilities between this country and Britain. The principal differences were settled, however, by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of August 1842.

465. To the EvENING PosT Keene, New Hampshire, .July 13, 1843. I resume my journey where I stopped short in my last, namely, on reaching Benson, in Vermont, among the highlands east1 of Lake Cham• plain. We went on through a pastoral country of the freshest verdure, 238 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT where we saw large flocks of sheep grazing. From time to time we had glimpses of the summits of a long blue ridge of mountains to the east of us, and now and then the more varied and airy peaks of the mountains which lie to the west of the lake.2 They told me that of late years this part of the country had suffered much from the grasshoppers, and that last summer, in particular, these insects had made their appearance in im• mense armies, devouring the plants of the ground and leaving it bare of herbage. "They passed across the country," said one person to me, "like hail storms, ravaging it in broad stripes, with intervals between in which they were less numerous." At present, however, whether it was the long and severe winter which did not fairly end till the close of April, or whether it was the un• commonly showery weather of the season hitherto, that destroyed these insects, in some early stage of their existence, I was told that there is now scarce a grasshopper in all these meadows and pastures. Every where the herbage was uncommonly luxuriant, and every where I saw the turf thickly sprinkled with the blossoms of the white clover, on the hill, in the valley, among rocks, by streams, by the road-side, and whenever the thinner shade of the woods allowed the plants of the field to take root. We might say of the white clover, with even more truth than Montgomery says of the daisy:- "But this bold floweret climbs the hill, Hides in the forest, haunts the glen, Plays on the margin of the rill, Peeps o'er the fox's den."a All with whom I spoke had taken notice of the uncommon abundance of the white clover this year, and the idea seemed to prevail that it has its regular periods of appearing and disappearing, -remaining in the fields until it has taken up its nutriment in the soil, and then giving place to other plants, until they likewise had exhausted the qualities of the soil by which they were nourished. However this may be, its appearance this season in such profusion, throughout every part of the country which I have seen, is very remarkable. All over the highlands of Vermont and New Hampshire, in their valleys, in the gorges of their mountains, on the sandy banks of the Connecticut, the atmosphere for many a league is perfumed with the odor of its blossoms. I passed a few days in the valley of one of those streams of northern Vermont, which find their way into Champlain. If I were permitted to draw aside the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me most interesting history of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley.4 I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for forty A Place in the Country 239 years, during which they have shared each other's occupations and pleas• ures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness; for sickness has made long and frequent visits to their dwelling. I could tell you how they slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each other's relations, and how one of them, more enterprising and spirited in her temper than the other, might be said to represent the male head of the family, and took upon herself their transactions with the world without, until her health failed, and she was tended by her gentle companion, as a fond wife attends her invalid hus• band. I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, which now in the days of their broken health, bloom wild without their tendance, and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in be• stowing upon them, but I have already said more than I fear they will forgive me for, if this should ever meet their eyes, and I must leave the subject. One day I had taken a walk with a farmer of the place, over his ex• tensive and luxuriant pastures, and was returning by the road, when a well-made young fellow in a cap, with thick curly hair, carrying his coat on his arm, wearing a red sash round his waist, and walking at a brisk pace, overtook us. "Etes-vous Canadien?"-are you a Canadian? said my com• panion. "Un peu"-a little-was the dry answer. "Where are you going?" asked the farmer again, in English. "To Middlebury," replied he, and immediately climbed a fence and struck across a field to save an angle in the road, as if perfectly familiar with the country. "These Canadian French," said the farmer, "come swarming upon us in the summer, when we are about to begin the hay-harvest, and of late years they are more numerous than formerly. Every farmer here has his French laborer at this season, and some two or three. They are hardy, and capable of long and severe labor; but many of them do not under• stand a word of our language, and they are not so much to be relied upon as our own countrymen; they, therefore, receive lower wages." "What do you pay them?" "Eight dollars a month, is the common rate. When they leave your service, they make up their packs, and bring them for your inspection, that you may see that they have taken nothing which does not belong to them. I have heard of thefts committed by some of them, for I do not suppose that the best of the Canadians leave their homes for work, but I have always declined to examine their baggage when they quit my house." A shower drove us to take shelter in a farm-house by the road. The family spoke with great sympathy of John, a young French Canadian, "a gentlemanly young fellow," they called him, who had been much in their family, and who had just come from the north, looking quite ill. He had been in their service every summer since he was a boy. At the approach of 240 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT the warm weather, he annually made his appearance in rags, and in autumn he was dismissed, a sprucely-dressed lad, for his home. On Sunday, as I went to church, I saw companies of these young Frenchmen, in the shade of barns or passing along the road; fellows of small but active persons, with thick locks and a lively physiognomy. The French have become so numerous in that region, that for them and the Irish, a Roman Catholic church has been erected in Middlebury, which, you know, is not a very large village. On Monday morning, we took the stage-coach at Middlebury for this place. An old Quaker, in a broad-brimmed hat and a coat of the ancient cut, shaped somewhat like the upper shell of the tortoise, came to hand in his granddaughter, a middle-aged woman, whom he had that morning accompanied from Lincoln, a place about eighteen miles distant, where there is a Quaker neighborhood and a Quaker meeting-house. The denomination of Quakers seems to be dying out in the United States, like the Indian race; not that the families become extinct, but pass into other denominations. It is very common to meet with neighborhoods formerly inhabited by Quakers, in which there is not a trace of them left. Not far from Middlebury, is a village on a fine stream, called Quaker Village, with not a Quaker in it. Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiari• ties of costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally adopted. I hope they will be slow to lay aside their better characteristics: their abhorrence of violence, and the peaceful and wholesome subjection in which, of all religious denominations, they seem to have best suc• ceeded in holding the passions. In such remote and secluded neighbor• hoods as Lincoln, their sect will probably make the longest stand against the encroachments of the world. I perceived, however, that the old gentle• man's son, who was with him, and, as I learned, was also a Quaker, had nothing peculiar in his garb. Before sunset we were in sight of those magnificent mountain sum• mits, the Pico, Killington Peak, and Shrewsbury Peak, rising in a deep ultra-marine blue among the clouds that rolled about them, for the day was showery. We were set down at Rutland, where we passed the night, and the next morning crossed the mountains by the passes of Clarendon and Shrewsbury. The clouds were clinging to the summits, and we travelled under a curtain of mist, upheld on each side by mountain-walls. A young woman of uncommon beauty, whose forefinger on the right hand was dotted all over with punctures of the needle, and who was probably a mantua-maker, took a seat in the coach for a short distance. We made some inquiries about the country, but received very brief, though good• natured answers, for the young lady was a confirmed stammerer. I thought A Place in the Country 241

of an epigram I had somewhere read, in which the poet complimented a lady who had this defect, by saying that the words which she wished to utter were reluctant to leave so beautiful a mouth, and lingered long about the pearly teeth and rosy lips. We passed through a tract covered with loose stones, and the Quaker's granddaughter, who proved to be a chatty person, told us a story which you may possibly have heard before. ""Where did you get all the stones with which you have made these substantial fences?" said a visitor to his host, on whose grounds there appeared no lack of such materials. "Look about you in the fields, and you will see," was the answer. "I have looked," rejoined the questioner, "and do not perceive where a single stone is missing, and that is what has puzzled me." Soon after reaching the highest elevation on the road, we entered the state of New Hampshire.5 Our way led us into a long valley formed by a stream, sometimes contracted between rough woody mountains, and sometimes spreading out, for a short distance, into pleasant meadows; and we followed its gradual descent until we reached the borders of the Connecticut. We crossed this beautiful river at Bellows Falls, where a neat and thriving village has its seat among craggy mountains, which, at a little distance, seem to impend over it. Here the Connecticut struggles and foams through a narrow passage of black rocks, spanned by a bridge. I believe this is the place spoken of in Peter's History of Connecticut,6 where he relates that the water of the river is so compressed in its passage between rocks, that an iron bar can not be driven into it. A few miles below we entered the village of Walpole, pleasantly situated on the knolls to the east of the meadows which border the river. Walpole was once a place of some literary note, as the residence of Dennie, who, forty years since, or more, before he became the editor of the Port Folio, here published the Farmer's Museum, a weekly sheet, the literary department of which was amply and entertainingly filled. 7 Keene, which ended our journey in the stage-coach, is a flourishing village on the rich meadows of the Ashuelot, with hills at a moderate distance swelling upward on all sides. It is a village after the New England pattern, and a beautiful specimen of its kind-broad streets planted with rock-maples and elms, neat white houses, white palings, and shrubs in the front inclosures. During this visit to New Hampshire, I found myself in a hilly and rocky region, to the east of this place, and in sight of the summit of Monadnock, which, at no great distance from where I was, begins to up• heave its huge dark mass above the surrounding country. I arrived, late in the evening, at a dwelling, the door of which was opened to me by two damsels, all health and smiles. In the morning I saw a third sister of the same florid bloom and healthful proportions.8 They were none of those slight, frail figures, copies of the monthly plates of fashion, with waists 242 LETTERS OF VVILLIAl\1 CULLEN BRYANT of artificial slenderness, which almost force you to wonder how the different parts of the body are kept together-no pallid faces, nor narrow chests, nor lean hands, but forms which might have satisfied an ancient statuary, with a well-formed bust, faces glowing with health, rounded arms, and plump fingers. They are such women, in short, as our mothers, fifty years ago, might have been. I had not observed any particular ap• pearance of health in the females of the country through which I had passed; on the contrary, I had been disappointed in their general pallid• ness and look of debility. I inquired of my host if there was any cause to which this difference could be traced. "I have no doubt of the cause," replied he. "These girls are healthy, because I have avoided three great errors. They have neither been brought up on unwholesome diet, nor subjected to unwholesome modes of dress, nor kept from daily exercise in the open air. They have never drunk tea or coffee, nor lived upon any other than plain and simple food. Their dress-you know that even the pressure of the easiest costume impedes the play of the lungs somewhat-their dress has never been so tight as to hinder free respiration and the proper expansion of the chest. Finally, they have taken exercise every day in the open air, assisting me in tending my fruit trees and in those other rural occupations in which their sex may best take part. Their parents have never enjoyed very good health; nor were the children particularly robust in their infancy, yet by a rational physical education, they have been made such as you see them." I took much pleasure in wandering through the woods in this region, where the stems of the primeval forest still stand-straight trunks of the beech, the maple, the ash, and the linden, towering to a vast height. The hollows are traversed by clear, rapid brooks. The mowing fields at that time were full of strawberries of large size and admirable flavor, which you could scarce avoid crushing by dozens as you walked. I would gladly have lingered, during a few more of these glorious summer days, in this wild country, but my engagements did not permit it, and here I am, about to take the stage-coach for Worcestor and the Western Rail• road. MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: LT 1, pp. 134-143; first published in EP for July 24, 1843. l. The printed text mistakenly has "west." 2. The Green Mountains of Vermont were east of Bryant's route, and the Adirondack Mountains of New York west of it. 3. James Montgomery (1771-1854), "The Daisy." 4. Bryant's aunt Charity Bryant and her lifelong companion, Sylvia Drake, who operated a dressmaking and tailoring shop in their home at 'Veybridge, Vermont. See 58.1. 5. Bryant was woolgathering; he would have passed from Vermont to New Hampshire only when he crossed the Connecticut River between Bellows Falls and Walpole. A Place in the Country 243

6. Samuel Peters (1735-1826), Geneml History of Connecticut (London, 1781). 7. Joseph Dennie (1768-1812, Harvard 1790) edited the Farmer's Weekly Museum at Walpole, New Hampshire, from 1796 until 1799, when he moved to Philadelphia, where from 1801 to 1811 he was distinguished as editor of the Port Folio. 8. The daughters of Bryant's cousin Elisha Fish, at Gilsum, New Hampshire. See Letter 472. 466. To Richard H. Dana New York August 4, 1843. My dear sir. I would have answered your letter earlier if I had known what to say. All the circumstances which made the death of Allston a happy one, seem to increase the weight of the loss to his friends. 1 Even the general sorrow with which he is mourned, and the honors paid to his memory, but remind them how great is that loss. I suppose the only method of consolation is to fix the mind upon what death has been to him, rather than what it is to those whom he has left. For my part, I think of him as of one who, without the usual process of pain and decay was taken by the gentlest transition into that better world the light of which was always about him, and to which he seemed to belong rather than to this. Do you remember the pilgrims in Bunyan's narrative, who in passing over the dark river to the glorious land beyond, seemed scarcely to dip their feet in the waters?2 Weir who has just put the last hand to his picture of the Embarka• tion of the Pilgrims on which he has been earnestly engaged for years,3 is a man of great simplicity of character and depth of feeling. "It was an encouragement to me during my long labours," said he to me last week, "that when they should be finished Allston would see what I had done. I thought of it almost every day while I was at work." Such was the confi• dence with which the artists looked up to his true and friendly judgment, and so sure were they that what they had done well would give him pleasure. I hope you will admit that it is something to the credit of the country and the age that it can discern the worth of such a man as Allston, and can grieve that so bright an example both in life and in art has been taken from our midst. You make an apology for something you said in a previous letter on a political subject. My dear sir, I am always glad to hear your opinions on any subject. I do not like to dispute, but I like to know what my friends think. In regard to the matter of which you spoke, I do not share your fears, but for various reasons I had taken no part in it, so that your rebuke touched me not.4 Remember me kindly to all Yrs. faithfully WM c. BRYANT 244 LETfERS OF \NILLlt\1\1: CULLEN BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: MHS (final); NYPL-GR (draft) ADDREss: R. H. Dana Esq. I. Dana's brother-in-law, the painter-poet Washington Allston (1779-1843, Harvard 1800), died at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on July 9, 1843. DAA. Dana's verse tribute to his friend, "Washington Allston," appeared in Graham's, 24 (November 1843), 228. 2. Pilgrim's Progress (1678). 3. As Weir's great painting for the Rotuada of the Capitol (see 327.3) made its way toward Washington in the summer of 1843, it was exhibited to wide acclaim, first by the Corps of Cadets at West Point, and then at Faneui1 Hall in Boston, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Artists' Fund Hall in Philadelphia. Robert Weir: Artist and Teacher of West Point (West Point: Cadet Fine Arts Forum, 1976), p. 16. 4. Since Dana's letter is unrecovered, the nature of his "rebuke" is undetermined.

467. To George Bancroft New York August 18, 1843. My dear sir The bearer Wm Gilmore Simms Esq. being about to visit Boston I take the liberty of introducing him to your acquaintance.! You must be already familiar with his merits as an author; those who know him per• sonally think that there is even more occasion to esteem the man. Yrs truly WM. c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh ADDRESS: George Bancroft Esq. I Boston I W. G. Simms Esq. I. In August and early September Simms visited New York and Boston. After returning home, he wrote Israel Tefft that "Bancroft was yery attentive to me. I took tea with him on one occasion, and was compelled to decline an invitation to join him on an excursion to Plymouth-classical Plymouth." Letter dated October 27 [1843], Simms, Letters, I, 380. It is probable that Simms stayed with the Bryants while in New York, as Bryant had suggested (Letter 460), though there is no specific confirmation of this.

468. To Richard H. Dana New York August 18, 1843. My dear sir. The bearer, Wm Gilmore Simms Esq. of Charleston, being desirous of making your acquaintance, I take pleasure in giving this letter of in• troduction to one whom I so much esteem. With his literary standing you are already acquainted, and I desire to bespeak your good will for him as a gentleman of the highest personal character.1 Yrs. truly WM C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: LH ADDRESs: R. H. Dana Esq. A Place in the Country 245

I. Though there is no mention in Simms's letters of his meeting Dana on this visit to Boston, the presence of Bryant's letter among Dana's papers seems adequate evi• dence that it was presented.

469. To Richard D. Arnold1 New York August 1843. My dear sir. I send you, as you desire, a homoeopathic pharmacopoeia. Your con• jecture, with regard to the numbers on the vials, is not quite right. One set of numbers refers merely to the order in ·which the medicines are arranged in the box; as I, 2, 3, 4, 5, &.:c. If there is another set, it refers merely to the potences or attenuations. The globules in the box I sent you are of the 3d and 6th attenuations. The Arnica is the mother-tincture, which is to be used externally in contusions &c. by dropping a drop or two into a small quantity of water. You will see that Jahr, in his Pharmacopoeia,2 directs that two or three globules be given as a dose. It is thought I believe safer to give from four to six; for it may happen that all the globules are not impregnated with the medicine. I am happy to hear that Mrs. Arnold continues to improve. Remem• ber me to her. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT P. S. The price of the Pharmacopoeia is $2. W.C.B.

MANUSCRIPT: Emory University Library ADDREss: Dr. Richard D. Arnold I Savannah 1 Geo. I. See 462.3. 2. Gottlieb Heinrich Georg .Jahr (1800-1875), New HomoeojJathic Pharmacopoeia and Posology, or the Preparation of Homoeopathic Medicines and the Administration of Doses, transbted, with additions, by .James Kitchen, M.D. (Philadelphia and New York, 1842).

470. To Israel K. Tefft New York August 1843. My dear sir.

I send you several autographs-of Tholuck1 and others-which Pro• fessor Robinson was kind enough to give me for you. Accompanying them is the handwriting of the Professor himself who is remarkable for having written the best book of travels in the Holy Land which we have in any language.2 My regards to Mrs. Tefft and believe me Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT 246 LETTERS OF \IVILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: UVa ADDREss: I K Tefft Esq. I. Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799-1877), German Protestant clergyman and commentator on the Bible. 2. Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea (London, 1841).

471. To I. H. Hedgesl New York Sept. l, 1843 Office of the Evening Post Sir I have this morning received a letter from you desiring to know the name and address of the Secretary of the Copyright Club established in this city. Cornelius Mathews Esq. of this city is the Corresponding Secretary of the Club.2 I was near not answering your letter, in compliance with a rule which it has been found necessary to adopt in this office, of not noticing letters on which the postage is not paid; but observing the language you make use of, expressing much anxiety to obtain the information you ask, I concluded at once to depart from the rule in this instance. Yrs. truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: Chicago Historical Society ADDRESS: I. H. Hedges. I. Possibly Isaac A. Hedges, author of Sorgo, or The Northern Sugar Plant ... (Cincinnati, 1863). Hedges' letter is unrecovered. 2. Almost from the start of his career as a newspaper editor, Bryant advocated an international copyri~ht agreement. When Gulian Verplanck introduced a bill in Congress in 1830 to double the period of protection for native authors from 14 to 28 years, the EP proposed that British writers receive the same privileges. At a dinner honoring Verplanck on the passage of his bill, Bryant toasted "An International Copy• right Law-the only link required to complete the chain of reciprocity between na• tions" (EP, April 30, 1831). His editorial of September 27, 1836, insisting on an author's right to his book as a "natural right," brought an appeal from Harriet Martineau that he and other American writers make common cause with their British brethren, who were just then petitioning the American Congress, through Henry Clay, for an effective law (Martineau to Bryant, November 8, 1836, NYPL-GR). This "Address of certain Authors of Great Britain to the Senate of the United States in Congress assembled" bore the signatures of fifty-six prominent British writers, and appealed for the "Exclu• sive Benefit of their Writings within the United States," and was dated February 2, 1837. See United States Senate Document No. 134, Twenty-Fourth Congress, Second Session. A few months later Bryant summarized his objections to the failure to grant equal protection: "It promotes the circulation of works of English origin in this country to the exclusion of our own, and to the discouragement of our authors-and ... it leads to the ignorant and injurious mutilation of foreign works republished here" (EP, March 2, 1837). On the eve of Dickens' yisit in 1842. Bryant returned to the fight, this time against A Place in the Country 247 domestic papermakers who feared that an equitable law would reduce their sales. He argued, first, the immorality of robbing visitors of their literary property "for the benefit of the paper-makers. It would be very convenient for a certain class," he con• tinued, "who hang about our wharves, if they were allowed to pick the pockets of those who arrive from abroad, or ran off with their baggage, without fear of punishment; but this benefit and this convenience ... would hardly be a sufficient ground for depriv• ing strangers of the protection which the law grants to our own citizens." But literary piracy, he insisted, did not account for the proliferation of cheap books and periodicals; it had been made possible, rather, through improvements in papermaking and printing, which greatly speeded up these operations (EP, :February 11, 1842). Before Dickens left this country, he sent Bryant an "Address to the American People," signed by a dozen prominent British writers, urging adoption of an international copyright agree• ment. Publishing this in his paper, Bryant warned, "It is a mistake to suppose that, if we refuse to make an arrangement for securing to the authors of America and Britain a copy-right in both countries, the advantage of the injustice will be on our side." He cited the rapid increase in American writings of merit, and predicted that the day was "not far distant, when the greater number of books designed for readers of the English language, would be produced in America .... If our publishers enrich themselves at the expense of British authors, British publishers enrich themselves at the expense of ours, and will continue to do so, from year to year, until the advantage will be shifted from our side to theirs. The policy of our country is to secure for its authors the benefit of an international copyright before that time arrives" (EP, May 9, 1842). It was, then, no surprise that when an American Copyright Club was organized at a "meeting of the friends of copyright" at the Atheneum Hotel in New York on August 23, 1843, Bryant was made its president. The dub's stated aim was "to procure the enactment of such law or laws as shall place the literary relations of the United States and foreign countries, in reference to copyright, on just, proper, and equitable grounds." The other officers were Verplanck, vice president; novelist and playwright Cornelius P. Mathews (1817-1889), corresponding secretary; Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816-1878, Columbia 1835), book and magazine editor and critic, recording secretary; and Alexander Warfield Bradford (1815-1867), New York lawyer, treasurer. Prominent among the members were Dana, Emerson, Greeley, Griswold, Hawthorne, Holmes, Irving, Longfellow, Lowell, Paulding, Pierpont, Poe, Simms, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Nathaniel Parker Willis. Bryant prepared an address, subsequently adopted and published by the executive committee on Octo• ber 18, 1843, announcing their purpose as not "to argue with the American people, so much as to excite, alarm and animate them to the instant performance of a duty." The pirating of foreign writings, they charged, was a crime; a change of country "is not-cannot be-a change of proprietary right." One might as easily justify the seizure of Sheffield cutlery, China tea, or Persian silks, as of a book. "It only becomes a people abject, needy and slow of thought, to take advantage of a state of things where their right to alms is so greatly questionable." The American people, Bryant concluded, must demand, as a matter of simple justice, a law "equalizing all copyrights, native and foreign." An Address to the People of the United States in Behalf of the American Copyright Club (New York, 1843), pp. 5-18, passim.

472. To Charity Bryant New York September 25, 1843. Dear Aunt. I am greatly obliged to you for the present you were so kind as to send me. I generally wear cotton socks for the greater part of the year, but 248 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT in very cold weather, and sometimes also at other seasons when I am not quite well and find that my feet do not perspire, I give them a covering of woollen. The socks you sent me are very fine ones, and will answer my purpose extremely well. You speak as if I had been under a sort of promise to write to you on my return to New York. I do not recollect having made any such. On the contrary it seems to me that I told you I would answer any letter you should send me, but that being myself a bad correspondent, I would not undertake to write first, notwithstanding the impression you had that I was under a sort of engagement to do it. We had a very pleasant journey to Gilsum, where we found all our friends well. My cousin Elisha Fish has three fine daughters, so healthy and ruddy that it would do your heart good to see them. Yet neither the father nor the mother enjoy very good health, and the daughters them• selves were not particularly healthy in their infancy. When I asked him what was the secret of their robust and fresh appearance, he said that he ascribed it to the avoiding of three common errors. One was tight dresses, the other improper diet, and the third want of exercise in the open air. He was always careful that their clothes should be so made as not to impede respiration-corsets [I] suppose, therefore, were out of the ques• tion; they were habituated to plain [fare?] never drinking either tea or coffee, and they took plenty of exercise in the open air. He is fond of the cultivation of fruit-and his orchards of different kinds of fruit trees are large and in good order. They often assist him in the management of his trees; he has taught them he says that it is no disgrace for them to help their father in any thing in which he has occasion for their assistance. From Gilsum I went to Worcestor, and in about thirty six hours from the time I parted with my cousin was in my chamber at New York. I am glad to hear of the improvement in Miss Drake's health. Per• haps it was occasioned by my bringing the homoeopathic medicines to Weybridge, as in our system you know the smallest possible quantity of medicine has the best effect. My brother John gave a dose of some ho• moeopathic medicine to Uncle Eben[ezer Snell], who put it in his pocket and went to Northampton, and on his return, laughingly told John that he had not felt so well in many years. My mother is now with my wife at Hempstead Harbor on Long Island, a remarkably healthy situation, where we have persuaded her to try the effect of sea bathing which has done my wife great good.l Julia is with us, going to school and into the salt water every day. Fanny my eldest is in New York and is very well. Mr. Dorrance2 who brought me the packet from you disappeared as soon as he delivered it, before I had time to open it and see what it was, or to make any inquiry of him. I had therefore no opportunity to write by him, and send by mail. I shall probably go out to Buffalo with my mother when she goes A Place in the Country 249 westward, and put here on board the steamboat which runs between Buf• falo and Chicago.3 Some of my brothers will meet her at the end of the lake. My regards to Miss Drake. My wife sends love to you both. Yrs. affectionately WM c. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: UTex ADDRESs: Miss C. Bryant/ Weybridge I Vermont POSTMARK: NEW• YORK I SEP I 27 I 1843 POSTAL ANNOTATioN: PAID I 18[Vl!?] I Wm C. Bryant. 1. Cullen's widowed mother, Sarah Snell Bryant, now seventy-four years old and living with her daughter Louisa Olds near Princeton, Illinois, had come east early in the summer, in time to join her son on his visit to her sister-in-law Charity. On his way back to New York Cullen left her with the Fish family at Gilsum, New Hampshire. See 465.8. Fish took Sarah Bryant to visit her Snell relatives at Plainfield and Cummington, where she was surprised to meet her son John, who had come east from Princeton unexpectedly on a business trip. Sarah to Charity Bryant, August 3, 1843, Sheldon Museum, and September 21, 1843, UTex. In September and October she spent three weeks with Cullen and Frances at their new country home. This was their first summer at Hempstead Harbor, and they shared it with friends as well as family. Just before Bryant's visit to Vermont, Horatio Greenough, who was awaiting the final disposition of his statue of Washington, came to New York for a brief visit, and wrote afterward to his brother, "I was at Bryant's, on Long Island, on Sunday. Oh, the beautiful land! I saw bobolinks and fiery hangbirds rain gold among the green boughs; I lay on the velvet knolls and saw the snowball swing and nod in the breeze. It was all glorious." July 8, 1843, in Letters of Horatio Greenough to his Brother, Henry Greenough, with Biographical Sketches and Some Contemporary Correspondence, ed. Frances Boott Greenough (Boston, 1887), p. 153. 2. A Vermont neighbor of Charity Bryant's. 3. On October 9 Cullen left with his mother for Buffalo, by way of Albany and, presumably, a combination of railroad and stagecoach such as is described in Letter 405. After a visit to Niagara Falls, he put her on the lake steamer Great Western at Buffalo for Chicago, and returned to New York. Sarah to Charity Bryant, December 2, 1843, Sheldon Museum.

473. To William Bayliesl [New York, October 5, 1843]2 My dear sir When I was in Bridgewater you told me that it was your intention to visit New York in the month of October.3 I shall set out on Monday next for Buffalo, with my mother, whom I shall accompany as far as that place, on the way to Illinois. I intend to be at home the be[ginning of the foll]owing week. I hope you will not [plan to visit?] New York until then. My house [is at 326 Ninth?] Street. Come to it immediately, and you will find a chamber ready for you. There is an omnibus which has its station within a few rods of my door, which makes it almost as easy to get from my neighbourhood to any place you wish to visit as if you were at one of the hotels in the lower part of the city. I suppose we have a new set of sights since you were last here, and if you 250 LETTERS OF vVILL!Al\1 CULLEN BRYANT will allow me, I shall take pleasure in showing them to you. My wife, who is a much more hospitable person than I pride myself upon being, will [make you as comfortable in my?] house as if you were in a tavern, even if you are one of the class of those who find

Their warmest welcome at an inn.4 Should you delay your visit beyond the time I have mentioned, will you be so kind as to write and let me know at what time I may ex• pect you, so that I may not be out of town when you arrive; for I some• times straggle off in fine weather for a day or two into the country. My regards to the Miss Howards.... 5

MANUSCRIPT: MHS ADDREss: Hon. William Baylies I West Bridgewater I Massachusetts. POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I OCT I 6 POSTAL ANNOTATION: PAID I 18[Y2?] ENDORSED: Wm. C. Bryant I 5th Oct. 1843 I 7. reed. I 12. answered I to go- on the I 1. Nov.-. I. Former Congressman William Baylies had been Bryant's law tutor in 1814-1815; see Vol. I, 14; 35.4. 2. The heading and signature have been clipped from this single sheet, leaving other gaps as indicated by brackets below. 3. This suggests that Bryant may have returned from Worcester to New York by way of Bridgewater in July. See Letter 465. 4. C£. William Shenstone (1714-1763), "Written at an Inn at Henley." 5. Dr. Peter Bryant's cousins at West Bridgewater.

474. To John Howard Bryant New York October 6, 1843. Dear Brother

The bearer of this is Dr. George E. Shipman1 of this city who has just completed his medical studies and goes to your state with a view of establishing himself as a practitioner of the homoeopathic method. His father is a person of excellent character and standing among us, and I hear a favorable account of the bearer, though I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance. I am assured that he is well educated and of unexceptionable morals, and believing as I do in the system of practice which he has adopted I strongly desire that he may be successful. You will I am sure assist him with such information as you have it in your power to give him, and such advice as your long residence in the state enables you to offer. Yrs truly WMC. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-BFP ADDREss (first address leaf): John H. Bryant I Esq 1 Prince• ton I Bureau County I Illinois; (second address leaf): Dr. Geo E Shipman I care of [Gannett Duncan?] Esq. I Louisville Ky. POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I OCT I 12 ENDORSED: "Andover January 24th 1844 I Mr. Bryant I Dr Sir- I should have sent A Place in the Country 251

you this letter long ere this or have delivered it in person but I have been wander• ing about since my arrival in this state & have but just determined upon a location; when the weather & my affairs here permit I trust that you will allow me the pleasure of calling upon you. I Yours very respectfully I Geo. E. Shipman I John H. Bryant Esq." I. George Elias Shipman (1820-1893) became a successful Illinois physician and writer on homoeopathic medicine. His The Homoeopathic Family Guide, for the Use of Twenty-five Principal Remedies in the Treatment of the More Simple Forms of Disease, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1865) was reprinted many times.

475. To Theodore Sedgwick IIJl New York Nov. 16, 1843. My dear sir We meet on Saturday evening at 433 Houston Street. I shall see you there of course.2 Yrs. truly W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: HCL ADDREss: Theodore Sedgwick Esquire. I 20 Wall Street. I. Since 1835, when he substituted briefly for the ailing William Leggett during Bryant's absence in Europe, Theodore Sedgwick III (209.8) had been a frequent con• tributor of political articles to the EP over the signature "VETo." An able and successful lawyer, in 1839 he had represented in the Connecticut courts, at Bryant's behest, a group of African slaves who had seized the Spanish schooner Amistad at sea, and had in turn been taken into New London by an American warship. Sedgwick's carefully reasoned argument for their release, printed in the EP, prevailed in the subsequent decision of the United States Supreme Court to set the captives free. EP, September 6 and 21, 1839; Life, I, 352-353; Nevins, Evening Post, pp. 153, 172, 176. In 1840, with Bryant's help, Sedgwick edited a selection of Leggett's political writings, and Bryant persuaded him to review Richard H. Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast (374.3; Letter 394). By 1843 they were close political and journalistic associates. 2. Probably a meeting of the Sketch Club, although the minutes for this period have not been recovered.

476. To George Bancroft New York, December 11, 1843. My dear sir. I have the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance Dr. Luther of Germany,! a descendant of the great reformer of that name. He is of the medical profession, and is travelling in this country for the gratifica• tion of a liberal curiosity. A friend of mine in London speaks of him as worthy of the highest regard, and as such allow me to commend him to your friendly attentions. Yrs truly WMC.BRYANT 252 LETTERS OF \VILLIA.'\1 CULLEN BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: MHS ADDRESS: Geo. Bancroft Esq. I. Not further identified.

477. To Thomas Cole New York Dec 22 1843. My dear sir

I told Mr. Cummings1 on Wednesday that I had inserted a notice of your picture of Mount Etna2 in the Evening Post. When you called yester• day, I supposed you came for the paper which contained that article; and I had no doubt whatever that it was in the paper, inasmuch as I had corrected the proof the day before, and had directed its insertion. I was mortified to find, after you went away that the article had not appeared but had been postponed by the foreman without asking my permission. It appeared yesterday. I send you the paper containing it.3 Yrs truly w C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: NYSL ADDRESS: Thomas Cole Esq. I. Thomas Scir Cummings (1804-189"1), British-born m1mature and portrait painter, was a founder of the National Academy, and for forty years its treasurer. He was the author of Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design (Philadelphia, 1865). DAA. 2. Cole's "View of Mount Etna" was shown at the National Academy in 1843. NAD Exhibition Record, I, 89. 3. The EP of December 21 carried a short paragraph of high praise for Cole's picture.

478. To Rufus W. Griswold New York Dec 25 1843 My dear sir. The occasion of my sending the poem to the Lady's Book was this. In consequence of what you had said to me, I had commenced and made some progress in a poem for Graham's Magazine. I intended to finish and send it in season for his January number. It happened, however, that a friend of mine desired me to dispose of a translation which he had executed of a Tale from the French. I offered it to Mr. Graham; he declined it, and said at the close of his letter that he should like to have "a poem occasionally from me."1 When I read this it struck me that I had been under some mistake, and that Mr. Graham did not expect any poem from me for his January number. If he had, it seemed to me that he would have been more explicit. I knew that you were no longer engaged in the magazine, and supposed that either I had misunderstood you or that you had not fully communicated with Mr. Graham on the subject. I therefore desisted from writing the poem. A Place in the Country 253

Subsequently Mr. Frost wrote to me desiring something for the Lady's Book for January and I sent him the translation from Goethe.2 I have a respect and liking for Graham's Magazine and the reason you give, if no other existed is enough to make me wish that what I write should continue to appear in it, but it appeared to me that I was civilly given up by the editor. Of course I had no right to complain, but as I found it convenient to take what Mr. Frost offered me I did so without any idea that Mr. Graham expected me to write for him. But as it appears that somehow or other I did not construe Mr. Graham's letter rightly, I will finish the poem I began and send it in a week or two.3 Yrs truly W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-BG ADDRESS: Revd. Rufus \V. Griswold I care of Geo. R. Graham Esq I Office of Graham's Magazine I Philadelphia POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I DEC I 27 POSTAL ANNOTATION: [25?). I. George Rex Graham (1813-1894) founded Graham's in 1840, editing it until 1853. He had as assistants, successively, Poe, Griswold, and Bayard Taylor. Between 1842 and 1853 he published twelve of Bryant's poems. The letter Bryant refers to is unrecovered, but on December 17, 1843, Graham wrote Parke Godwin, "I am sorry [Bryant] has abandoned 'Graham' for the Lady-Book, as I was as proud of the con• nexion as Murray was of Byron's and would have sacrificed much before I would have agreed to the change." NYPL-BG. On the day of that letter, Griswold wrote rather spitefully to Bryant, "Mr. Graham ... was a little surprised to find a contribution from you in Mr. Godey's Magazine for January-as Mr. Godey's system of giving one number each year for men, and eleven numbers for Milliners was supposed to be so well understood as to prevent the better class of writers from furnishing him articles." NYPL-BG. 2. John Frost of Philadelphia was an engraver and illustrator who occasionally acted as a publisher. DAA. Although not so identified by magazine historian Frank Luther Mott in his A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 580-594, in a sketch of Godey's Lady's Book, Frost was apparently serving in 1843 as an editor of that periodical. Bryant's four-stanza trans• lation, beginning, "I think of thee when the strong rays of noon I Flash from the sea," appeared in Godey's in January 1844. Not republished by Bryant during his lifetime, it was first collected in The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, ed. Parke Godwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), II, 298. 3. However, the next poem of Bryant's to appear in Graham's was "The Waning Moon" in July 1844. See 484.2.

479. To Frances F. Bryant [1843?] 1 Dear Frances.

Willard Phillips an old friend of mine IS m town.2 I asked him to dine with me, and perhaps he will come. Can you get some little [matter?] for him? He made me promise that I should have nobody to 254 LETTERs or 'VILLIA;\I CuLLEK BRYA:\T

dine with us "and nothing to eat and nothing to drink"-so you have the bill of fare. But would it not be well to give him a show at least, of some meat-victuals as my grandmother used to call it?- yrs affy W C B.-

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I 326 Ninth Street I near Sixth Avenue.

1. The year 1843 is assigned conjecturally, since the Bryants were then living at 326 Ninth Street, in a house they would relinquish soon afterward. See Letter 483. 2. Bryant's early literary mentor Willard Phillips, of Cambridge (see Vol. I, 13-14), had been chairman from 1837 to 1842 of a commission to codify the Massachusetts criminal law, and was currently Probate Judge of Suffolk County, of which Boston is the seat. In 1847 he resigned this position to become president of the New England Life Insurance Company. He was distinguished as the author of several books on various aspects of the law.

480. To Auguste G. V. D'Avezac1 New York Jan. 11, 1844. My dear sir. Captain Asa W. Welden has applied for the office of Warden of this Port, to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of Captain Parsons.2 As the Governor will probably consult the New York delegation before making any appointment, I take the liberty of addressing this letter. Captain Welden is a man of excellent character and good capacity. He is well qualified for the post he solicits by his experience in naval matters, having for forty six years followed the sea, and for thirty one years commanded a vessel from the port of New York. He was at one time a purveyor to the Alms House, but the Whig Commissioners find• ing him too honest for them and being unable to make him otherwise through fear of losing his place, dismissed him. It will much gratify me if you can do any thing in favour of his appointment, which I am sure will be a satisfactory one to the public. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: CU ADDRESS: 1\fa j. A Davezac.

1. Auguste Genevieve Valentin D'Avezac (1780-1851), born in Santo Domingo, had been an aide to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and later served as President Jackson's charge d'affaires in the Netherlands. In 1839 he settled in New York City, and in 1843-1844 was a member of the state legislature. 2. In Longworth's New York Directory, 1842-1843, Asa Welden is listed as a broker at 24 Rutgers Street. Since his name does not appear among those of the port wardens listed in Doggett's New York City Directory, for 1844-1845, or the following year, it may be assumed that he failed of the desired appointment. Harry Parsons, of A Place in the Country 255

210 Henry Street, appears among seven port wardens for 1843-1844, but not thereafter. Port wardens for New York City were appointed by the governor, with the concurrence of the state senate.

481. To Richard H. Dana New York January 16, 1844. My dear sir. Will you take a little trouble for me? Just to inquire of Mr. Brackett for what he will cut a bust in marble of Allston, for the Art Union?1 I think he said to me at Cape Ann that his price for a bust was $200. You quarrel with the name Art Union,2 yet let me tell you that there is a very extensive and very flourishing association in London which is content to bear it. All societies in Great Britain and Ireland established for the same objects as ours are called Art Unions, with the exception of the Edinburgh Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, which is too long to be pronounced by any body but a Scotch pedant. The term Art Union is a literal translation of the German name for such societies, Kunst Verein-and they had their origin in Germany. Why should we not tack the words Art and Union together as well as any other? Why not say Art Union as well as Peace Society, Bible Society, Temperance So• ciety? Is the name too short? Is it not as well sounding as Duff Green-yet look what brave war Duff is waging against Sidney Smith, magnanimously forgetting that all the wit and the greater part of the right is on the side of his antagonist.3 There have been great men who have borne short names from the great Oft downwards. Try the words Art Union a few times on the end of your tongue and they will sound as well as Mark Paul, or George Guelf-Mr. Guelf as Cobbett5 used to call George the Fourth. We run too much into long names in this country-Young Ladies' Institute for Girls' School, &c. I remember a slop shop in Maiden Lane called on the sign United States Clothing Emporium. I saw Cooper today. He came in talking as usual about his lawsuits. He was not successful in his last suit against Webb, and is making ap• plication for a new trial.6 He scolds about the administration of the laws in this country and says it is much better in Russia. Considering his success in the many prosecutions he has commenced, I do not think he has any right to complain. He is giving himself a great deal of trouble, and nursing his natural disposition to controversy, which is too strong already, but every body allows that the manners of the newspaper-makers are much mended since he took them in hand. You speak of the solitude in which you find yourself since Allston is gone.7 Dr. Johnson said that we must keep our friendships in repair,8 but there are some losses in friendship which can never be made up. For my part it has been my fate to live so long among people with whom I have 256 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT what Charles Lamb calls imperfect sympathies, that I have learned to be content with those respects in which we can understand each other. I have never, however lost such an associate as Allston. It is true that I have house and lands on Long Island-a little place in a most healthy neighbourhood, just upon the sea water-a long inlet of the Sound, overlooked by woody hills-and near a village skirting several clear sheets of fresh water fed by abundant springs which gush from the earth at the head of the valley. I cannot come to you at Cape Ann but you can come to me at Hempstead Harbour, and you must. You shall have fruits of all kinds in their seasons, and seabathing if you like it- I found it of great benefit to me last summer, but the water I am sorry to say is as still as a mill pond-and you shall sleep a mornings till the sun is half way on his journey to noon. My wife desires to be kindly remembered to you and your sisters and your daughter. She would have written by Fanny but she was so busy with some Christmas arrangements for Julia and so[me of] her little compan• ions that the hours slipped by. 9 My best [regards to?] all. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Richard H. Dana Esquire I Boston ENDORSED: Wm C. Bryant, Jany I 16, 1844- Ans. Jany-24tll PUBLISHED (in part): Life, I, 409. I. Edward Brackett's bust of Washington Allston (401.1), for which Bryant per• suaded the Committee of Management to pay the sculptor $300, became a part of the permanent collection of the American Art Union, until its dissolution in 1852, when the bust was acquired by Charles 1\L Leupp, who bequeathed it to the New-York Historical Society, Letter 483; 487.1; Cowdrey, AAFA & AAU, I, 238. 2. At the annual meeting in December 1843 of the Apollo Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States, Bryant was elected president for the year 1844, having been a member of its management committee for two years pre• viously. Earlier, the officers of the association had asked the legislature for permission to change its chartered title to "The American Art Union," hoping to have the change made in time for the annual meeting. But, as Bryant reported in his newspaper, this effort failed because the senator who was to present the bill objected at first, thinking the new name was not good English! The change was effected legally on January 29, 1844. Ibid., 106, 247; EP, December 29, 1843. 3. Duff Green (I 791-1875), Washington journalist and politician, and radical proponent of States' Rights, was then in England trying to arrange for direct trade between Great Britain and the southern states. He had fallen into a public controversy with the English critic Sydney Smith (1771-1845), who excelled as a wit, and who had addressed the American Congress in criticism of the state of Pennsylvania for defaulting on interest payments on its bonds. 4. Deut. 31 :4. 5. George IV (1762-1830), who reigned in Great Britain from 1820 to 1830, was descended through the Hanoverian line from the European Guelf, or Welf, dynasty, which traced its origin to the ninth century. The radical journalist William Cobbett (1762-1835), champion of the lower classes and hater of foreigners, had no use for the dissolute king. A Place in the Country 257

6. Fenimore Cooper had sued James Watson Webb (1802-1884), editor of the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer (Letter 370), for libel once in 1841 and twice in 1843. The juries disagreed at the first two trials, and Webb was acquitted at the third. Cooper, Letters & Journals, IV, 284. 7. See Letter 466. 8. Cf. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, under the year 1755. 9. Julia Bryant's young friend Mary Perkins (406.4) recalled in old age that "the first Christmas tree she had ever seen was at William Cullen Bryant's home in 1844, when they were still a novelty: 'I believe I am the only survivor of that party, and how the trees have spread!'" Letter to Ruth Tompkins, December 22, 1909, quoted in Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press [1973]), p. 478. Julia Bryant had died in 1907. 482. To William Gilmore Simms New York February 9, 1844. Dear Simms I avail myself of the opportunity of Mr. Forrest's journey to Charles• ton to send you this brief note. Mr. Whitaker is mistaken in supposing that the Southern Review has been sent to me regularly.1 I have not re• ceived it at all except sometimes a number, one perhaps in a half a dozen. As soon as I got your letter I made enquiry for it, but it had not been received in town. Afterwards during an absence of mine at 'Vashington, -a fortnight's absence Mr. Godwin managed to procure it and made a notice of it for the paper.2 I shall look out for it hereafter and get hold of it whenever I can, but it is astonishing how torpid the agents for it are here at the north. It is not that the public take less interest in it than in other periodicals, but it is that no pains are taken to bring it to the notice of the public. What you say of it in comparison with the North American Review is quite true.3 There is a certain finish about the North American, but there is a want of spirit-and with a few exceptions it is dull-respectable always, often sensible, sometimes able,-but dull. Its appearance now excites little interest.4 My regards to Mrs. Simms and Augusta and to Mr. Roach and his nieces. I remember my visit to the South as one of the pleasantest periods of my life. It gratified a strong curiosity which I had always felt in re• gard to that region and it left with me a favorable impression and a most friendly recollection of its inhabitants. Yrs truly W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: University of South Carolina Library ADDREss: Wm Gilmore Simms Esquire I Woodlands I Midway P. 0. I Barnwell District I South Carolina POSTMARK: CHARLESTON IS. C. I FEB I 20 ENDORSED: CHARLES• TON HOTEL I CHARLESTON, S. C. PUBLISHED: Simms, Letters, I, 384, note 145. 258 LETTERS OF \\'ILL!.\\! CUI. I.E:\ BRYA:\T

I. Daniel Kimball Whitaker (1801-IHSI, Han·anl JH:!O), lawyer, planter, and journalist, had founded the Soul hem q_urnterly Review at New Orleans in January 1842, and in October 1813 he mo,ed it to Charleston. Simms was a frequent contribu• tor to the magazine, and for fiye years (18,19-18'15) be was its editor. Simms, Letten, I, lxxiii, 368. 2. EP, November 29, 1843. The occtsion for Bryant's visit to \Vashiugton just then is undetermined. In reply, Simms wrote, "I heard of you in \Vashington. You were half way here, and from what I know of you, and of the doings of folks at \Vashington, I feel sure you were out of your latitude there. Your sympathies, I am sure, would have been much better consulted in our swamps here, where already the smell of blossoms fills the atmosphere with the most honied odours, and spring begins to blush as well. She [is early?] getting out of the arms of this dirty old ravisher, winter." Letter dated at Woodlands, March 8, ISH, NYPL-GR. 3. Writing Bryant on November l, 1843, Simms had remarked of the Southern Quarterly Review, "As a work of finish, it is far inferior to the N. American,-as a work of character and independent tone, very far superior. It is rough but manly. Besides it is democratic wholly." Simms, Lette1'S, I, 385. 4. Since 1835 the North American Review had been in the hands of Rev. John Gorham Palfrey (1796-1881, Harvard 1815), who had been pastor of the Brattle Square (Unitarian) Church, Boston, and professor of sacred literature at Harvard. It has been said that he was "deeply devoted to the past of New England," and that in his five• volume History of New England (1858-1890) he "set up an impermanent monument as a token of his ancestor worship." J\Jichael Kraus, The Writing of Amen·can History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press [1953]), pp. 127-129.

483. To Richard H. Dana New York March 30 1844. My dear sir We should not have allowed your daughter to leave us but for the necessity of making preparations for leaving the city. No person could have been more reasonable, or given less trouble, or proved herself a more cheerful and agreeable companion in the midst of the daily suffer• ing which it was evident she had to endure. My wife is now and has been for some time past in the midst of her arrangements of various kinds for transferring our residence to the country, and the mere thought of mov• ing almost makes her ill and quite makes her nervous. My intention at present is to pass three days in the week at the Harbor and the rest here, taking rooms, I think, in Brooklyn. The winter we shall pass in town, trusting to chance to get lodgings when the cold weather comes. I shall not he able to offer you so cool a retreat as your favorite Pigeon Cove, but the difference of temperature between the Harbor and this city in summer is very great and a grateful breeze in hot weather is always in motion about our dwelling. I should have 'vritten you before this about Mr. Brackett's bust of Allston, if I could have obtained any better terms for him from the Art Union. I have been authorized to offer him $250, hut I think I shall be able to raise the offer to $300. -at all events I shall make the attempt at A Place in the Country 259 the next meeting of the Committee of Management.1 The Society is formed for the purpose of purchasing pictures and other works of de• sign and distributing them among the members by lot. It is on the same plan with the associations bearing the same name in Great Britain and on the continent. The members pay five dol1ars each annually and the purchases made by the committee must of course be limited by the ex• tent of the contributions. I do not think it would be possible to persuade the committee at present to go beyond three hundred dollars. Will you speak with Brackett about it? Or perhaps it would be best to wait till I get authority from the Committee to make the offer. Your daughter makes us short calls now and then. She has just been here, in fine spirits my wife tells me, for I was out and did not see her, and very confident of recovering the use of her eyes. I hope you will not allude again in any manner to your leaving us when we lived in Carmine Street.2 Not that it affects me, who am perhaps too dull of feeling in these matters, but it makes my wife uneasy to think you remember it. At the Harbor we have a roomy habitation, where we could lodge you if you came as Mrs. Malaprop says "like Cerberus three gentlemen in one."a Remember me kindly to your sisters and sons. My wife also desires to be remembered. Yrs faithfully W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Richard H. Dana Esq. I Boston ENDORSED: Wm C. Bryant, Mar. I 30144. Ans. Ap 3rd. I. See Letter 481. 2. During Dana's lecturing engagement in January-February 1840. See 386.3. 3. Sheridan, The Rivals IV.i.

484. To Rufus W. Griswold New York May 12, 1844. My dear sir I have no objection to enter into an engagement to contribute ex• clusively to Graham's Magazine. Indeed I think some arrangement of the sort rather desirable. It would furnish me with a ready and convenient answer to solicitations to write for other publications, and besides there is some satisfaction in appearing in such good company as Graham's gives you.1 I wish you would make my apology to Mr. Graham for not answering his last letter. I have been much engaged in removing my family and furni• ture to a house in the country and making preparations for a half country life. I delayed writing to him till I could send him a poem. You have one 260 LETTERS OF \VILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

on the other leaf of this sheet which I wish you would hand over to him.2 Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: HSPa ADDRESS: Revd. Rufus W Griswold I Care of Geo. R. Graham Esq. I Office of Graham's Magazine I Philadelphia POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I MAY I 15 POSTAL ANNOTATION: 12. 1. George Graham was just then signing up leading poets and novelists for ex• clusive contributions to his magazine. On May 2 he had written Bryant, "Would you have any objection to making a permanent engagement with me?" He said he had already engaged Cooper, Paulding, Longfellow, and Lowell, and wanted Bryant's name as well. Griswold, writing to the same effect on May 6, added that Graham "is of course anxious to grace his pages with the writings of the first of all our authors." Bryant's single contribution earlier that year to Godey's Lady's Book still troubled the editors of its rival: Griswold urged that in Godey's "you will be nigh alone," and that the pay would be no better or prompter than Graham's. Letters in NYPL-BG. Graham shrewdly varied his bait to suit his fish. Offering Lowell $25 a poem, he argued that he offered more to Bryant and Longfellow ($50 a poem) only because of their higher standing in the literary world; when Lowell demurred, Graham wrote him bluntly, "The hardest lesson is to treat all men as bargain-driving, sharpers. I see my dear Lowell, you have learned it early." Martin Duberman, ]ames Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin [1966]), pp. 57-58. 2. Bryant's poem has been detached from this leaf. It was "The Waning Moon," Graham's, 25 (July 1844), 22. See Poems (1876), pp. 304-306.

485. To Richard H. Dana New York May 17, 1844 My dear sir I write in great haste to say to you that I have persuaded the Execu• tive Committee of our association, I will not call it Art-Union since it of• fends your fastidious ear,1 to offer Mr. Brackett $300 for a copy of his bust of Allston. I hope he will let us have it at that. What will be the way in which it will be disposed of I cannot say. I suggested that a subscrip• tion should be raised for keeping it in the rooms of the association, which seemed to take very well but I am not sure that the plan will succeed. Your daughter visited our place at Hempstead Harbor, and seemed pleased with it, but we could not keep her there long. You must make up for her short visit by a long one of your own. Remember me kindly to all Yrs faithfully WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: LH ADDREss: R H. Dana Esq. 1. See Letter 481. A Place in the Country 261

486. To Frances F. Bryant [New York] Friday May 31, 1844 My Dear Frances, I write this to say that you must not be surprised if you do not see me this week. Mr. Verbryck is near his end. I saw him a moment this morning-he sent for me to see me before I went to the office, supposing I have no doubt that it would be for the last time. There are several of Mrs. Richards's friends in the house, a brother and a nephew of her husband, but I shall inquire when I go to dinner if I can be of any possible service by staying and if so I shall not come out.1 Mr. Von Mandelslohe will not come out, he says till Monday.2 Love to Julia. Yrs affectionately WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I Hempstead Harbor I L. I. 1. The early death of Cornelius Ver Bryck (1813-1844), brother-in-law of the better-known artist Daniel Huntington, then studying in Rome, shocked his associates in the Sketch Club and the National Academy. A pupil of Samuel F. B. Morse's in 1835, he exhibited portraits and landscapes at the National Academy and the Apollo Association, 1836-1842, fighting all the while a losing battle against chronic illness. He and his wife and sister Mrs. Richards were friends of the Bryants', and he and Thomas Cole were intimate companions. In 1841 Ver Bryck had shown his portrait of Bryant at the National Academy. Shortly before Ver Bryck's death at his home in Brooklyn, which occurred later on the day Bryant wrote this letter, Cole painted a landscape scene from one of his friend's sketches and gave it to Jonathan Sturges, who had already paid the young artist for a commission he could not fulfill. Bryant re• called this generous act in a tribute to both artists in his memorial eulogy of Cole in 1848. EP, June 1 and 8, 1844; DAA; NAD Exhibition Record, II, 173-174; Cowdrey, AAFA & AAU, II, 370; Bryant, "Thomas Cole, A Funeral Oration, Delivered Before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848," in Orations and Ad• dresses, pp. 30-32. As he had suggested he might (Letter 483), Bryant was then room• ing in Brooklyn during the week, at an unspecified address. 2. The Baron Ludwig von Mandlesloe, a friend of the Sedgwicks', was apparently Bryant's German tutor at this time. Life, I, 365-366.

487. To Richard H. Dana New York June 5, 1844. My dear su. Three of my friends, F. W. Edmonds A. B. Durand and C. M. Leupp, being about to visit Boston I have taken the liberty of giving them this letter to you.1 Mr. Durand I am sure you have met with, and the rest I believe you have seen, for they are all members of that little club of artists and amateurs to which I have more than once taken you.2 They are also concerned in the association with that hard name to which you object.3 262 LETTERS OF vVILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

They are particularly desirous to see such of the designs and drawings left by Allston as are accessible, and I am sure you will take pleasure in procuring for them the means of seeing them.4 Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: LH ADDRESS: R. H. Dana Esq. I. Francis William Edmonds (1806-1863) was a banker by profession and an art• ist by avocation. For many years cashier of the Mechanics' Bank in New York, he was a popular painter of comic genre scenes, and an officer of the National Academy as well as the American Art Union. Asher Brown Durand (214.1) was by 1844 a leading landscape artist. A founder of the National Academy, he was its president from 1846 to 1861. Charles M. Leupp (1807?-1859), partner in the lucrative tanning business of Gideon Lee, whose daughter he married, was a philanthropist, aud one of several patrons of American art during the l8'10s and 1850s. He and Edmonds were on the Committee of Management of the American Art Union. DAA; EP, October 6, 1859; Cowdrey, AAFA & AAU, I, 106. 2. When in New York Dana was usually Bryant's guest at Sketch Club meetings. 3. The American Art Union. 4. Their inspection of vVashington Allston's drawings resulted in the Art Union's distribution by lot in 1850 of fifty sets of Outlines and Sketches by Washington All• ston, a large folio of eighteen plates executed by the artist-engravers J olm Cheney (1801-1855) and his younger brother and pupil Seth Wells Cheney (1810-1866), of Boston. Cowdrey, AAFA & AAU, II, 5-6; DAA. In 1846 Seth Cheney did a fine crayon portrait of Bryant which John Cheney engraved for Bryant's 1817 Poems. See Let• ter 599.

488. To Frances F. Bryant New York June 10 1844. My dear Frances C. E. Anderson said yesterday that he thought of commg out on Saturday with his wife to our place at the Harbor.1 This morning Mr. Field called and said that if we were not encum• bered with company, he thought of bringing out his wife and children on Saturday. I asked him to postpone it to the Saturday following. 2 I saw Mrs. and Miss Sands yesterday morning. They say that they will probably go to Rhinebeck next week. If they should not, which how• ever is very unlikely they will visit us before they go. Love to Julia Yrs affectionately WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Har• bor I Long Island. I. Charles Elbert Anderson; see 333.2; Letter 559. 2. Probably Alfred Field; see 406.5. A Place in the Country 263

489. To Gulian C. Verplanck New York June 10, 1844. My dear sir Our old friend Dr. Bliss is turned out of his place on a day's notice. He was in the book room of the appraisers department, a clerk with a salary of eight hundred dollars, and was a most useful, conscientious and diligent officer. The appraisers who removed him are Amos Palmer, Van• brugh Livingston, and Matthew Edgar. Can nothing be done for him? He has now neither money nor occupation. I have sent every body whom I could to remonstrate with the Appraisers-! do not know any of them myself. I know you will be as sorry for the worthy Doctor as I am. If any method of helping him occurs to you, I hope you will resort to it im• mediate} y. 1 Yrs truly vVM C. BRYANT.

:\IANUSCRIPT: NYPL-Berg ADDREss: Hon. G C Verplanck-.

I. The amiable, improvident Elam Bliss (1779-1818), Bryant's friend and former publisher, had secured this position, with Bryant's help, after his profitable specula• tions in Buffalo real estate had been dissipated in the depression of 1837 (Letter 327). The efforts of Bryant and Verplanck seem to have been successful in getting Bliss re• instated in his position at the Custom House in New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. Arthur Ames Bliss, Theodore Bliss, Publisher and Bookseller: A Study of Character and Life in the Middle Period of the XIX Century (Northampton. ?lfassachusetts: Northampton Historical Society, 1941), p. 6.

490. To Frances F. Bryant [New York] ·wednesday .June 12, 1844. My dear Frances

I have a letter from the Reverend Mr. Clapp of Savannah1 who has passed a few days in the city and looked for me at the office and for both of us in Ninth Street, but in vain, and goes out today without having seen me. He says, "I must apprise you that Dr. and Mrs. Arnold2 will be in New York probably next week. They sail in the 'Wilson F[ulle?]r' [can you make that out? I can't]3 on Thursday next. Mrs. Arnold is in bad health and we all hope that the tour and change may prove beneficial to her." I saw the Deweys yesterday. Mr. and Mrs. Dewey will probably come out, with Kitty on Friday and must be taken back to the cars the next day. I saw Fanny who was better except her cold, of which she had once got rid, but which had now returned. Whitney has got the shoes back. He said Julia's feet mus.t have spread by being in the country. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT 264 LETTERS OF vVILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I Hempstead Harbor I Long Island. I. Rev. Mr. Clapp has not been further identified. His letter is unrecovered. 2. See Letters 462, 469. 3. The second pair of brackets is Bryant's.

491. To Frances F. Bryant [New York] Tuesday morning July 9, 1844. My dear Frances. I went yesterday to the American Hotel, and found that Dr. Arnold had not returned nor was it known when he would return. I shall call upon the Sandses today. Charles Anderson has just called upon me to tell me that his brother Henry was employed at Paris in the Observatory. A letter from Stanton says that Arago1 has declared him to be the man he had long looked for, and possessing more of the peculiar knowledge required for making astronomical observations and calculations than any man he had known. He is employed on a salary and will remain all summer. Dr. Hull whom I met yesterday says that my sore throat in the first place, and grumbling stomach in the next place were the influenza, which attacked the digestive organs instead of the organs of breathing. He was coughing himself with an attack of the influenza. I shall endeavour to obtain and send home a pump this week. Yrs affectionately WMC. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Har• bor I Long Island.

l. Dominique Fran~ois Arago (1786-1853). noted lecturer and experimenter in magnetism and optics, w:1s the director of the Paris Observ:1tory. Stanton, a tr:1veler the Bryants had run across in Europe several times in 1835 (see 303.3), was perhaps Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887), a lawyer and journalist.

492. To Albert H. Tracy1 [New York, cJuly 15, 1844] (Confidential.) Sir- You will doubtless agree with us, that the late Baltimore Convention placed the Democratic Party at the North in a position of great difficulty. We are constantly reminded that it rejected Mr. Van Buren and nom• inated Mr. Polk, for reasons connected with the immediate annexation of Texas; reasons which had no relation to the principles of the party. Nor was that all. The convention went beyond the authority delegated to its members, and adopted a resolution on the subject of Texas, (a sub• ject not before the country when they were elected, upon which, there- A Place in the Country 265 fore, they were not instructed,) which seeks to interpolate into the party code a new doctrine, hitherto unknown among us, at war with some of our established principles, and abhorrent to the opinions and feelings of a great majority of northern freemen.2 In this position what was the party at the North to do? Was it to reject the nominations and abandon the contest, or should it support the nominations, rejecting the untenable doctrine interpolated at the Convention, and taking care that their support should be accompanied with such an expression of their opinion, as to prevent its being misinterpreted? The latter alternative has been preferred; and we think wisely; for we conceive that a proper expression of their opinions will save their votes from misconstruction, and that proper efforts will secure the nomination of such members of Congress, as will reject the unwarrantable scheme now pressed upon the country. With these views, assuming that you feel on this subject as we do, we have been desired to address you, and to invite the cooperation of your• self and other friends throughout the State. lst.-In the publication of a joint letter,3 declaring our purpose to support the nominations, rejecting the resolution respecting Texas. 2d.-ln promoting and supporting at the next elections the nomina• tion for Congress of such persons as concur in these opinions. If your views of this matter coincide with ours, please write to some one of us, and a draft of the proposed letter will be forwarded for examination. Very respectfully, GEO. P. BARKER, WILLIAM c. BRYANT, J · W. EDMONDS, DAVID DuDLEY FIELD, THEODORE SEDGWICK, THOMAS w. TUCKER, ISAAC TOWNSEND.4 P. S. A copy of this Circular has been sent to the following gentlemen: -Michael Hoffman, Albert H. Tracy, Hiram Gardiner, Addison Gard• iner, Samuel Selden, Henry Selden, Ashley Sampson, J. Osborn, Hiram Gray, Jared N. Wilson, James M. Smith, Thos. G. Talcot, William Allen, Freeborn Jewett, Daniel Chandler, Hiram Denio, John Tracy, Jabez D. Hammond, John I. De Graff, N. L. Benton, Preston King, Ransom Gillett, Samuel Young, L. Stetson, James B. Spencer, David L. Seymour, David Buel, Harmanus Bleecker, A. C. Flagg, Robt. McLellan, R. D. Davis, Jas. Powers, Archibald Niven, Nathaniel Jones, John W. Lawrence-and will be sent to any other person you may wish.

TEXT (printed circular): NYSL ADDREss: Hon. Albert H. Tracy I Buffalo IN. Y. PUB· LISHED: EP, July 24, 1844; Life, I, 416-417. 266 LETTERS OF \VILLL\:\r CULLEI\' BRYANT

1. Albert Haller Tracy (1793-1859), of Bu!Ialo, spent six years in the United States Congress before entering the New York State Senate in 1830 as an Antimason. A close friend of William H. Seward's, he went with Seward into the new Whig Party in 1834, and became one of his chief lieutenants when Seward was elected governor in 1838. But in 1839 Tracy failed of election as a Whig to the United States Senate, and in 1840 fell out with the state Whig boss, Thurlow Weed, and joined the Democratic Party. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford Univer• sity Press, 1967), pp. 16-17, 53, 60; BDAC. 2. Bryant had opposed the annexation of Texas from the moment the question was first agitated. On August 4, 1837-the day the revolutionary Texas government of Sam Houston expressed to President Van Buren their desire to join the Union• the EP predicted how historians would treat the subject. "It will be related," Bryant wrote, "that the people of the United States overflowed into the territory belonging to Mexico. They quarreled with Mexico, declared themselves independent, and de• nied her power. The people of the United States at home, hastened, while the war was yet unfinished and before any other nation, to recognize the political independ• ence of the people of the United States in Texas. It will be related, that as soon as this was done, a compact was formed between the emigrants in Texas and their friends at home, transferring to their native country the territory of which they had taken possession. Mexico, conscious of her weakness, saw that it was prudent to acquiesce. This would be the story of a high handed public robbery." In 1844, the compact Bryant had foreseen was made. A confidential annexation treaty was before the Senate for consideration, behind closed doors, when a copy of this was sent to Bryant by anti-slavery senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio, and was at once published in the EP, together with confidential letters favoring annexation, writ• ten by President John Tyler, Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, and other members of the administration. The friends of Texas were indignant, and tried to expel Tap• pan from the Senate. Bryant's nominal publisher Boggs was haled to Washington by the sergeant at arms of the Senate, to explain how he "became possessed of the copy of the Treaty and accompanying documents." But outrage in the North among op• ponents of annexation and of slavery was so great that when the treaty came before the Senate on June 8 for ratification it was defeated by a Yote of more than two to one. Meanwhile, the national Democratic convention meeting at Baltimore on May 27 blocked the candidacy of former President Van Buren, an opponent of annexation, by requiring a two-thirds majority vote for nomination, and, after a deadlock, chose James K. Polk, who was respected by many northern Democrats, but was sympathetic toward annexation. The convention then adopted the resolution to which this letter refers, demanding "the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period." EP, August 4, 1837; April 27, May I, 2, 6, 27, 1844; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The .Jacksonian Era: 1828-1848 (New York: Harper & Row, I 959), pp. 179-180; Charles lVI. Wiltse, The New Nation, 1800-1845 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961), pp. 168, 183- 184; Herbert D. A. Donovan, The Bamburners: A Study of the Internal Movements in the Political History of New York State and of the Resulting Changes in Political Affiliation, 1830-1852 (Philadelphia: Porcupine. 1974). pp. 85-86. 3. Letter 493. 4. George P. Barker (388.9); John Worth Edmonds (1799-1874), radical lawyer and defender of union labor, and justice of the New York Supreme Court, 1847-1852; David Dudley Field (1805-1894), law partner of Robert Sedgwick and anti-slavery Democrat: Isaac Townsend (1805?-1860), wealthy New York merchant, president of the Bank of the State of New York and a director of the New York Central Railroad. Hough, Biographical Notes. Thomas W. Tucker was a New York lawyer with offices at 27 Wall Street. Doggett's New York City Directory, for 1844-1845.. A Place in the Country 267

493. To the Democratic-Republican Electors of the State of New York [New York] July 15, 1844. Fellow-Citizens: The present circumstances of the Democratic party induce us to address you. It has been placed by the late Baltimore Convention, in a position of difficulty, from which nothing can extricate it but prudence, firmness, and a recurrence to its original principles. The Convention rejected Mr. Van Buren, to whose nomination a great majority had been pledged, and nominated Mr. Polk, for reasons connected with the immediate annexation of Texas, and then passed a resolution, the purpose of which was to pledge the whole party to the annexation at the earliest practicable period. This signifies neither more nor less than annexation as soon as it can receive the forms of law, and pays no regard to our relations with other nations, to the debts of Texas, or to its slave institutions. In this position, ought the Democratic party at the North to reject the nominations and abandon the contest, or support them, rejecting the resolution respecting Texas, and taking measures to counteract its tend• ency? The latter alternative has been wisely preferred. But it ought not to be done silently. On the contrary, there is every reason, that upon a subject of such magnitude, where apparent acquiescence might be drawn into precedent, the voice of the whole party should be made known. That we may do our part toward this object, we have united in this address, not merely to make known our own views, but to ask the co-operation of our fellow electors, in measures to counteract the tendency towards im• mediate annexation. We protest against the resolution, because, It was an unauthorized act of the Convention.- The members had received from their constituents no instructions on the subject. They were elected before the question had been presented to the country. They were elected for a definite and limited purpose. If they had authority to pass any resolutions, they had none to go further than to reiterate the old, established, well-known principles of the party. They were elected to select candidates for office, not to promulge new creeds or annex provinces. But if the members of the Convention had had the authority of a majority of their Constituents for its resolution, it would not have bound the minority, because it was not an exposition of any principle of the party, or of any measure which those principles require. The authority of party is as limited as its purpose. Men having the same views of the principles of their government, unite for the purpose of putting those principles into practice. That union is a party. It is founded on certain general principles, and is limited to them. To adhere to them and to concur in such measures as they require, is the whole duty 268 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

of party men. In all other respects, each may act and vote as he judges right, without complaint from his associates. The Democratic party has been in existence from the foundation of the Constitution. Its principles are as old as the Government, and have since been constantly repeated. They are "equality and freedom-equal rights to all-no distinction of persons-no special privileges, and no restraint of the individual, except so far as may be necessary to protect the rights of others. We regard every man as a brother, having equal rights with ourselves. We are for the strictest construction of all grants of power, and the strictest accountability of all magistrates and officers of what class soever." This is the Democratic Creed, and the whole of it. The measures of the party are those, and those only, which these principles require. So far we hold ourselves bound as party men-but no farther. The greatest danger to our institutions arises from the tendency of party to engross every public question. This comes from the selfishness of mere partizans, who seek to turn everything to their own ends. We see no more reason for submitting all our actions to its control, than to the control of fashion or sects. When, therefore, a convention of party men seek to pledge the party to a measure, not within these limits, we look upon the act as of no greater force than the act of any other equal number of equally respect• able persons. As an opinion we adopt or reject it, as we think it sound or otherwise-as authority we disregard it. For these reasons, though firmly attached to the Democratic party, we hold ourselves not bound as party men by the resolution of the Con• vention. The resolution itself we consider unwise and unjust. We con• demn it, not because we are opposed to the extension of our territory, or the admission into our union of new communities-not that we would not resist the interference of any European power in the affairs of the New World, a policy to which this whole people is devoted, but because I. We have a treaty with Mexico, binding us to "inviolable peace and sincere friendship." Texas is now engaged in war with Mexico, and taking her, we take that with her, breaking our pledge of inviolable peace. It is not an act of sincere friendship, to take to ourselves a country which once belonged to her, which she has never surrendered, and is now strug• gling to regain. Our recognition of the independence of Texas admitted that her forces had actual possession of the government of that country, but it admitted no more. It neither admitted nor denied that Mexico had claims and rights in respect to Texas. 2. Texas has an enormous public debt, which she is unable to pay, the amount of which is unknown, and which must either be assumed by us, or left, as it now is, a dishonored claim upon an insolvent state. In the latter case we add another to the list already too great of insolvent or repudiating American States. In the former we assume for the Union a A Place in the Country 269 debt not contracted by it or for it, an act of doubtful power and evil tendency. 3. Texas is a slave country, and if received with its institutions, will claim admission into the Union, with its slavery, its unequal representa• tion, and its requisitions upon the free states. We are not Abolitionists and have no sympathy with them. We are willing to abide by the compromise of our fathers. -We will not obliterate a line of it. We will not stop short of it, but we will not go a step beyond it. No threats, no reproaches shall force us beyond it. We stand by the Constitution of our country. But when it is proposed to extend that Constitution and compromise to foreign countries we take leave to inquire what sort of countries they are, and by whom inhabited. It is said that the annexation of Texas will not increase the number of slaves. If it were so, it would not remove our objection-for the annexa• tion would still increase our connection with slavery. Why should we multiply our relations with it, even if the sum total remains the same[?] If it were proposed to bring under the American flag all the slave com• munities of the world, would it overcome your repugnance to it, to tell you that the number of slaves would not be increased? We are unwilling to give to any foreign slave-holding nation, those extraordinary and unequal privileges, greater than our own, which our forefathers gave to their brethren and companions in arms. A citizen of Mississippi, with five slaves, has virtually as many votes as four citizens of New York. If Texas ever comes into this Union, no one of its citizens shall have, with our consent, more power than a citizen of our own State. But they err, who think that the annexation of Texas will not in• crease slavery and the number of slaves. The annexation is pressed upon us by a portion of the South as a new source of prosperity for slave in• dustry, and a new guarantee to their institutions. Do they not know their own interests better than we? Political economy and our own experience both teach us a different lesson. Slavery has increased in Virginia and the Carolinas since the annexation of Louisiana. Slave breeding is always commensurate with slave markets. Population expands with the means of its subsistence and the demand for its industry. To increase the market and the value of the labor, is to increase the population. No law of politi• cal economy is more certain. For these reasons we are firmly and unalterably opposed to the an• nexation of Texas, in any shape in which it has yet been offered to the American people. But we cannot consent to see whig candidates elected and whig policy prevail in the general Government. Nor shall that ever happen, if any efforts of ours can prevent it. The great principles of our party were never more firmly rooted in the hearts of a majority of the American people than at this moment, and if the election can be made to rest on them, we shall assuredly prevail. How shall we separate the true 270 LETTERS OF \VILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT issues from the false? How to reconcile the conflicting wishes and duties which the error of the Baltimore Convention has created, is the question we have anxiously considered. We see no means of doing so, but to sup• port the nominations made at Baltimore, and at the same time promote the nomination of members of Congress opposed to this annexation. The President can do nothing of himself, if the two Houses are of a different opinion. To this point, then, we invite your particular attention. You can, if you choose, effectually counteract the tendency to annexation, by electing members of Congress opposed to it. You are about to elect thirty• four members of the Lower House of Congress, and a State Legislature that will elect one member of the Senate. If we might be allowed to counsel you at this crisis, we would do so, and earnestly entreat you not to falter in your support of the Baltimore nominations, but at the same time to nominate for those elections no man who is committed to this scheme-this unwise, unjust, un-American scheme of adding Texas to our dominions, without even a plausible pretext, with indecent haste, regardless of treaties and consequences, with its war, its debt, its slave institutions, and their preponderating political power.1

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: EP, August 20, 1844 PUBLISHED: Life, !, 418-422. I. On July 24 the EP published the "Secret Circular"-as it was later called• signed by Bryant and six others (Letter ·192), confessing that, although it was "con• fidential," it had been "stolen" and published in another newspaper. And in the Au· gust 19 issue of the EP Bryant commented, "From the time that the 'Circular' was published the signers of it felt that the purpose for which they had intended the 'joint letter' was already answered"; that is, no responsible public man in the state would any longer call annexation a party question. Therefore, he continued, there was no need to get more signatures for the letter; it would be published in full, since the circular was imperfect without it. The joint letter was printed the following day, August 20, in the EP.

494. To George R. Graham New York July 26, 1844. My dear sir. I send you, on the other leaf of this sheet, a poem for your magazine.1 I have on hand two poems, by my brother John H. Bryant of Illinois, which he would like to dispose of for something. They would do no discredit to your magazine. I spoke to Mr. Griswold once, concerning my brother's verses, and he said something about ten dollars as a compen• sation for a short poem. If you are willing to give that sum for each of them I will send them to you. Please write to me on the subject.2 Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT A Place in the Country 271

.\IANUSCRIPT: DuU ADDREss: George R. Graham Esq. I Editor of Graham's Magazine I Philadelphia POSTMARK: NEW-YORK I JUL I 27 PoSTAL ANNOTATioN: [12?]. I. "The Paradise of Tears," translated from the German of N. Mueller, and pub• lished in Graham's, 25 (November 1844), 202. See Poems (1876), pp. 222-223. 2. See Letter 506.

495. To Frances F. Bryant New York Tuesday Aug. 6, 1844. My dear Frances Fanny is a good deal better. She comes into town today, and on Thursday will come out to Hempstead Harbor. Will you be so good as to see whether all my new socks are gone also. I found but one in my drawer this morning, and I brought one out with me on Friday. Miss Robbins takes this out, but as accident sometimes hinders the fulfilment of her intentions, I shall send a note inside of today's paper. Yrs affectionately WM C. BRYANT-

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Harbor I Long Island.

496. To James Fenimore Cooper New York August 9, 1844. My dear sir. I take the liberty of giving this letter of introduction to George S. Hillard Esq. of Boston1 who in visiting your part of the country would be sorry to leave it without seeing what it contains worthiest of regard. Mr. Hillard is a man of well-endowed and accomplished mind, and agree• able, unobtrusive manners. I have ventured to promise him a friendly reception in the brief visit he will make you. Yrs truly WM C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: UVa ADDREss: To I J. Fenimore Cooper Esq./ Cooperstown./ N Y./ introducing I Geo. S. Hillard Esq. 1. See 341.4.

497. To Charles Hubbellt NewYork August 10, 1844. Sir The speech of Mr. Husbands is able and creditable to him in various respects, but I return it without publishing it, for these reasons. The posi- 272 LETTERS OF V\7ILLIAJ\! CULLEK BRYANT

tion taken by the Evening Post contemplates two things--to save the democratic party in this quarter, from committing itself to the annex• ation of Texas, and to unite it,-whatever may be the varieties of opinion entertained by its members, on that question,-on the sup• port of the democratic nomination for the Presidency. This was the design of the signers of the circular which made so much noise.2 Mr. Husbands' speech goes beyond these objects, and having pub• lished which I cheerfully do, your resolutions, to publish that speech also might cause our course to be misunderstood and give colour to the attacks which are made upon us as desiring to separate from the democratic party, when in reality we desire to strengthen it. We do not want to excite dissatisfaction with the nominations; our only aim is to keep the public mind sound on a great question of national policy. I am sir very respectfully yours WMC.BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: University of Rochester Library ADDREss: Charles Hubbell Esq I Roches• ter IN. Y. DOCKETED: Wm C Bryant IN York City 1844. I. Charles Hubbell was a secretary of a "Democratic Republican County Meet• ing" at Rochester on August 3 at which Joseph D. Husbands of Cooperstown pre• sented a series of resolutions, adopted unanimously, deploring the action of the Baltimore convention of the Democratic Party (492.2) in recommending the ad• mission of Texas to the Union and the assumption of its debts. Bryant printed these resolutions in the EP on August 10, despite their intemperance of language in at• tacking the "ultra nullifying and repudiating slaveocracy of South Carolina and Mis• sissippi." But in an accompanying editorial note he regretted their criticism of vice presidential candidate George M. Dallas (1792-1864) as threatening government by the "banking powers," and their failure to make any expression of support for the national party ticket. Since Husbands' apparently divisive speech did not appear in Bryant's newspaper, its content is undetermined. 2. Letter 492.

498. To Samuel R. Betts1 New York August 14, 1844. My dear sir I wrote you that I would supply a few verses to be set to music for the Berkshire celebration,2 but I find, after attempting again and again, that I produce nothing but what would disgrace me, on account of its flat and commonplace character. I have torn up the verses, and acknowl• edge that I cannot fulfil the engagement. It is mortifying to make the acknowledgment, but I find no alternative. The committee, I am sure, will see that it may be difficult for some minds to summon up a poetic rapture upon a given occasion, and will indulgently take the attempt for the deed. A Place in the Country 273

I have written to Mr. [Charles] Sedgwick3 who is at Stockbridge to inform the Committee at Pittsfield that it will be impossible for me to write any thing, so that the hiatus if there is any may be supplied from some other quarter. I am sir very respectfully and truly yrs, WMC. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYHS ADDREss: Hon. Samuel R. Betts PUBLISHED: J. E. A. Smith, A His• tory of Pittsfield, Massachusetts from the Year 1800 to the Year 1876 (Boston, 1876), II, 589. I. See 373.3. 2. Betts and Bryant were among eighteen New Yorkers from western Massachu• setts who organized a "Berkshire Jubilee" at Pittsfield on August 22-23, 1844, in the centennial year of Berkshire County. A copy of their printed letter of invitation dated March 25, 1841 is in NYHS. It was published, together with an account of the festivi• ties, in The Berkshire jubilee ... (Albany, 1845), p. [15]. 3. Letter unrecovered.

499. To Rufus W. Griswold New York August 16, 1844. My dear sir. I should have earlier answered your letter on the subject of an illus• trated edition of my poems to be published by Carey & Hart,1 but a short recital of the circumstances in which I am placed will best explain the delay. The Harpers are the publishers of my poems on these conditions. The volume is stereotyped at their expense and they pay me a certain sum for every copy they print.2 When I choose to put an end to the engagement I must pay them for the plates. I cannot publish an illustrated edition without either obtaining their consent or taking the plates and paying for them. I have spoken with them on the subject, and they tell me they want to publish such an edition themselves. The expense of taking up the stereotype plates would be more than all I should get from any illustrated edition, and I could not afford to lose money much as I should like to see my poems published on the plan you mention. I could not suggest a better artist than Huntington3 for the designs, and to be sure that they would be engraved seasonally and in a perfectly fitting manner, it would be almost necessary to send them to London. You see my difficulty therefore. I like Mr. Carey's plan, I am fully persuaded that the publication would be got up in the best manner, I should be glad to see what I have written given to the world in such a form, but I do not like to pay for the satisfaction of seeing it done. Can you suggest any course to take? 274 LETTERS OF \VrLLIAM CCLLE:\ BRYAJ\T

I wrote to Mr. Graham some time since mentioning to him that I had some poems by my brother-two pieces--which I should like to dis• pose of for his magazine. As you, I believe, still interest yourself somewhat in the affairs of his periodical, will you, if you see him soon remind him of the matter? Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: BPL ADDREss: Revd. R. W. Griswold I care of Messrs Carey & Hart. I Philadelphia POSTAL ANJ\OTATION: Paid.

I. Two months earlier Griswold had written Bryant, "Carey 8~ Hart desire me to ascertain of you what would be your terms for an edition of yr. complete works in one splendid $5 octavo (something in the style of Rogers' Italy, and in no way in• ferior to that, having illustrations by Huntington, engraved in London)." He con• fided that the publishers were doing Longfellow. and proposed to do Halleck, both in 1845. June 20, 1844, NYPL-BG. 2. For the third edition of Bryant's Poems in 1836, which they reprinted in 1839, the Harpers contracted to pay Bryant ~625 for a first printing of 2,500, and a royalty of 25¢ for each additional copy sold. Exman, Brothers Harper, p. 78. 3. Daniel Huntington (1816-1906, Hamilton 1836), a portrait and historical painter and member of the National Academy, of which he was later president (1862- 1870, 1877-1890). 500. To Frances F. Bryant New York Tuesday Aug 27, 1844. My dear Frances Mr. Simms, as Mr. Lawson tells me arrived here with his wife and child on Thursday evening at nine o'clock. They went to Grassy Point whence they were to proceed to Great Barrington. They left a letter for you which I enclose. Mr. Simms is expected back today or tomorrow.1 I went to Mr. Moulton's office this morning and saw a paper pinned on his door informing the visitor that he was gone to Albany and should return on Wednesday or Thursday. So I could not hand him the fruits. vVall Street is full of peaches of a very large size. I had a letter from Mr. Barrault, dated the third of July. He tells me that his nephews, I mean grand children, for whom he says he and his wife "sacrificed the little fortune that remained to them and pursued a profession which agreed ill with the need of repose which is felt at an advanced age" are provided with employments, and ends with a request that we should send boarders and pupils to his school. He complains of heing poor. Mr. Lawson has heard nothing of Dr. Arnold.2 I have a letter from Dr. Simmons. There is nothing in it but an enquiry whether I have received a previous letter.3 Yrs affectionately W. C BRYANT A Place in the Country 275

MANuscRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. F. F Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Har• bor I L. I. 1. Simms had written James Lawson that he would sail from Charleston for New York on August I3, and that Mrs. Simms planned to spend two or three weeks in Great Barrington, then a week with Mrs. Bryant. Simms, Letters, I, 431. 2. Dr. Richard Arnold wrote Bryant from Savannah on July II that he would come north, but regretted he could not visit the Bryants. NYPL-BG. See Letter 490. 3. The Charleston poet William Haynes Simmons (460.I). Simmons' letters are unrecovered.

501. To Frances F. Bryant New York Tuesday Sept. 3 1844. Dear Frances

Lena1 called this morning. She has no place and will come out to Springbank on Thursday. She would come tomorrow, but she has a project for getting her mother into the Widows' Asylum. Those who are able she says pay sixty dollars and are entitled to a maintenance for life; those who cannot pay so much pay thirty. She is to see some of the man• agers tomorrow. Where the thirty dollars are to come from she does not know. I have just opened a note from Miss Sands written yesterday. She came to town with her mother on Friday. I shall call on her shortly. Do not forget to come out for me on Saturday, and take the road by the turnpike gate, passing by Mrs. Miller's house. Tell Julia that I perceived this morning that the plums were drop• ping off from the trees by the kitchen door and that if she does not look out the chickens will get her share. Yrs truly WMC. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. I•". F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Har• bor. I Long Island. I. The Bryants' former German servant; see Letters 405, 406.

502. To Frances F. Bryant New York Sept. 4, 1844. My dear Frances.

I came over to town yesterday after dinner.1 I called first on the Tischler [carpenter] Vogel to attend to the arrangements for getting Augusta Berger2 to Hempstead Harbor. She was not at home, but I left the necessary directions, and told the people of the house that the sooner she went out the better. So whether you may expect her today or tomor• row or not till the next day I cannot tell. I next called at Miss Sands's boarding house. She was not at home, 276 LETTERS OF \VILLIA11f CULLEN BRYANT

but I saw Mrs. Sands who has quite set her heart upon making you a visit -not this week however but sometime next week, perhaps Tuesday. She seems quite as active and lively as ever. I took Mr. Gibson's in my way. One of the young ladies was at home -neither of the two oldest nor yet the youngest,-! do not recollect her name. She informs me that the school opens on the 9th of this month. I got a copy of the printed terms and enclose it.3 At Beschoreman's where I called last, I learned that [L?]enchen's child is better. He did not send them to Hempstead Harbor, because, he said, he could not do it without encumbering you with the whole family, and that said he, passt nicht [will not do]. His wife and child are now between Brooklyn and Williamsburg, in a place where they have free air. Fritz was playing before the door, very dirty his father said because he made playfellows of the pigs.4 Charles Dewey has just called to say that the family, with the excep• tion of Mary have returned to town.5 He talked of a visit of a few days which his mother would like to let him make to Hempstead Harbor. Why can you not come out tomorrow, and stay till Saturday, telling John6 to come for us to the Branch on that day? Or if that will not do, come on Friday morning. You will then have Lena with you, and can trust her to take care of the house. I left the bill of Whitson & Jackson, which I promised to examine, and directed the man who brought it to call this week for his money. Will you look it up for me? The man has just called and I have had to put him off a second time. Yrs affectionately WM c. BRYANT

P. S. Charles Hopkins7 of Mobile or Tuscaloosa has just called, having received a letter from Major Charles as he says, directing him to let you know when he goes to Great Barrington. He goes up on Friday by the Bridgeport railroad and would be glad to take you with him. He chews tobacco so inordinately and spits so profusely that he is quite a nuisance.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. F. F. Bryant/ Springbank /Hempstead Harbor. I. Bryant was boarding in Brooklyn during the week. 2. A prospective servant; see Letter 513. 3. John Gibson of Edinburgh, once a radical writer for the Signet in that city, brought his family to New York about 1831, and soon afterward his wife established a school for girls on Union Square. The Gibsons had four daughters--Christiana, Janet, Jessie, and Victoria-several of whom taught in the school at various times. The youngest, Victoria, was Julia Bryant's schoolmate there. Bryant's friendship with the Gibson family, particularly Christiana, continued throughout his lifetime. 4. The persons named in this paragraph are unidentified. 5. Son and daughter of Rev. Orville Dewey. A Place in the Country 277

6. Bryant's gardener-coachman. 7. Son of Frances Bryant's sister Mina Hopkins.

503. To Parke Godwin [Brooklyn] Saturday morning [September 7, 1844] Dear sir. I have the influenza so hard that I think I shall not come to the office today. Mr. Crane1 has some extracts set up from the last Comptroller's Report. It was my intention to introduce them and to connect them by some notice of the other matter in the report. Will you be kind enough to do this for me.2 Yrs- W C.B.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR. I. Probably an EP printer. 2. Following his failure to make a success of two short-lived newspapers, the Morning Post in 1842 and the Pathfinder in 1843, Parke Godwin had resumed his position as assistant on the EP, in which since 1840 he had held a small share of the ownership. Sometime during 1844 this share was transferred to Timothy Howe, a printer and bookkeeper. Bryant, Reminiscences of EP, p. 337; "Evening Post Ac• counts," NYPL-GR; EP, February 14, 1843; 429.3.

504. To Parke Godwin [Brooklyn] Monday morning [September 9, 1844] Dear Sir I shall not be able to come to the office this morning before eleven o'clock- Yours• W.C.B.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: 1\h. Godwin/ 74 Sixth Avenue/ at Mrs. Errington's.

505. To Frances F. Bryant New York September 9 1844. My dear Frances I suppose you have found out before this time that I gave you no money on Monday morning to pay Mr. Leek. Another time you must seize me and rob me. Can you not borrow the money of Mr. Candee till Friday? Yesterday morning George W. Morton called to know your answer. I gave him the letter to Mrs. Morton and told him you could not go up till next week. He said he should himself go on Monday or Tuesday and should be happy if you could go at the same time. 278 LETTERS OF WJLLIA;<.I CULLEN BRYAJ\T

There are boats which go in the morning and others which leave New York in the evening. The Troy and the Empire leave Barclay street in the morning and land you at Newburg. This is the most comfortable way, for you are landed in the day time. The Madison and the Highlander leave the foot of \Varren Street at four in the afternoon and land you at the long wharf in Fishkill at 9 o'clock or thereabouts. Mr. Morton says, if you will appoint the day and time of day when you will go up he will write and let his friends at Presqu'isle1 know of it, and they will be ready to meet you at the landing. But it should not be later than Tuesday afternoon, for the family as I understand him go to Poughkeepsie to see the great agricultural fair on Wednesday. Please let me know immediately on receiving this, what your deter• mination is. My influenza is much better today. Mr. Goddard2 came into the office and insisted on my taking some belladonna, homoeopathically, which he had at his place of business. I took it, went without my dinner, except eating four peaches, and have slept nearly all the afternoon, and then had a good long sleep in the night. Today my hoarseness is much dimin• ished.- Love to Julia. My regards to Mrs. and Miss Sands who I suppose are with you. Yrs affectionately, W. C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. F. F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Har• bor I Long Island. I. The country home of \Villiam Denning at Fishkill Landing, on the Hudson River. See 376.1. George W. Morton, husband of Denning's daughter Caroline, whose residence was in Hoboken, was a New York lawyer with offices near City Hall. Long• worths' New York Directory, 1838-1839. 2. See 317.6.

506. To George R. Graham New York September 11, 1844 My dear sir. On the other leaf of this letter I have copied the two poems written by my brother of which I spoke in my last.1 I was in hopes to have had something of my own for your magazine before this time, but I have been unusually busy. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MA!';USCRIPT: HSPa ADDRESS: To Geo R Graham Esq. 1. These were apparently John Bryant's "A Day in Autumn," Graham's, 26 (De• cember 1844), 256, and "Lines on a Fountain Discovered in a Secluded Part of a Forest," ibid., 27 (January 1845), 12. A Place in the Country 279

507. To Frances F. Bryant New York Tuesday Sept 17, 1844. My dear Frances I have been running about this morning till I am quite tired which you know is not often the case with me looking for some person who is going to Great Barrington. Mr. Hopkins is not at Mrs. Ballard's nor is any other person from that place. I went to Mrs. Dewey's who told me that you must send Julia there to stay till she found somebody to go up with. By the bye, she sends you much love and many thanks for the pears. From Mrs. Dewey's I went to Sherwood's. Mrs. Sherwood said that Mr. Simms thought of going to Great Barrington tomorrow or the next day, and that when he returned he would bring out his family to Roslyn.l I went immediately to Mr. Lawson's where I supposed Mr. Simms would be and found that he had gone out. Mrs. Lawson told me that he had this morning received a letter from Great Barrington informing him that his child was much better, and therefore he would not probably go thither at present. On my way to the lower part of the city I called on Fanny who looks quite well again-and is well as she tells me. I have been to Law• son's office but do not find him in. I have also called on William Sher• wood in Pearl Street who tells me that he does not know of any body in from Great Barrington. Mrs. Sherwood says that there is an aunt of Mrs. Simms's in town who will go to Great Barrington shortly. I shall be on the look out for her and will let you know what I can learn. Yrs affectionately W. C. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Hempstead Harbor I L. I. I. "Roslyn" was the new name for Hempstead Harbor. See 514.1. Simms's affection for Bryant had grown warmer with the poet's visit to South Carolina in the spring of 1843. The following March he wrote his northern friend, "Why are you not with us now, rather than the last dolorous winter[?] Why, Oh! Why? ... We shall not be content in Carolina with the brief visit you have made us .... Are we never to be free? Shall none but the sorry drudges enjoy the bon-bons of existence, & we who are born with wings, you at least, and I after a fashion, shall we not share?" And in July, planning a trip north, he wrote to James Lawson, "I fancy it will be a pleasant trip for all of us to Bryant at Spring Bank. In his new character of farmer, he strikes me as being really more nigh the poetical than the editorial condition. He shall give us an idyll in pastoral at morning, while his wife is at the churn, and we will drink to his muse & her cows at the same happy moment. He deserves to be 'on his own ground,' and in the sacred homestead which he can call his own, must experience (for an Amer• ican democrat) the very proudest of feelings." Simms to Bryant, March 8, 1844, NYPL-GR; Simms to James Lawson, July 15, 1844, Simms, Letters, I, 426. Simms sailed from Charleston for New York on August 13, 1844, and returned on October 28. During this time he and his family visited Great Barrington as well as New York, and 280 LETTERS oF \'\'ILLIA\! CuLLEN TIRYANT

spent an undetermined period with the Bryants at Hempstead Harbor. He had also been invited to visit Fenimore Cooper at Cooperstown, but apparently did not do so. During his absence from home, Simms was elected to the South Carolina legislature. See C. Hugh Holman, "Introduction," in William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature History and Fiction, First Series (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), p. xxvi; Cooper, Letters & journals, IV, 439- 440; Letter 511.

508. To Frances F. Bryant New York Wednesday September 18, 1 1844. Dear Frances Fanny has made up her mind to go to Great Barrington by the railroad on Friday morning. .Julia therefore can go with her. I shall expect you in, tomorrow. I have just got your letter,2 without a date, and so blotted that I cannot make out what hour the rail cars set out from Brooklyn which was the intelligence you meant to communicate. It is worth the sixpence it cost however, as a specimen of your handwriting when in a hurry. I send this by the Express mail. I shall send another in the newspaper of today, in order to make it certain that you get the information. Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant/ Hempstead Harbor POST• MARK: [illegible] POSTAL ANNOTATION: Paid. I. Bryant mistakenly wrote "17." 2. Unrecovered.

509. To Frances F. Bryant New York Thursday morning September 19, 1844 My dear Frances Yesterday I wrote you word both by the Express mail, and by a letter enclosed in the paper of that day that Fanny was going to Barrington on Friday morning and would take Julia with her. As I neither see you nor hear from you this morning I fear that the letters did not reach you. I this morning accidentally met with Major Rosseter1 in the street. He told me that he was going to Hudson tomorrow evening in the West• chester which leaves the foot of Liberty Street at 5 o'clock, and that if Julia were to go up he would see her put into the stage coach at Hudson. He is not I believe going out to Barrington immediately on his arrival, his wife being at Hudson on a visit. Yrs affectionately WM c. BRYANT Robert W. Weir's autographed carte de visite; photograph by Matthew Brady.

Weir's sketch for Bryant's "A Forest Hymn" (see p. 6).

/. /""./~ ~./,ho. • 4t~A'•/ ..;'(,i / ,t 4 //. .~.... ";/'./ <: .II""' /., c,y,,.... -.. "·""' ,. ./ / • /V~ , , -;..• .,_..., • ~.. ~~· IPO~lYJS

BY

~F\\" YOkJ( Harper · Broth•rs ~ 6

The engraved title page of the 1836 Poems with \Veir's vignette (see Letter 318). I I I

i ,, 'I

Goddard, R oslyn Harbor Map of Joseph Moulton's proposed subdivision, l\ lontrose, at Hempstead Har• bor, Long Island. T he large house numbered 608 at the lower left became Bryant's "Springbank," later "Cedarmere" (see Letter 435).

/'

W illiam Cullen B ryant II Cedarmere painted by William R . Miller and engraved by J ohn B. Forrest, cl845. T he pond is Moulton's Lake Marston on the map above. See Letter 447. TWO YEARS

BEFORE THE ~£AS T.

A

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF

LIFE AT SEA .

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NEW-YORK:

HARPER & DROTIJERS-82 CLIFF -S TREET.

Bryant persuaded the Harper brothers to publish the younger Dana's world-famous account of his life at sea (see Letters 375, 380,386, 391,393, 394, 398,400, and 417). John Cheney's engraving of his brother's crayon portrait of Bryant, published as the frontispiece to the 1847 Poems (see Letter 599).

The Be>·hshire Museum, Pittsfield Thomas Cole in 1838, by Durand (see Letters 407, 477, 647, and 660). Asher B. Durand's sell· portrait, cl835, now in the National Academy Charles Loring Elliott's portrait of of Design (see Letter Durand, 1864 (see Letter 660). 487).

The Century Associatio1l, New York Jonathan Sturges (see Letters 421 and 660). New York Public Library "Kindred Spirits": Bryant and Cole in the Catskills, by Durand (see Letters 389 and 660, and p. 515). Hiram Powers (see Letter 512).

....

Charles l\1. Leupp (see Letters 421 and 1R7, and p. 287). A Place in the Country 281

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR AnDRESS: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Roslyn I Long Island.

I. l\Jajor Samuel Rosseter, a Great Barrington tanner, who manufactured "stock shoes" for the local and New York markets, was for many years conspicuous in busi• ness and civic improvements in his home town. Charles J. Taylor, History of Great Barrington (Berkshire County), Massachusetts (Great Barrington, 1882), pp. 339, 358.

510. To Ferdinand E. Field [September 1844] ... Would that I could have accompanied you in your visit to Stone• henge and other old places in your walking excursions! But these are dreams: the probability is that I shall never visit England nor you come to New York. I shall go on a mere journalist until I am worn out; and you will remain an amiable old bachelor, leading an industrious, rational, contented life, too well satisfied with your home to change it, and feeling too strongly that decline of enterprise ·which creeps over us with years, to cross again the Atlantic, when you have so beautiful a country as your own for pedestrian tours ....

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT (partial): Life, II, 1.

511. To Frances F. Bryant New York Wednesday October 16 1844 Dear Frances. Mr. Simms thinks of setting out on Monday, so says Mr. Lawson, who however adds that he does not believe he will go till Wednesday or Thursday. Mr. Forrest will not come out this week. He has been to Philadelphia & just returned. I have just made a literally flying visit to Chelsea,! and find that his mother and sister are in the house with him in consequence of which he is obliged to postpone it to another week. Yrs affectionately W C B I shall look for you on Friday. Grotius [Denny's?] son is down from G. B. and goes up on Friday. W.C.B.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Roslyn I Long Island. I. Before building his elaborate "Fonthill Castle" at Riverdale on the Hudson River in 1849, the actor Edwin Forrest lived, with his wife, Catherine Norton Sinclair Forrest, on West Twenty-Second Street, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Mrs. Forrest was the daughter of an English opera tenor, John Sinclair (1791-1857), who made several appearances in New York. 282 LETIERS OF vVILLJAi\1 CULLEN BRYANT

512. To John Howard Bryant New York, November 13, 1844 Dear Brother Money is so scarce, that the best thing I can do is sell to the old gentleman.1 Hereafter if I should have anything to invest I might send it on; but as I have bought the house and mill belonging to the land I owned when you were here last I think the best thing I can do is to apply all the money I can get together to the payment of debts. It may save trouble to my Executor at least. Sell, therefore, and make a sale at the same time of your own lot and you will relieve two of us at a time. I never was more straitened for money than at present and am tired of the worriment it brings upon me. Your two poems I have sent to Graham but neither of them has yet appeared.2 vVe are all well. Remember me to your wife and to your children and all my friends.

MANUSCRIPT: Unrecovered TEXT: Keith Huntress and Fred vV. Lorch, "Bryant and Il• linois: Further Letters of the Poet's Family," New England Quarterly, 16 (Decem• ber 1943), 641 ADDREss: John H. Bryant I Princeton I Bureau County, Illinois. l. No record has been found of the sale of Illinois land at this time by either Cullen or John Bryant. 2. See Letter 506.

513. To Frances F. Bryant [New York? cNovember 15, 1844.] Dear Frances. "\Vhen you come out will you be so kind as to bring me a pair of stockings? Would it not be well for John to protect the roots of the trees just planted, by some coarse manure, or litter placed round them before the hard frosts set in? Will you tell him to do it? I have made an arrangement with Capt. Smith to bring out the lumber.1 It will go, part this week, and part next. What should hinder you from coming out at the same time that Augusta2 does-or rather what should hinder her from coming out the same time that you do? She could then return with you. I shall be im• patient to see you by the week's end. Yrs truly WMCBRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Roslyn I Long Island-. 1. "In the early 1810's Capt. Stephen Smith, in the Garland, sailed every Mon• day from the grist mill in Rosyln, sometimes going as far as Albany to get lumber A Place in the Country 283 for William Hick's lumber yard, as did Capt. J. M. Kirby in the General Washington. Kirby and Smith apparently carried whatever freight they could get." Goddard, Roslyn Harbor, p. 24. 2. Augusta Berger, German servant (Letter 502).

514. To Frances F. Bryant Wednesday Nov. 20 [1844] Dear Frances Lena has just called to tell me that she remains here instead of going out to Hempstead Harbor. She has one or two places in view and is anxious to get one of them. In the spring, if you want her, she would like to go to the harbor again-to Roslyn I ought to have said.1 As for the lumber-remember to tell Bals that it needs no measuring. Only let him get Cox to help him pile it in the manner unseasoned boards are piled, and that is all the trouble you need have with it. When shall I see you? I had a roaring fire in my room last evening. Yrs truly W C. BRYANT.

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. Frances F. Bryant I Springbank I Roslyn I Long Island. I. About September 17, 1844, the community of Hempstead Harbor was renamed "Roslyn" by a published resolution signed by its postmaster, and, presumably, a ma• jority of its residents. The accepted, romantic tale of this rechristening has been that the name was "suggested by Mr. Bryant, from an incident recorded in the town annals, that the British troops marched out of Hempstead to the tune of Roslyn Castle." A more likely explanation appears in the memoirs of a resident who was a young woman when the change was made. Recalling that her family often entertained visit• ing lecturers, she continued, "So one time came a Scotchman, and we invited him to stay with us. The Scotchman one day said, 'You have too many towns called Hemp• stead, it is bewildering. If you ever want to change the name call it Roslyn-it is very like old Roslyn in Scotland.' Well, in course of time then, a meeting was called and held in our house. No ladies invited and I told Grandpa to save his vote to the last• but I sat in the room close to grandpa with my foot to his sensitive toe-it was a small gathering. I was so intent on the name of Roslyn. Mr. Bryant thought it would be good to call it 'Mill Town,' and the company came, lit their pipes, and I sewed diligently and innocently. One more vote would make it Mill Town, and one more vote would make it Roslyn. Grandpa whispered, 'Bryant thinks Mill Town-why not?' Such a twinge on the gouty toe again and the name came to be Roslyn, and now the pretty harbor town delights to have been named from the poet Bryant's vote, and are glad to think this is the truth, and I am willing; but it was the Scotchman who gave me the name and my foot that hurt Grandpa's toe; that is how its pretty name came.'' Goddard, Roslyn Harbor, pp. 19-20. The young lady's version seems supported by Bryant's apparent reluctance to use the new name, as suggested by his comment in this letter two months after the change was effected. In truth, when Bryant visited Roslin in Scotland the following year, he remarked that it looked "no more like Roslyn on Long Island than A. looks like Ampersand.'' Letter 549. 284 LETTERS oF WrLLIA~r CuLLEN BRYANT

515. To William Waret [New York, December 1844?] Forty, my dear sir, did I say that forty volumes of American poetry were published in a year? The times are altered since. The number is now nearer a hundred and forty. Parnassus speaks with blessings on every cliff and down to the lowest sod in his vale. It is spring time in the land of poetry and the nettles are in flower as well as the violets. Here I have at this moment on my table-Mrs. Welby's poems and [Shin's?] Remains, and the poems of two sisters of the west and Immortality a Poem and a long one, and all published within a few weeks and all sent to me by the publishers with the expectation that I would notice them.2 ·what can I do? It is impossible to read so many works-If I could really think they were good I couldn't read them [less to?] enjoy them for you must read poetry as an epicure drinks old wine letting it pour slowly over the tongue and pass leisurely through the esophagus -But poetry must be written-we shall have no good poets unless there are many writers of poetry-many men must learn to fiddle or we shall have no Ole Bull.3 I have heard from you often within the past year or two, by way of Miss Robbins and other persons and am most glad to get a letter written by your own hand and that familiar [blind?] hand which used to puzzle me so much to decypher.4 You travel about they say-can you never think of coming down to our place at Hempstead Harbor-or Roslyn as we now call it? It is an old house on an old plan-large rooms low broad easy stair cases-a hall between the rooms through which the wind sweeps in summer-trees and several water ponds by the salt sea-fringed with stately and drooping willows, and hills and woods, and springs and bubbly rivulets without mosquitoes and the fever and ague never heard of. -Can you not in your travels shuffling along easily through the country at some time come down .... Your young friend's [poem was clever, but not skilfull in rhyme & meter, and sometimes resorts to misshapen prose?] I have been concerned in a newspaper for some years and find no occasion to borrow any thing for my verses from the language of the reporting of accidents and public meetings or of the speeches in Congress. Yet he is clever-very clever-with a great deal of beauty of imagery and ingenuity of thought .... [unsigned]

;\fA:'\USCRIPT: NYPL-GR (incomplete draft). l. The recipient is conjecturally identified because of the intimacy of Bryant's manner, similar to that of earlier letters to 'Vare, and because of the reference to Eliza Robbins, who often visited Boston and Cambridge, where Ware then held a pas• torate. The tentative date of this letter is suggested by Bryant's reluctance to substi• tute "Roslyn" for "Hempstead Harbor," soon after the name change. See 514.1. 2. These publications, insofar as they can be identified, were Amelia B. C. Welby, A Place in the Country 285

Poems (Boston, 1845); [Mrs. Catherine Ann (Ware) Warfield and 1\hs. Eleanor Percy (Ware) Lee] The Wife of Leonard and Other Poems. By Two Sisters of the West (New York and Philadelphia, 1844); and [Alfred Wheeler] Immortality; or, The Pilgrim's Dream, and Other Poems (New York, 1844). 3. The popular Norwegian violinist Ole Bornemann Bull (1810-1880) played to large and very enthusiastic audiences in New York in the fall of 1844. Odell, Annals, v, 145. 4. Ware's letter is unrecovered.

516. To Frances F. Bryant Tuesday morning [1844?] Dear Frances I left, I believe,-the knife which was used to prune trees in the door yard-in the garden under a peach tree near the peas. Will you send somebody to look for it. Yrs truly W C BRYANT

MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDRESS: Mrs. F. F. Bryant/ Hempstead Harbor.

517. To Frances F. Bryant [New York? 1844?] Dear Frances I have not seen Dr. Gray but Godwin saw him this morning and put all the questions that I could have done. The Doctor says that all the mischief that has been done has been done already. There is nothing that can be taken and nothing that can be done, except to keep up our courage. Vaccination he says is the best preventive, and that we have all had. I shall find out, before I come out, how long it will be before the disease would appear, after the exposure to the contagion. Meantime it is not one in a hundred, that is affected by the disease in consequence of the greatest exposure. There is much the same chance that there is of drown• ing if you go out in a boat. I do not think therefore that it would be of the least use for Cordelia and Maggy1 to leave the house, nor do I see any great occasion for being frightened. I cannot very well come out tonight, and perhaps may not be able to come till Saturday. Mrs. Kirkland is better this morning.2 The medicines for the com• plaint are, first-aconite for the fever-then belladonna and sulphur. I am sorry that Mrs. Moulton who is so fearless in other things should be so much alarmed at so remote a danger as this. Do not allow yourself to be afraid because others are- Yrs truly WM c. BRYANT 286 LETTERS OF 'NILLIA\1 CtiLLEN BRYA:\T

\IA:\USCRIPT: NYPL-GR ADDREss: Mrs. Fr;mces F. Bryant/ Springbank I Roslyn I Long Island.

I. Probably daughters of Caroline Kirkland (Note 2). 2. The New York novelist Caroline Matilda Stansbury Kirkland (1801-1864), whose tales of life on the MichigaH frontier, A New Home-Who'll Follow (1839), and Forest Jjfe (1842), were widely read in the 18,10s and 1850s, occupied a cottage on Bryant's Roslyn property a few years after this letter was written, and became an in• timate friend of the Bryant family. Life, II, 57-61. The nature of her illness is un• determined.