edged ability. The June
number contained two poems which ought to have made a great hit. One was
"A Song of Pitcairn's Island;" the other was "Marco Bozzaris." There was
no flourish of trumpets over them, as there would be now; the writers
merely prefixed their initials, "B." and "H." The reading public of New
York were not ready for the _Review_, which had been projected for their
mental enlightenment; so, after about a year's struggle, it was merged
in the _New York Literary Gazette_, which began its mission about four
years before. This magazine shared the fate of its companion in a few
months, when it was consolidated with the _United States Literary
Gazette_, which in two months was swallowed up in the _United States
Review_. The honor of publishing and finishing the last was shared by
Boston and New York. Profit in these publications there was none, though
Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Dana, Bancroft, and Longfellow wrote for them.
Too good, or not good enough, they lived and died prematurely. Mr.
Bryant's success as a metropolitan man of letters was not brilliant so
far; but there were other walks than those of pure literature open to
him, as to others, and into one of the most bustling of these he entered
in his thirty-second year. In other words, he became one of the editors
of the _Evening Post_. Henceforth he was to live by journalism.

Journalism, though an exacting pursuit, leaves its skillful followers a
little leisure in which to cultivate literature. It the heyday of those
ephemeral trifles, Annuals, and Mr. Bryant found time to edit one, with
the assistance of his friend Mr. Verplanck, and his acquaintance Mr.
Robert C. Sands (who, by the way, was one of the editors of the
_Commercial Advertiser_), and a very creditable work it was. His
contributions to "The Talisman" included some of his best poems. Poetry
was the natural expression of his genius--a fact which he could never
understand, for it always seemed to him that prose was the natural
expression of all mankind. His prose was, and always continued to be,
masterly. Its earliest examples, outside of his critical papers in the
_North American Review_ and other periodicals (and outside of the
_Evening Post_, of course), are two stories entitled "Medfield" and "The
Skeleton's Cave," contributed by him to "Tales of the Glauber Spa"
(1832)--a collection of original stories by Mr. James K. Paulding, Mr.
Verplanck, Mr. Sands, Mr. William Leggett, and Miss Cathar