ng religious
feeling of this ancestry, which was united in him with a deep and
sensitive love of nature. This led him to reflect in his poems the
strength and beauty of American landscape, vividly as it had never
before been mirrored; and the blending of serious thought and innate
piety with the sentiment for nature so reflected gave a new and
impressive result.

Like many other long-lived men, Bryant suffered from delicate health in
the earlier third of his life: there was a tendency to consumption in
his otherwise vigorous family stock. He read much, and was much
interested in Greek literature and somewhat influenced by it. But he
also lived a great deal in the open air, rejoiced in the boisterous
games and excursions in the woods with his brothers and sisters, and
took long rambles alone among the hills and wild groves; being then, as
always afterwards, an untiring walker. After a stay of only seven months
at Williams College, he studied law, which he practiced for some eight
years in Plainfield and Great Barrington. In the last-named village he
was elected a tithingman, charged with the duty of keeping order in the
churches and enforcing the observance of Sunday. Chosen town clerk soon
afterwards, at a salary of five dollars a year, he kept the records of
the town with his own hand for five years, and also served as justice of
the peace with power to hear cases in a lower court. These biographical
items are of value, as showing his close relation to the self-government
of the people in its simpler forms, and his early practical familiarity
with the duties of a trusted citizen.

Meanwhile, however, he kept on writing at intervals, and in 1821 read
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard a long poem, 'The Ages,' a
kind of composition more in favor at that period than in later days,
being a general review of the progress of man in knowledge and virtue.
With the passage of time it has not held its own as against some of his
other poems, although it long enjoyed a high reputation; but its success
on its original hearing was the cause of his bringing together his first
volume of poems, hardly more than a pamphlet, in the same year. It made
him famous with the reading public of the United States, and won some
recognition in England. In this little book were contained, besides 'The
Ages' and 'Thanatopsis,' several pieces which have kept their hold upon
popular taste; such as the well-known lines 'To a Waterfowl' and t