encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely
Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted
men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as
giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could
address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made
independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like
Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they
could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work.
Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and
making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing
here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves
freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of
some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities
and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that
Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he
afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that
Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the
break-up of the Brook Farm Community.

In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest
American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes
of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily
newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was

"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."

Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western-most county of
Massachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and
practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great
Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social
and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with
Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts.
Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a
literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a
brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review
and Athenaeum_, he assumed the editorship of the _Evening Post_, a
Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected
till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered
the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had
be