hich the correspondence was carried on
after her return; but some unknown cause seems to have broken off the
fascinating romance, and after a year or two we hear of it no more. That
the end was painful to Mr. Bryant, we have reason to suspect from his
poems and letters; but as to how the lady felt, we have no evidence. The
verses show little promise of the work which the young poet soon
afterward did, but they are not entirely without charm:--

"The home thy presence made so dear,
I leave,--the parting hour is past;
Yet thy sweet image haunts me here,
In tears as when I saw thee last.

"It meets me where the woods are deep,
It comes when twilight tints depart,
It bends above me while I sleep,
With pensive looks that pierce my heart."

In another little poem we are informed,--

"The gales of June were breathing by,
The twilight's last faint rays were gleaming,
And midway in the moonless sky
The star of Love was brightly beaming.

"When by the stream, the birchen boughs
Dark o'er the level marge were playing,
The maiden of my secret vows
I met, alone, and idly straying.

"And since that hour,--for then my love
Consenting heard my passion pleaded,--
Full well she knows the star of Love,
And loves the stream with beeches shaded."

The poet had quite a lengthened season of darkness and despair after
this love-dream came to an end, and it must be confessed wrote a good
deal of very bad poetry, none of which he placed in collections of his
poems, but some of which have been published by his biographer. They are
rather worse than the usual run of such poems, which may indicate that
the feeling was really deeper,--too deep for expression in verse,--or
that it was not as deep and lasting as some of the first loves of poets.
As he had already written "Thanatopsis" and other fine poems, it is
rather surprising that there are so few gleams of the true poetic fire
in these amatory verses.

As is usual in such cases, he did not recover from the old love until he
had discovered a new one, and he did this in his new residence, not long
after his arrival there. The second lady of his choice was Miss Fanny
Fairchild, daughter of a well-to-do and respectable farmer on the Green
River. She was nineteen years old at the time, a "very pretty blonde,
small in person, with light-brown hair, gray eyes, a graceful shape, a
dainty foot, transparent and delicate hands, and a wonderfully frank a