made
themselves into a poem which he wrote down in words many years after,
and which is as clear and fresh as the voice of the little brook
itself after which it was named. This poem is called _The Rivulet_ and
it shows the poet-child standing upon the banks of the little stream
listening to the song of the birds or gathering wild flowers.

It was his first lesson in that wonder-book of nature from which he
translated so much that was beautiful that he became the distinctive
poet of the woods and streams.

Lessons from books he learned in the little log school-house,
preparing himself for ordeals when the minister came to visit the
school. At these times the pupils were dressed in their best and sat
in solemn anxiety while the minister asked them questions out of the
catechism and made them a long speech on morals and good behavior. On
one of these occasions the ten-year-old poet declaimed some of his own
verses descriptive of the school.

In Bryant's boyhood New England farm life was very simple. The farmers
lived in log or slab houses, whose kitchens formed the living room,
where the meals were generally taken. Heat was supplied by the great
fireplaces that sometimes filled one whole side of the kitchen and
were furnished with cranes, spits, and pothooks. Behind the kitchen
door hung a bundle of birch rods with which mischievous boys were kept
in order, and in the recess of the chimney stood the wooden settle
where the children sat before bed-time to watch the fire or glance up
through the wide chimney at the stars.

Here, when three years old, Bryant often stood book in hand and with
painful attention to gesture repeated one of Watts's hymns, while his
mother listened and corrected. Here he prepared his lessons, and wrote
those first childish poems so carefully criticised by his father,
who was his teacher in the art of composition. In the poem called
_A Lifetime_ Bryant long afterward described many incidents of his
childhood and the influence of his father and mother upon his art,
one developing his talent for composition, and the other directing his
imagination to and enlisting his sympathies with humanity. This poem
shows the boy by his mother's knee, reading the story of Pharaoh and
the Israelites, of David and Goliath, and of the life of Christ. As he
grew older Bryant shared the usual amusements of country life. In
the spring he took his turn in the maple-sugar camp; in the autumn he
attended the husking