Are Holy Land!

In 1821--the same year which saw the publication of _The Spy_, the first
significant American novel--there appeared at Boston a little pamphlet
of forty-four pages, bound modestly in brown paper boards, and
containing eight poems. Two of them were "To a Waterfowl" and
"Thanatopsis," and that little volume marked the advent of the first
American poet--William Cullen Bryant. Out of the great mass of verse
produced on our continent for two centuries after the Pilgrim Fathers
landed on Plymouth Rock, his was the first which displayed those
qualities which make for immortality.

Before him our greatest poets had been Philip Freneau, the "Poet of the
Revolution"; Francis Scott Key, whose supreme achievement was "The
Star-Spangled Banner"; Fitz-Greene Halleck, known to every school-boy by
his "Marco Bozzaris," but chiefly memorable for a beautiful little
lyric, "On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake"; and Drake himself, perhaps
the greatest of the four, but dying at the age of twenty-five with
nothing better to his credit than the well-known "The American Flag,"
and the fanciful and ambitious "The Culprit Fay." But these men were, at
best, only graceful versifiers, and Bryant loomed so far above them and
the other verse-makers of his time that he was hailed as a miracle of
genius, a sort of Parnassan giant whose like had never before existed.
We estimate him more correctly to-day as a poet of the second rank,
whose powers were limited but genuine. Indeed, even in his own day,
Bryant's reputation waned somewhat, for he never fulfilled the promise
of that first volume, and "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" remain the
best poems he ever wrote.

William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794,
the son of a physician, from whom he received practically all his early
training, and who was himself a writer of verse. The boy's talent for
versification was encouraged, and some of his productions were recited
at school and published in the poet's corner of the local newspaper. In
1808, when Bryant was fourteen years old, the first volume of his poems
was printed at Boston, with an advertisement certifying the extreme
youth of the author. It contained nothing of any importance, and why
anyone should care to read dull verse because it was written by a child
is incomprehensible, but the book had some success, and Bryant's father
was a very proud man.

Three years later, Bryant entered Williams College