enter
into the spirit of his poetry one must go back to the hills of western
Massachusetts.

Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower
stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country
physician, with liberal preferences in theology, Federalist views in
politics, and a library of seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The
poet's mother records his birth in her diary in terse words which have
the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven
in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted.
"Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day.
Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large
head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy
spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat
unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his
brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry
from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become a poet.
At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, "The Embargo," which his
proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly
one year at Williams College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He
wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money
for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the
autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of
"Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's "Grave"
and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses
in a drawer, and five years later his father found them, shed tears
over them, and sent them to the "North American Review," where they were
published in September, 1817.

In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of
it, and with the confession that he sometimes read "The Lyrical Ballads"
when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in
1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield--aged twenty-one,
and looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid
sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird
seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before
he slept that night he had composed the poem "To a Waterfowl." No more
authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse
for more than