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accordingly taken by my father to the house of my mother's brother, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Snell, in North Brookfield, to begin the study of Latin. I began with the Latin gram

mar, went through the Colloquies of Corderius, in which the words, for the ease of the learner, were arranged according to the English order, and then entered upon the New Testament in Latin. Next the Eneid of Virgil. While I was occupied with the Eneid my father wrote to me advising me to translate some portion of it into English verse. Accordingly I made a rhymed translation of the narrative of A Tempest in the first book. Somebody showed me a piece of paper with the title The Endless Knot, the representation of an intricate knot in parallel lines, between which were written some homely verses. I thought I could write better ones, and my head being full of the ancient mythology, I composed this.” (Life, p. 29.)

1809.

"While I was at my uncle's," the poet continues, “another edition of my poem, The Embargo, was published in Boston. It had been revised and somewhat enlarged, and a few shorter poems were added. I went through the Eneid in my Latin studies, and then mastered the Eclogues and the Georgics, after which my uncle put into my hands a volume of the select Orations of Cicero. In the beginning of July, having read through the volume of Cicero's Orations, I left the excellent family of my uncle, where I had been surrounded by the most wholesome influences and examples, and returned to Cummington, after an absence of just eight calendar months. I took my place with the haymakers on the farm, and did, I believe, my part until the 28th of August, when I went to begin my studies in Greek with the Rev. Moses Hallock, in the neighboring township of Plainfield, where he was the minister. I committed to memory the declensions and conjugations of the Greek tongue with the rules of syntax, and then began reading the New Testament in Greek, taking first the Gospel of St. John. At the end of two calendar months I knew the Greek New Testament from end to end, almost as if it had been Eng

lish, and I returned to my home in Cummington, where a few days afterward I completed my fifteenth year.

1810.

"The next winter I was occupied with studies preparatory to entering college, which, for reasons of economy, it was decided that I should do a year in advance; that is to say, as a member of the sophomore class. At this time I had no help from a tutor, but in the spring I went again for two months to Plainfield and received from Mr. Hallock instructions in mathematics. In the beginning of September, when the annual commencement of Williams College was at that time held, I went with my father to Williamstown, passed an easy examination, and was admitted a member of the sophomore class. After the usual vacation I went again to Williamstown and began my college life. I mastered the daily lessons given out to my class and found much time for miscellaneous reading, for disputations and for literary composition in prose and verse. No attention was then paid to prosody, but I made an attempt to acquaint myself with the prosody of the Latin language and tried some experiments in Latin verse, which were clumsy and uncouth enough. Among my verses was a paraphrastic translation of Anacreon's Ode on Spring:

So fragrant Spring returns again
With all the graces in her train!

a version of David's lament over Saul and Jonathan, II Samuel i, 19 (Godwin's Life of Bryant, p. 76); the version of A Fragment of Simonides, a poem recited before my class; also an Indian war-song:

Ghosts of my wounded brethren, rest;
Shades of the warrior dead!

(See Godwin's Life of Bryant, p. 90.) Also note by Mr. Arthur Bryant, "I still retain in memory fragments and entire poems written about this period, many of which were never printed." Such as the Edipus Tyrannus, Elegy on the Death of the Gerrymander, etc. (Godwin's Life of Bryant, p. 94.)

The Gerrymander was a figure representing a monster which the Federal newspapers constructed from outlines made on a map of Massachusetts by a peculiar arrangement of the electoral votes, which Elbridge Gerry was said to have so distributed as to secure a Legislature which would elect him to the United States Senate. To this period in Bryant's life belong the translations of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead; also several Odes of Anacreon; the lines of Mimnermus of Colophon on The Beauty and Joy of Youth; An Idyl by Bion and choruses from Sophocles. During a school vacation in January, 1810, he wrote a patriotic song called The Genius of Columbia. (For full text of this poem, see Godwin's Life of Bryant, pp. 80-81.) An attempt to declaim before his class a passage from Knickerbocker's History of New York ended in his being compelled to resume his seat under the frowns of the tutor, the humor of it so convulsed him with laughter.

1811.

Under date of May 8th of this year Bryant writes: "Before the third term of my sophomore year was ended, I asked and obtained an honorable dismission from Williams College, and going back to Cummington began to prepare myself for entering the junior class at Yale. I pursued my studies with some diligence and without any guides save my books; but when the time drew near that I should apply for admission at Yale my father told me that his means did not allow him to maintain me at New Haven, and that I must give up the idea of a full course of college education."

At this period he read Cowper, Thomson, Burns, Southey, etc. These studies, however, did not win him from his rambles, during one of which his thoughts took a shape that proved to be of the greatest consequence in his poetic growth. He had been engaged in comparing Blair's poem, The Grave, with another of the same cast by Bishop Porteous, and his mind was also considerably occupied with a recent volume of Kirke White's verses. "It was in the autumn," we are told, "the blue of the summer sky had faded into gray and the brown earth was heaped with sear and withered emblems of the departed glory

of the year. As he trod up on the hollow-sounding ground in the loneliness of the woods and among the prostrate trunks of trees that for generations had been moldering into dust, he thought how the vast solitudes about him were filled with the same sad tokens of decay."

In December, 1811, he began the study of law in the office of Mr. Howe, of Worthington, a quiet little village some four or five miles from Cummington. He congratulated himself in a little poem on his escape from the farm. (See p. 103, Godwin's Life of Bryant.) To this period belongs the love-song beginning:

I knew thee fair and deemed thee free

From fraud and guile and faithless art;
Yet had I seen as now I see,

Thine image ne'er had stained my heart.

1812.

Of this period Parke Godwin says in his Life of Bryant: "Carefully preserved among his papers-and he was for the most part inattentive in keeping what concerned himself only -are several fragments of poems expressive of the joys, the doubts and the disappointments of love." (See Godwin's Life of Bryant, pp. 107-114, for text of these love poems.) He wrote at this time for the Washington Benevolent Society of Boston a Fourth of July ode, in which are these lines:

Should justice call to battle

The applauding shout we'd raise!

A million swords would leave their sheath-
A million bayonets blaze!

Another series of poems belonging to this period, and never published save in Godwin's Life of Bryant, is called A Chorus of Ghosts. This was published in the New York Review for 1824 over the signature of X, with several stanzas wanting, but since supplied by Mr. Arthur Bryant. (For full text of these poems see Godwin's Life of Bryant, pp. 115-117.)

1814.

In June, 1814, he removed to Bridgewater and resided with his grandfather, Dr. Philip Bryant, and entered the law office

of Mr. William Baylies. To this period belong the lines To a Friend on his Marriage, in the North American Review, March, 1818. On the 4th of July he delivered a piece of rhymed declamation, deploring the folly and ravages of war, and rejoicing in the downfall of Napoleon, then sent to Elba. (For text of this Ode see Godwin's Life, p. 121.) On August 9, 1814, he passed his preliminary examination for admission to the bar and received a certificate sprinkled with snuff, instead of sand, for which he paid six dollars. Mr. Bryant was at this time completely possessed with the military fever. A letter dated Cummington, November 16, 1814, Mass. State Archives, reads:

TO HIS EXCELLENCY, CALEB Strong, Governor and COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASS.:

Humbly representing that William C. Bryant, your petitioner, being desirous to enter the service of the State in the present struggle with a possible enemy, etc., etc.

A severe illness prevented him from enlisting, and after his recovery he penned an Ode to Death, beginning:

Oh, thou whom the world dreadeth-art thou nigh
To thy pale Kingdom Death to summon me?

1816.

On July 25, 1816, Mr. Bryant was appointed adjutant in the Massachusetts militia, but returned the commission to the adjutant-general February 8, 1817. The treaty of peace signed at Ghent ended the war. To this period belongs the ode written for the Howard Society of Boston.

Oh taught by many a woe and fear
We welcome thy returning wing!
And earth, Oh Peace, is glad to hear,
Thy name among her echoes ring."

(For full text of this poem see Godwin's Life, p. 137.) “On the 15th of August, 1816, he left Bridgewater with his credentials as an Attorney of the Common Pleas in his pocket." He now adopted the poetic form in which he worked for the rest of his life. See poem I cannot forget with what Fervid Devo

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