6

Some mention having been made of Lord Houghton's and Tupper's recent travels in this country, the poet asked : "Did I ever tell you of Lord Houghton's visit to Roslyn a few years ago? He was accompanied by his valet, who announced in my kitchen that his master was the greatest poet in England,' when one of my servants, not to be outdone, thereupon said, 'Our man is the greatest poet in America. The use of the words "master" and "man," I may remark, are worthy of notice, and appeared to amuse the poet when relating the incident.

Passing the Halleck statue, Mr. Bryant paused to speak of it, of other statues in similar sitting posture, and of Halleck himself and his genius, for several minutes. Still continuing to lean on my arm, he asked my little daughter, whose hand he had held and continued to hold during our walk, if she knew the names of the robbins and sparrows that attracted his attention, and also the names of some flowering shrubs that we passed. Her correct answers pleased him, and he then inquired if she had ever heard some little verses about the bobolink. She answered yes, and that she also knew the peet who wrote them. This caused him much amusement, and he said, “ I think I shall have to write them out for you. "Mary, do you know the name of that tree with the pretty blue flowers ?" he asked, and as she did not know, he told her that it was "called the Paulownia imperialis-a hard name for a little girl to remember; it was named in honor of a princess, and was brought from Japan."

Arriving at the Morse statue at the Seventy-second Street gate, we stopped, and he said: "This recalls to my mind a curious circumstance. You remember Launt Thompson's bust which the Commissioners refused to admit in the Park, on the ground that I was living? Well, soon after, this statue of Morse was placed here, although he was alive, and [laughingly] I was asked to deliver the address on the Occasion of its unveiling, which I did." 'Do you like your bust ?" "Yes, I think it is a good work of art, and the likeness is pleasing and satisfactory, I believe, to my friends." "Which do you think your best portrait ?" "Unlike Irving, I prefer the portraits made of me in old age. Of the earlier pictures, I presume the best are Inman's and my friend Durand's, * which you perhaps remember hangs in the parlor at Roslyn."

As we approached my house, about four o'clock, Mr. Bryant was recalling the Scenes of the previous year on the occasion of President Hayes's first visit to New York, and he was still, I think, cheerfully conversing on that subject as we walked up arm in arm, and all entered the vestibule. Disengaging my arm, I took a step in advance to open the inner door, and during those few

* The most important portraits of the poet, mentioned as nearly as possible in the order in which they were painted, are by Henry Inman (1835); Prof. S. F. B. Morse (1836); Henry Peters Gray, S. W. Cheney, Charles Martin (1851); Charles L. Elliott, A. B. Durand (1854); Samuel Lawrence (1856); Paul Duggan, C. G. Thompson, A. H. Wenzler (1861); Thomas Hicks (1863); and Charles Fisher (1875). Of these I have engravings on steel now before me from Inman's, Martin's, Elliott's, Durand's, and Lawrence's portraits, as well as several taken from recent photographs. The portrait of Mr. Bryant which appears in this work is engraved from an admirable photograph taken by Sarony.

seconds, without the slightest warning of any kind, the venerable poet, while my back was turned, dropped my daughter's hand and fell suddenly backward through the open outer door, striking his head on the steps. I turned just in time to see the silvered head striking the stone, and, springing to his side, hastily raised him up. He was unconscious, and I supposed that he was dead. Ice-water was immediately applied to his head, and, with the assistance of a neighbor's son and the servants, he was carried into the parlor and laid unconscious at full length on the sofa. He soon moved, became restless, and in a few minutes sat up and drank the contents of a goblet filled with iced sherry, which partially restored him, and he asked, with a bewildered look, "Where am I? I do not feel at all well. Oh,

my head my poor head!" accompanying the words by raising his right hand to his forehead. After a little, at his earnest request, I accompanied him to his own house, and, leaving him in charge of his niece, went for his family physician, Dr. John F. Gray. The following is a portion of the statement made by Dr. Gray after the poet's death:

"I sent for Dr. Carnochan, the surgeon. He could find no injury to the skull, and therefore thought there was a chance of recovery. Mr. Bryant, during the first few days, would get up and walk about the library or sit in his favorite chair. He would occasionally say something about diet and air. When his daughter arrived from Atlantic City, where she had been for her health, she thought her father recognized her. It is uncertain how far he recognized her or any of his friends. The family were hopeful and made the most out of every sign of consciousness or recognition.

'On the eighth day after the fall, hemorrhage took place in the brain, resulting in paralysis, technically called hemiplegia, and extending down the right side of the body. After this he was most of the time comatose. He ceased to recognize his friends in any way, and lay much of the time asleep. He was unable to speak, and when he attempted to swallow his food lodged in his larynx and choked him. He was greatly troubled with phlegm, and could not clear his throat. There was only that one attack of hemorrhage of the brain, and that was due to what is called traumatic inflammation. After the fourteenth day he died. "He was a man who made little demonstration of affection or emotion, but he had a profoundly sympathetic feeling for the life and mission of Mazzini, and on the day when he delivered the address he exhibited considerable emotion. That and the walk afterwards certainly exhausted him, and led to the swoon. He overtaxed his strength during the winter, in attending evening entertainments and in public speaking. He had few intimate acquaintances, and was so extremely modest in expressing approbation or liking that one could scarcely tell the extent of his friendly feeling. Though I had attended him for many years, and often visited him at Roslyn, and also at his old homestead in Massachusetts, I never noticed an expression of more than ordinary friendship till I was prostrated by sickness. He made an impression ordinarily of coldness, but his poems show that he had plenty of feeling, and great sympathy for mankind.

'Once when at Roslyn we visited the grave of his wife in the village cemetery, and we saw the place by her side reserved for him. He frequently requested that his funeral should be simple and without ostentation. He has had fulfilled his wish to die in June.

"Mr. Bryant owed his long life to an exceedingly tenacious and tough constitution and very prudent living. I always found him an early riser. Although he was slight of body and limb, he seemed to me unconscious of fatigue, and he would walk many a stronger man off his legs. He did not walk rapidly, but seemed as wiry as an Indian."

In April, 1867, Mr. Bryant expressed to the writer a wish that he might not survive

the loss of his mental faculties like Southey, Scott, Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shepherd, who all suffered from softening of the brain, and mentioned his hope that he should be permitted to complete his translation of Homer before death or mental imbecility, with a failure of physical strength, should overtake him. On another Occasion he said, "If I am worthy, I would wish for sudden death, with no interregnum between I cease to exercise reason and I cease to exist." In these wishes he was happily gratified, as well as in the time of his being laid away to his final rest, as expressed in the following beautiful and characteristic lines to JUNE:

"I know that I no more should see

The season's glorious show,

Nor would its brightness shine for me,
Nor its wild music flow;

But if, around my place of sleep,
The friends I love should come to weep,

They might not haste to go.

Soft airs, and song, and light and bloom
Should keep them lingering by my tomb.

These to their softened hearts should bear
The thought of what has been,
And speak of one who can not share

The gladness of the scene;

Whose part, in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills,

Is that his grave is green;

And deeply would their hearts rejoice
To hear again his living voice."

It was indeed a glorious day, and the daisies were dancing and glimmering over the fields as the poet's family, a few old friends, and the villagers saw him laid in his last resting-place at Roslyn, after a few words fitly spoken by his pastor, and beheld his coffin covered with roses and other summer flowers by a little band of country children, who gently dropped them as they circled round the poet's grave. This act completed, we left the aged minstrel amid the melody dearest of all to him in life—the music of the gentle June breezes murmuring through the tree-tops, from whence also came the songs of summer birds.

The following, from the pen of Paul H. Hayne, of South Carolina, is one of the many tributes to Mr. Bryant's character and genius, that have appeared since the poet's death, from the pens of Curtis, Holland, Osgood, Powers, Stedman, Stoddard, Street, Symington (a Scottish singer), and many others:

I can not forbear adding to this expression of appreciative affection a few words from the funeral address uttered by his pastor, the Rev. Dr. Bellows, at the commemorative ceremony held in New York, on the 14th of June, at All Souls' Church, of which Mr. Bryant was for the last fifteen years of his life an active and honored member. Dr. Bellows said:

"Never, perhaps, was there an instance of such precocity in point of wisdom and maturity as that which marked Thanatopsis,' written at eighteen, or of such persistency in judgment, force, and melody as that exhibited in his last public ode, written at eighty-three, on occasion of Washington's last birthday. Between these two bounds lies one even path, high, finished, faultless, in which comes a succession of poems, always meditative, always steeped in the love and knowledge of nature, always pure and melodious, always stamped with his sign manual of faultless taste and gem-like purity.

"A devoted lover of religious liberty, he was an equal lover of religion itself—not in any precise dogmatic form, but in its righteousness, reverence, and charity.

"It is the glory of this man that his character outshone even his great talent and his large fame. Distinguished equally for his native gifts and his consummate culture, his poetic inspiration and his exquisite art, he is honored and loved to-day even more for his stainless purity of life, his unswerving rectitude of will, his devotion to the higher interests of his race, his unfeigned patriotism, and his broad humanity.

“The increasing sweetness and beneficence of his character, meanwhile, must have struck his familiar friends. His last years were his devoutest and most humane years. He became beneficent as he grew able to be so, and his hand was open to all just needs and to many unreasonable claimants."

No more appropriate concluding paragraph can be added to this memorial paper, which I could wish worthier of the good and gifted Bryant-Integer vitae scelerisque purus-than his own beautiful words, applied to his contemporary Washington Irving. "If it were becoming," said the poet, "to address our departed friend as if in his immediate presence, I would say, 'Farewell, thou who hast entered into the rest prepared from the foundation of the world for serene and gentle spirits like thine. Farewell, happy in thy life, happy in thy death, happier in the reward to which that death is the assured passage; fortunate in attracting the admiration of the world to thy beautiful writings; still more fortunate in having written nothing which did not tend to promote the reign of magnanimous forbearance and generous sympathies among thy fellow-men. The brightness of that enduring fame which thou hast won on earth is but a shadowy symbol of the glory to which thou art admitted in the world beyond the grave. Thy errand on earth was an errand of peace and good-will to men, and thou art now in a region where hatred and strife never enter, and where the harmonious activity of those who inhabit it acknowledges no impulse less noble or less pure than love."

NEW YORK, July, 1878.

JAMES GRANT WILSON.