Bryant Among His Countrymen THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN AN ORATION BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D. LL.D Class,,? ^ Uftl. Book ,OX - /r BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN AN ORATION BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB Wednesday Evening, October 30T11, 1878 BY SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D., LL.D. V NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS lS2 FIFTH AVENUE 1S79 3<& - ■ - \ c,\ .on DTYL Press* o'f G. P. Putnam's Sons New York. BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN ; THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN. AN ORATION BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB, WEDNESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 30, 1878, By SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D., LL.D. OUR loved and venerated friend, the illustrious poet, the patriarch of our American literature, went from us in June, the month in which he had wished to die in God's own time. Our whole people mourned. All who could enter crowded the church and joined tenderly and reverently in the fitting solemnities there. A few friends with the family followed the body to Roslyn and commit- ted it to the ground among the trees and flowers, that had learned hymns from him. The leaves are falling there, the flowers are fading and dying in that forest cemetery. That is their nature and they have kept their sacred watch at the grave as long as they could. We are not to try to change that nature or to force the bloom of earth to put on the immortality of Paradise. We are concerned now with other growths of art and letters that do not die, and we do not meet now at the grave. Death is not here, but life. This is not a funereal, but rather a festal hour, not a mor- tuary, but a natal occasion, so near to the poet's birthday and so fittingly celebrated as the new birth of his fame, now that his country accepts him anew among her immortal sons, who have said their good word and done their great 4 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. work and gone to their rest. His spirit is with God, with whom are the souls of the faithful, and so in a serious and a sacred sense it is with us, in our fellowship with that communion of letters and humanity which belongs to the kingdom of God. This Goethe Club, which is given to the higher literature under the greatest name in German poetry and which has received our venerable poet with its highest honors, justly calls you now to unite with them in this welcome of Bryant to his lasting place in his country and mankind. In treating, as I am to try to do, of his hold upon his coun- trymen, I would do it in the most generous and comprehen- sive sense and look upon all who live with us as our people, and all of every land who love good letters and fine art as of our kindred. This was his feeling always, student, traveller, citizen of the world as he was, and we seem almost to see him among us with his white head and benign face and persuasive lips as when you so cordially received him ; and he seems now to approve every hearty word for fraternity among men and peace between nations. American he was and yet none the less cosmopolitan. In fact, because truly American, he can more fully take and give our fellowship with all races. Here to-night Bryant receives honors from the countrymen of Goethe and the countrymen of Bryant rejoice in the homage and return it. I. Bryant was first to take hold of his countrymen by tak- ing hold of the country itself and by presenting our land, its scenery and growths in the charmed light of poetry. He first entered this America by the Gate Beautiful, and left it open to all who came after him. It is of course unwise to say that there was no poetic sentiment here before him, no earnest love of nature, for these belong to the civilized BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 5 human mind, and especially to the English or Anglo-Ger- man race which has lived here for two centuries and a half. There were lovers of scenery and makers of verse here from the beginning of our colonies, but it is quite remarka- ble that no classic poet appeared until he came, and that a Green Mountain Boy at eighteen years began American poetry with immortal verse. The Pilgrims of the May Flower in 1620 might have brought with them hither the master-pieces of Spenser and Shakspeare from the mother country, and the Puritans of the Arabella in 1630 were under the lead of graduates of Old Cambridge, and some of them fellow-students there with Milton himself. When the Bryants came in an after- voyage of the May Flower, to the Old Colony about the year 1640, a year which Germans may well remember as the date of the accession of that Great Elector, Frederick William of Prussia, who started what we call Modern Ger- many, they left Milton in England at the age of thirty- two, author of "Comus," " Lycidas," "II Penseroso " and " L'Allegro," just returning to London from the country to begin his political career, as our Bryant began his in New York, at about the same age, nearly two centuries afterward. Does it not seem as if the Bryant forefather, Stephen, must have brought with him some spark of that Milton's fire, and that it was kept smouldering on the family hearth, until it kindled into flame, when " Thanatopsis " sprang to life. If we ask why so gifted a people as the New England race could live nearly two hundred years in this new and beautiful country without originating any enduring poetry, we may specify some reasons that lighten if they do not quite explain the difficulty. In the first place, it must be remembered that for a long time these people b DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. had to struggle for very life, and that moreover when they conquered peace, and won comfort, they were bent on building up and extending civil order, reclaiming the wil- derness, or planting their great domain with farms and homesteads and giving what in their eyes was beauty to the stern reality of life, instead of revelling in visions of the ideal. Again if they wanted poetry, they could import it from England in plenty and a much better article than any that their pedantic versifiers were likely to produce, and they could import it also in better shape and at lower prices than those of the domestic product. But perhaps the dearth of native poetry in America may be quite as much explained by the fact that the dominant Puritan belief was unfriendly to such literature by its pecu- liar interpretation of the Bible as the only revelation from God and its contempt for nature and mankind as both fallen from God and incapable of giving light to the soul ; whilst the dominant liberals who rejected this stern creed went for a time far wrong the other way and under the teachings of Locke and his school and of the French Ma- terialists who came after him, they denied or ignored the intuitive and ideal faculties of man and were blind to the Spirit of God in nature and the world. Yet the soul of poetry was in the race, and it was only a question of time, when it should speak out. There was evidently a kind of uniformity, a sameness in the thought and life of New England, that was not favorable to poetry and the new spirit could come only with some protest or antagonism. Sameness is death, and a certain difference always goes with vitality, whether in the bursting of a bud into flower, or the opening of an age into its ideas and arts. When poetry came, a new culture challenged the old the- BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN. J ocracy, and as Greece broke away from the Oriental rule of priest and king, so the rising literature here came out from the old Puritan theocracy, and claimed to hear God's Spirit in the woods and the waters as well as in the Bible and the pulpit. We cannot but note this tendency in Bryant's earliest poems. He was never a radical in the distinctive y sense of this word either in religion or politics, yet he began with a virtual protest against the old absolutism of the dogma and priesthood ; and he appeals to nature and to mankind as witnesses to God. His first characteristic poem, " Thanatopsis," is reverent, religious, not unchristian, yet it makes no reference to church, preacher or Scripture, and in its affirmation of the universality of death, it rebukes the reigning assumption that death, in its material sense, was an afterthought of the Creator, and came with an act of trans- gression in Eden a few thousand years ago. He meditates upon death as a fact of nature to be met tranquilly by man, not as an accident that might have been shunned, or as a curse that should not have been. He keeps in this poem, as always, his piety. He is the Puritan still, who begins and ends all things with God, although he does not name Him. Yet he is a Puritan Greek as he always was, and with his sense of God over all he united a steadfast convic- tion of God's presence in nature and man and of the worth of this visible world. In some respects Bryant's love of nature was peculiar, and it differed much from that of other poets who are often named with him, especially Cowper and Wordsworth, who were in some points his masters. Nature was Bryant's first love, and he wooed her before he saw the world, whilst Cowper and Wordsworth had tried the world and had their fill of it before they took to the woods and waters ; Cowper 8 DR. OSGOOD'S ORA TION. having for a while lost his wits under its coaxing agitations, and Wordsworth having escaped with his head from the revolutionary mob of Paris and the threat of the guillotine. If it is said, as it surely may be, that Bryant had none of the excitements and temptations that met those gifted men, and that with him the choice was between nature as a school of poetry and no school at all, we must allow a cer- tain truth to the statement. Yet how honorable is this serious truth ! With no masterpieces of art around him, no old halls and temples, no pictures and sculpture, with little color in costume or in house decoration, with few books, little if any good music, little artistic society, instead of Oxford or Cambridge and their favored fellowships for life, with only two years of study in William's College, which was only one year older than he was, when he entered it at the age of sixteen, in 1810 ; with all these limitations, Bryant, when about eighteen years of age, wrote a poem of nature which the English language cannot spare, any more than it can spare the masterpieces of Cowper and Words- worth. He loved nature none the less because he loved her first, and he had her love in return, and a certain elemental power came to him from her and went into his verse. Of course he carried his own life, his own thought and feeling to nature, but he did not carry the passions of the world and the agitations of a stormy career to her, that she might comfort him for the loss of other loves or help him fight the old battles, and tell the old stories, and paint the old pictures over again. Herein he differs widely from Byron who came out as a poet at about the same time, and whose " Childe Harold " runs parallel in date with Bryant's early poems. " Childe Harold," if not the most remarkable, is cer- BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN. 9 tainly the most celebrated English poem of the Nineteenth Century, and it has made the most mark upon men ; yet we Americans do not shrink from naming our poet's early pieces in their calm wisdom and reverent beauty in the same breath with that impassioned and marvellous Ro- maunt. Bryant had not Spain, Switzerland, Greece and Italy to roam over and to put into song ; but the mountain boy looked as deeply into nature as the petted English Lord, and he did not make the mistake of transferring to her face the blood-shot gleam of his own eyes and of con- founding his passions with her moods. Bryant had not seen Santa Croce or written like Byron : — " In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie Ashes which make it holier, dust which is Even in itself an immortality." There were no stately tombs or temples around his village home or within his range of village burying grounds, but he saw death in its majesty, and what a sepulchre he dis- covered : — " The hills Rock ribbed and ancient as the sun, the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between ; The venerable woods — rivers that move In majesty and the complaining brooks That make the meadow green ; and poured round all Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste — Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man." He had not St. Peter's Church before him — " Christ's mighty shrine before his martyr's tomb." Nor could he say of it with Byron : — " But thou of temples old and altars new, Standest alone with nothing like to thee — Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. Majesty, Power, Glory, Strength and Beauty all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled." 10 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. So wrote Childe Harold, but we Americans can say our prayers as well at the call of our Childe William in his " Forest Hymn," and he found a place of worship grander far:— " The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft and lay the architrave And spread the roof above them — ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sounds of anthems ; in the darkling wood Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication. Be it ours to meditate In these calm shades thy milder majesty And to the beautiful order of thy works Learn to conform the order of our lives." So the comparison might run on not wholly to the disad- vantage of our bard whose faith like his own " Waterfowl '■' is divinely guided, whilst poor Harold strays tempest-tossed. Truly, Bryant wrote in that early time, and it was always true of him : "He who from zone to zone Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight In the long way that I must tread alone Will lead my steps aright." The forty poems which expressed Bryant's genius and experience before he came to New York in 1825 show what rich lessons he learned in his studies and rambles in that hill country of Western Massachusetts, and these speci- mens prove their dominant tone. He was certainly a poet because God made him so, and he did his best probably before he knew what he was doing. Perhaps it is wisest to leave there the definition of poetry, and to say simply that it comes from poets as apples come from apple-trees. We may define the two things, the poetry and the apples, but we must have them before we define them and the things are better than the definitions. All the familiar definitions of BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 1 poetry have a certain truth, but none has the whole truth. It is, as is often said, the ideal in literature, but not the ideal only or always ; for much strong and kindling poetry deals with the most positive and sensuous reality, and this is the present turn of the muse. Nor does poetry always put beautiful thought into beautiful words, for much thrill- ing verse presents frightful images in terrible words, and tragedy goes as far as it can with terror without parting company with pity, which subdues fear and so purifies emo- tion. Aristotle, with his marvellous good sense, comes very near the mark when he distinguishes poetry from history by its dealing with things as they may be, instead of as they are, and by its treating of the whole instead of the parts. For certainly the poet is looking to what may be, and he is always trying to make the least word or sentence tell the whole of the matter. But without spending time in com- bining and condensing definitions, we may safely say, that poetry comes from a certain fulness of spirit that over- flows in new forms, and that the poet is he who is moved to make things new from what is in him and the world. The poet is he who sees and seizes the life of things and puts it into pictured and musical words. This life like all fulness of life tends to rhythm, and the muse dances more or less gaily or solemnly as all overflowing life dances. There was this overflow in young Bryant, and if there was not as much voluptuous sweetness or high-wrought music in his strain as in other gifted bards, and if he tended more to solemn rhythm, than to luxurious melody, it was because / his temper was serious ; and moreover because his teacher in verse was nature, more than schools, and nature tends to rhythm more than to melody, and her rivers and forests and winds and oceans sing a very plain chant, and the 12 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. birds themselves do not go far into the airs of Mozart and Mendelsohn. As to the material of Bryant's early and characteristic poetry, it evidently deals more with nature than with human life. It is landscape-painting with few figures introduced, yet always with tender feeling for men, per- haps more feeling for them than with them. The speech- less babe and the gray headed man, the matron and the maid appear to him as he meditates upon the dying ages ; and in his "Winter Piece" the herbless field and the spoiled shades were still sought and precious : — " I loved them still ; for they seemed Like old companions in adversity." He was more at home with landscape and nature than with persons, and it is quite memorable that even in his thought- ful and elaborate poem of "The Ages," delivered at Cam- bridge in 1 82 1, in which History is his theme, he gives about as many lines to his description of Boston Harbor, with its islands, as to the sketch of Greece and Rome, with their heroes and sages. Yet persons gain more and more ground upon his canvas, and he cannot look upon the cold and solemn North Star without feeling for the sailor, half- wrecked, his compass lost, and for the lost travellers in perilous wastes, who find safety in that light. As to the ideas that run through these early poems, we may say what we have already hinted, that they are of the Hebrew-Greek type ; that is they start from the existence of God over all nature and life, and they recognize the presence of His spirit in all creation, thus combining in a certain way faith in the Transcendent and in the Immanent God. Yet he is rather with Cowper than with Wordsworth in his limited sense of the full immanence of the divine life BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 3 in nature ; and he looks more with the eye of the Hebrew than that of the Greek, or may we not say more with the eye of Isaiah than that of a modern German like Goethe on the universe. He philosophizes upon the universe more with Newton than Spinoza, and to him God is more First Cause than Eternal Substance. Herein he is all the more American, for we start in our thinking from the God of our fathers, and we shrink from whatever looks like the pantheist vision of nature as the Supreme. Yet the poet keeps his faith firm in God in all as well as over all, and he is Greek as well as Hebrew in this. In his " Ages" he speaks of the Greek illumination thus: — " And the pure ray, that from thy bosom came, Far over many a land and age has shone And mingles with the light that beams from God's own throne." To him too nature unmistakably reveals the mind of God, and he accepts the ancient faith that the Polar Star instead of relentless force presents in its beams — " A beauteous type of that unchanging good, That bright eternal beacon by whose ray The voyager of time should shape his heedful way." Such in their leading traits were Bryant's early poems, and by them he took hold of his countrymen by taking first hold of the country, winning the people with the land which his muse conquered. I can only add briefly under this head, that in thus taking the landscape, he took hold of the people also by two leading ideas, which are essen- tially American — first the idea of firm citizenship under civil justice, and secondly the idea of fair play to the human mind by full freedom to bring out its powers. The young poet from boyhood was a sturdy patriot, and flamed up in verse on Independence days ; and in vindicating his own right to be a poet, he vindicated the right of all true 14 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. culture in a day when narrowness pinched the schools as well as the churches. Those who can look back as far as 1825, the year when Bryant came to New York, can re- member those early poems in our school books, and what an impression we who were at school then had of the poet and of the man. In the name of the school boys of that day, of whom I was one, and of the school girls who will allow me to speak for them, I express our filial reverence for the poet of our childhood and our youth, whose verses became a part of our very being, and beat with our hearts, and moved in our step in their grace and power. This is not the trick of rhetoric, but the offering of earnest grati- tude. How many thoughtful men and women, who read his verses when they were at school, can rise up and call William Cullen Bryant blessed for what he has been and done for them and their children. His name is blessed here to-night. II. But now a great change came to him, and with it no small trial of his spirit and purpose. Why he left his country home and law office in Great Barrington for the more stirring life and opportunity of a great city, we can readily see; but we do not so readily understand why he came here to New York instead of going to Boston where he had been so honored, and where his Puritan temper was more at home. Nearness and the easy drift of rivers be- tween New York and Western Massachusetts, and the wishes of cordial friends who lived there and here, had much to do with his choice undoubtedly ; yet there was a destiny in it that drew him to the great center of com- merce, enterprise, and ultimately of arts and letters. When he came here, however, this city had little of its present standing, and Boston and Philadelphia disputed its pros- BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 5 pective superiority even in population and trade. It was then comparatively a provincial city, great indeed, hoping soon to complete its second hundred thousand of inhabi- tants under the spur of the Erie Canal, which then opened into this harbor for the first time the waters and the wealth of the great lakes. Great and tingling was the promise of growth and power, but not greater than was accomplished in twenty-five years. If the Erie Canal made this city metropolitan in 1825, the ocean steamers, California gold, the railroads and the electric telegraph made her cosmo- politan about a quarter of a century afterwards ; and our rural poet came to live and work and be author, editor and citizen in all this turmoil and chase. What will become of him, the ready question is? What did become of him, we who have known him here in his career for fifty years, more or less, can say with considerable unanimity. It is well to consider how he was received here as a man of letters, this Puritan bard upon this Knickerbocker ground, and among a people whose choice society was little Puri- tanic, and to a considerable extent quite churchly and Anglican. He might have found apparently more con- genial society in Boston, and it is not easy to say how his genius would have shaped itself with those cultivated and gifted men, Ticknor and Longfellow and Lowell, under the elms of Harvard, and whether this village Milton might not have added his mature epic poem, his Paradise Lost, to his early miscellaneous pieces. But he did not go to Boston or Cambridge, and he did come here ; and he found work and home and friends and fame in some respects new. The time was in certain respects favorable here for author- ship, and here, as also in Boston, there was a memorable awakening in literature, although this city had the start in 1 6 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. classic letters of the English school, and even in history, Irving was in advance of Prescott and Bancroft, and the noble Boston historical school. Bryant dates the new literary movement from 1821, when Cooper first won fame by his " Spy," when Irving's " Sketch Book " was completed, when Miss Sedgwick began her charming series of domestic novels, and Percival and Halleck published their poems. Boston was not far behind, and perhaps in certain scholastic studies in advance of New York ; and Dana's " Idle Man" was completed, and " Bryant's Ages," and a few other poems came out that same year in the Pilgrim City. Yet it must be remembered that the literary atmosphere of Boston was then in some respects more heavy and schol- astic than that of New York, and less favorable to the genial English taste that prevailed in the best circle here. Dana's love for Shakespeare and Coleridge and Words- worth was not much liked among the old school liberals of Boston, who had been brought up upon Locke and Pope ; and a very superficial philosophy and criticism shut out the leading thinkers and authors of New England then from communion with the best mind of England ; whilst a certain theological prejudice estranged theologians from the great lights of the English and Latin Church until Chan- ning broke the spell by his Essays on " Milton and Fenelon" (1 826-1 829), and claimed for the best literature of Christen- dom a place among the inspirations of God. Had Bryant gone to Boston, he might have joined in the renaissance there, and he might not only have accepted, as he did the Channing movement for humanity, but he might have favored the more radical transcendental movement headed by Emerson in 1832, which was perhaps more Germanic than English or American in its idea and tendency ; al- BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 7 though he disliked this movement to a certain extent, and often he has said to me that the Boston and Cambridge men Germanized too much. But he stayed here, and he brought his Puritan severity and his Greek culture to bear upon the revived old-school literature here ; and he was cordially received by its leaders, especially by Cooper and the circle of scholars and gentlemen who composed the weekly club which Cooper had founded, many of whose faces we can recall, such as Chancellor Kent, Wiley the bookseller, Henry D. Sedgwick, Morse, Durand, Professor H. J. Anderson, Halleck, Verplanck and Charles King. The place of the meeting, the old Washington Hotel, near our City Park, and on the site of Stewart's great marble store, shows how close his quarters were, and how New York has grown since those days. The influence of those associates must in some respects have been wholesome for a man re- served and introspective as Bryant was ; and it did much to make him in the best sense a New York man, and some- what different from the noted and excellent Boston and Cambridge type of character, which was so subjective, scholastic, sedentary, and until of late so little muscular and artistic, far more fond of books than of nature, and of print than pictures and sculpture. He had had enough of the East wind, and, grateful for the bracing air, he was evidently not sorry now to be nearer the Western breezes ; and he was not afraid of a Southern exposure, for he knew how to take it without harm. Probably his life here did much to give him hold upon reality, to warm his poetry with sunshine, to animate it with personality and action, and to give it more body than before. If Bryant and Emerson are the two great American interpreters of nature, and we honor them both as they lb DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. honored each other, may we not say that nature is more completely interpreted by their difference as well as by their likeness, and that Emerson's subjective and intro- versial sense is helped out by Bryant's open vision and objective reality. They stand together now two sons of Massachusetts, two good New Englanders, who in different schools have interpreted nature to our time and to the ages. The most telling tribute ever paid to the dead poet was paid by the survivor fourteen years ago, when both met at Bryant's seventieth anniversary and Emerson was the guest of honor there. As a poet he kept his hold of his countrymen, and he strengthened it not by any new and startling bursts of genius, but by keeping the old ground and growing from the old root. His poetry widened its range, ripened its beauty and sweetened its humanity and exalted its faith ; but it did not change its essential type of calm medita- tion and descriptive art. New subjects came into his field of vision in his new home, whilst he kept open his old base of supplies of rural images from the fields and woods and rivers and hills of his early days. His verse feels the power of the near ocean and speaks as neighbor to the Western prairie ; it stirs with the rush of the waters of the noble Hudson, and is not unmindful of the rush of human life in the currents of noble Broadway. He catches the pulse- beat of the great nations here, and answers to it in trans- lations of choice gems of the French, Spanish, German and Portuguese muse and in original odes to the genius of Dante and Schiller. He does not forget Nature, and his exqui- site studies of the flowers and the seasons, the clouds and stars and winds and woods, the seas and mountains, grow into such completeness that a Bryant Year of Nature might BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 9 rival in beauty and favor Keble's " Christian Year." Yet life, in its struggle and pressure, came in for its share of his thought, and his later poems deepen in pathos for human grief and sometimes ring with enthusiasm for patriotism and humanity. Religion becomes a more positive convic- tion and emotion, and what is sometimes said of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the last of the great Stoics, may be said with added meaning of him. It was said of Marcus Aurelius that he brought Stoicism so near to Christianity that after him it died out and Christianity took its place. In Bryant the change was made before death, and his poems are the record that in his life he passed from the Stoic into the Christian, and so embodied the lessons of ages in his experience. Yet his poetry kept its essential intellectual type and did not glow with passion or burn with martial fire. He had neither epic fulness nor dramatic compass and force. This is but saying that he belonged to his own time and people and school and temperament ; for the New England that schooled him was essentially intellectual and meditative in its literature, and even in theology it reasoned out Heaven and Hell by calm logic, and left passion and force to other and more worldly fields. He was in his way scholastic in his poetry, a disciple of his own set school ; and with his wonderful sense of beauty, he never ventures to lose his calmness or in any way to be unwise. He never said a foolish thing and rarely, if ever did an unwise one. Even love, which makes so many men fools, made him thoughtful ; and his one sacred love went forth in calm idyls and rose into godly hymns, and never burned with wasting fires. Yet this we may and must say in truth of the calmness of his verse and of a certain want of the will element in his 20 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. muse, that his active life made up for that want. His life was epic and drama too, true to the supreme justice that follows the Epos of Providence, and brave for the sovereign right that works out and fights out the Ethos of mankind. We must look to him as to the patriot and the man in order to appreciate the worth of the ideal expression and force that he gave, and to show that poetry is not word only but action also. His poetry was little personal, and shy of men and women he was more at home, especially in early life, with nature. Herein he differs signally from Goethe who always delighted in persons, and who put his whole poetic and ideal experi- ence into such personal forms as Werther, Faust and Wil- helm Meister. " Faust," Goethe's masterpiece, and the great poem of modern times since " Hamlet," is not only Goethe himself, but the modern man as Thinker under trial from Passion, Doubt and Care and as Conqueror by the Spirit of Beauty and the power of Action. Bryant did not put him- self and his age into any such ideal embodiment. He saw much of the modern man, and lived the modern life, but not as Goethe did. He was the new Puritan, the modern Independent in face of Death, Tyranny and Superstition. Conqueror by the charm of Nature, and by the power of Faith and Duty. This Puritan Greek lived out his idea grandly, and he did not dramatize it, as Goethe dramatized his. Bryant apparently did not have a hard struggle with passion as Goethe did, but he knew Doubt and Care and conquered them. If he was not compelled to fight hard with the flesh, he saw something of the world and the devil. How could he help it, all those fifty years here in this tumult — and his victory was constant, noble and inspiring. If he did not put the poem of his life into verse, he left the BR YA NT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 1 materials as a legacy to us, and Time is already beginning to shape these materials into form and to breathe into them a soul. The Puritan Greek is the name of that life-poem. Dwell a little now upon Bryant's career among us as a patriot, which is very much the same with his course as an editor. Editors are not always saints, even in New York, where we have the best of them. He was not quite saintly in his temper always, yet the wonder was that when there was so much to tempt an editor to play the Satan in re- venge, he grew in courtesy and lost the gall from his pen without losing its point. I do not propose and I am not qualified to go into the record of his political career. Not a partisan myself, and believing him to have been a sincere patriot, I will content myself, and I hope to make you con- tent with the simplest statement of his public career, and of the work which he did for his country by his pen and voice. If my remarks are too general and sweeping to suit practical politicians, set it down to my professional habit or philosophical infirmity. Bryant, as a patriot, belongs to what may be called in the largest sense, the second cycle of our national history ; and in this cycle he was the foremost citizen, who served and ruled the country without official power. From 1775, when Washington took command of our army at Cambridge, to 1825, when John Quincy Adams became President of the United States, Virginia had been, in a sense, the dominant state in the Union, and her men tended to the chief place. All the Presidents with the exception of the single term of John Adams, of Massachusetts, who was elected by the vote of Maryland, (1797-1801) were Virginians, and in 1825, when Bryant came to New York, the power of the Old Dominion was broken, the old parties were virtually dead; 22 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A T/OJV. new issues arose under the spur of new local and industrial interests, and the new cycle of American politics had be- gun. The two states that had always followed close upon Virginia and tried to take from her the Presidency, were Massachusetts and New York, with South Carolina close upon their heels. Massachusetts with the help of New York and the West, carried the day in 1825 for Adams, but after that New York changed the whole course of things by reaching down, not to South Carolina for a Calhoun, or Mississippi for a Jefferson Davis, but to the South-west for a new man, and the election of Jackson, of Tennessee, in 1829, with Van Buren as the Vice-President afterwards, was started in her counsels. Here Bryant's political career be- gan with the new democracy, which has been so much dominated by New York ; and his interest in the movement was not for the partisanship and greed for spoils which so damaged it, but from his interest in the opposition to false centralization and his wish to guard against the prostitution of the national power to local schemes or class aggrandise- ment. The popular party in the first cycle of fifty years, changed its name from Republican to Democrat, and in the second cycle it changed its name back again from Democrat to Republican with his sympathy. He had a great sense of individual right, and of the necessity of guarding against every infringement of liberty. He, who had so assailed the Jefferson democracy in his boyish rhymes, had become quite Jeffersonian in his ideas, and looked upon govern- ment as chiefly valuable, as it lets people and states alone, and as it secures them the freedom to be let alone, and to do their best to help themselves. Protective tariffs for special branches of business, and financial corporations with exclusive privileges he disliked. He went for free states, BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 3 and free trade under the National Union ; and when in 1832, South Carolina undertook to show her teeth and threaten nullification, Bryant approved President Jackson alike for showing the guns of the frigate Constitution near Fort Sumter, and for abating the high tariff that had given Carolina much of her provocation. His aim was the free- dom of the States, and also the right of the Union; and the key to his whole career is in his estimate of the just relation between the central and the sectional, the centri- petal and centrifugal forces of the nation. The States and the Nation, God hath joined them together, let not man put them assunder ; this was his political creed. He has been essentially right, and he has triumphed. He triumphed when the rightful flag of our fathers was put back upon repentant Fort Sumter, and he triumphed when the army was withdrawn from the insurgent states, and local law was left to its own jurisdiction. He will tri- umph if ever that madness is renewed and insurgents again anywhere assail the fortresses and the flag of our country. He triumphs now, that under the scourge of pestilence, good will binds North and South together ; and we hope for peace and prosperity in the restored republic, with the law of the nation unbroken, and its credit untarnished, with the honest dollar the money of the honest man. That he made no mistakes I will not say, for he was human, and the field of politics is not all patriotism or humanity. But he kept justice uppermost ; he took no bribes and sought no station ; and I call him calmly the first citizen of our country in our time. I am certain that his patriotism exalts his poetry, and joins him more closely to the great bards, who have felt their country in their inspiration, with Dante, father of modern letters at their head, who in Bryant's own words : 24 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. " Scattered far as sight can reach The seeds of free and living thought On the broad field of modern speech." Allow me to recall the fact that after he wrote this ode to Dante on the sixth centennial of his birth, in 1865, he brought me with his own hand, at my request, the root of a choice clematis, to be planted as a Dante memorial in some country grounds ; and that last June, when he was taken ill, it bloomed, and when he died, the flower faded and fell. Bryant's patriotism was more memorable, because he was not an enthusiast for institutions and organizations, but a. lover of independence and self-control ; or to use an em- phatic distinction, which is said to divide men into separate classes, he was an individualist, not a multitudinist, more earnest for the one in his freedom, than for the many in the mass. But his individualism made him patriotic by con- necting the liberty of persons with the union of states and the law of the nation. How he differed from Webster in temperament and schooling, and who of us who were there can forget their meeting at the Cooper Commemora- tion, in 1852, when Webster presided and Bryant was orator, — those two men, the burly iron bound Constitution- alist and the lithe, slight, wiry Free Soiler and Free Trader. Yet God had a use for them both, and he has been bringing them and their ideas together. The nation is stronger because of that statesman and that poet ; and Bryant and Webster live with us to-day in the freedom of the States and the union of the nation. Webster's oration at Plymouth, in 1820, against the slave trade chimes well with Bryant's ode in 1866, on the " Death of Slavery" : " A glory clothes the land from sea to sea, For the great land and all its coasts are free." BR YANT A MONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 5 But the man was the inmost fact and the man is upper- most in our thought to-day. We knew him well, and he did not keep himself aloof from us, and he was willing that we should know him. The man was the soul of the poet and the patriot, and his life was marvellously consistent, all of a piece, his character and his works, " integer vitae sceler- isque purus," whole and without stain indeed. His quick and gentle eye, his delicate and vigorous senses, and his apt and agile hand and foot showed the sensibility and strength that marked his career, and enabled his pen to paint his page with beauty, and to point it with truth and courage. His intellect looked out of his refined and manly face, and promised wise insight rather than elaborate analysis. He was more of a practical sage than a speculative philosopher ; more fond of seeing and showing the form and movement of life than of anatomising its vitals. In his affections he was kindly and constant ; and if somewhat reserved in so- ciety, and not always open like the rose when it has bloomed, he was like the water lily that opened always anew at the touch of sunshine. He had many friends, and kept and served them, and made sacrifices for them. He never set himself above the lowliest of his associates, and he was as free from arrogance as from servility. In his way, indeed, he was a very proud man, the proudest that I ever knew. He never sought out the great after the stan- dard of this world's gold and rank, and he never turned away from the poor and humble. He was never frightened by numbers, position and wealth, whilst very sensitive to- wards favor. I never knew him to be agitated but once, and that was two years ago in this hall, when as he came to receive a national tribute, that beautiful vase which was given not by any clique or club, but by people of every 26 DR. OSGOOD'S ORA TION. name and station from Boston to San Francisco, the whole of the great assembly without a hint or a suggestion rose up in reverence, and then the old poet trembled for a moment like a child. He was a good example of what we call dignity in America, the dignity which comes not from flattening every body up or down to the same dead level, but from modestly being free to be yourself in your own gifts, tastes and sphere, and leaving others to be free. Remember him as he went up and down Broadway, to and from his daily work in plain dress, a man among men, what dignity unasked and undis- puted attended him. Germans, your Emperor William has dignity in Berlin as he rides through the Unter den Linden in his helmet and military cloak. Honor to him in his rightful place and brave and truthful manhood, and con- found eveiy assassin's hand that strikes at him, the lawful chief. But equal majesty went with our citizen William as he went down Broadway to his printing office to hold the pen of Franklin, and to reach the nation and the world with his thought. He too, in his way was a soldier and knew how to use his weapon, and could hit the mark in his edi- torials ; and if he did not please those dainty critics who like to see the target sprinkled with clattering shot, he won favor from the adepts who knew when " the bulls'-eye " is pierced by the rifle ball. If not naturally a very social man, he came to be more ^ than almost any other man in sympathy with his neighbors and the community by his hold upon great principles and interests. He was in his way as well as poet and editor, farmer, forester, herdsman, chemist, physiologist, political economist, moralist, artist, historian, and somewhat of a theologian, and ready to say his word wherever he was duly BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2J called and able to comply. His social life deepened with advancing years ; and in his enthusiasm for public interests and associations during the last twenty years he seemed to have a second youth, more susceptible and sometimes more impulsive than his first youth. In fact a new bloom appeared to be budding within him, and to make us sometimes think that this century plant was waiting for the hundred years to bring out its final and full flowering. The last time that I met him in society, it was on last May Day at a festive reunion of clergymen, where he was the honored guest, and he spoke with his accustomed grace and point. Of the nearly fifty who were present, most were young men who greeted him for the first time, and were cordially received by him. The fellowship was generous and not bound by sect, and I never saw him so happy as whilst the noblest utter- ances of comprehensive religion such as that of the Rev Dr. Prentiss on The Divine Fatherhood and Sonship were made, and his face was rapturous in its delight. The last evening that I spent with him, he dwelt much upon that charming occasion, and he was full of the beauty and joy of the country where he had been. His conversation was then unusually various and significant, ranging from physiology to literature and religion ; in his love of nature showing the poet, and in his request for an article for his paper on an important subject keeping his place in the editor's chair. The remark that left most impression upon me was this, " why should not a man however old be happy, so long as he can enjoy nature and be free from pain." So the facts and faculties of his being held together to the last, and when he fell under the blazing sun with a plea for liberty and national union on his lips in that lovely park which he had helped to construct, it seemed as if that landscape all 28 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. around was presenting and interpreting his poems of nature, and giving the scenery for the closing act of that life which had been a drama of justice and humanity. There was something more and better than coolness and slowness in the economy of his life. He lived long and well, not because he lived slowly and scantly, but because he lived fully and harmoniously. He was careful to receive as much aliment as he needed to give out in action and thought, and he found the aliment in nature, society and religion, in a wise order of variety and constancy in the city, by the seaside and among the hills. So in a measure he interpreted the celestial Present of his " Flood of Years." " In whose reign the change That waits on growth and action shall proceed With everlasting Concord hand in hand." III. Thus Bryant deepens the hold upon his countrymen, which he first took by his mastering the country itself in the spirit of poetry and patriotism. Is this hold to con- tinue, or is it to stop in course of time, and be forgotten as most men are forgotten ? Our feeling and conviction say no. His works are to live, and his work is not to die. There are undoubtedly to be great changes in literature and taste and art as in all things. Poets are seeing more tragedy in nature than he saw, and they are telling of more sadness and passion in life than he noted. But he looked with keen and honest eyes, and said what he saw, and his word answered to the fact before him. So the very changes that come will add value to his works, because they are true to him and to his time ; and they are moreover foundation stones upon which the new culture must rest, and which BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 29 its loftiest spires cannot disown any more than those min- ster towers can ignore the walls upon which they stand, y* Remember too that though modes may change, man and nature remain, and God and Justice never die. His work lives after him in the union of beauty and justice, as well as liberty and truth, powers sometimes fearfully separated, and which God has joined in this his servant's career. Sacred Duty in him was wedded to ideal Grace, as when of old grave Numa, who ruled the state with steadfast care, sought solace in the groves from Egeria, the nymph of heaven. The man himself is in his works, and he works ever with them. His gentleness was mated with strength that marked his character, and looked out from his face. He was a very mild, unpretending man, and not commanding in stature, yet it was hard to resist the impression of his having a certain grandeur of form as of spirit, and artists generally overdrew his figure and his face. It was not accident, but a certain inherent dignity that made them do this. His intimate friends revered him, and they who knew him well, and saw him often and freely as I, for years — some fifteen years his pastor and always his friend — did for some thirty years, never presumed to any light familiarity with him, and they would not put their hand on his shoulder fondly, although any playful and confiding child might do so, and not be rebuked. This impression followed him to the last. On his death bed, the day before he died, when I offered at his bedside the prayer for the dying, which I knew that he loved, his head had the look of a Titan ; and when it sank in the repose of death, and a few favored friends were admitted to the sacred presence, his face in its exquisite lines and noble features and silvery radiance was 30 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. as one of God's own shining ones, and angelic in sweetness and spirituality. That face is ours, and it belongs to our country. It is everywhere with the faces of Washington and Franklin, and no effort or neglect of man can tear it out of the treasures of art and the custody of affection. Is there not moreover a kind of environment, a sphere of influence, a fellowship of powers and persons that goes with and keeps him living with us ? How much there is in this city to hold him to us, and us to him. The German Goethe did much to build up Weimar in his fifty years' residence there, and to train Duke Charles Augustus in taste and wisdom. Bryant, in a different way, has done no less for New York and for the promising and sometimes preverse, but not incorrigible, Prince Gotham, who rules the city by sovereign ballot, and who, we hope, although sometimes a little wild, is not a bad fellow at heart, and has pretty much sown his wild oats. Bryant meets us every where : Our rural cemeteries in their sacred beauty began public art, and they repeat " Thanatopsis" in their lawns and sculp- tures. Our lovely parks interpret the " Forest Hymn" in it's reverence and joy. Our mighty press in its new and growing relations with our social and religious life, is maturing the connection which he formed between the secular and the sacred rela- tions of this community, and mediating, without confound- ing them, between the Church and the world. The beau- tiful, and also the useful arts, are coming together under the lead which he held more by the purity of his taste and the largeness of his sympathy than by any new or profound theory of art. Our artists are nearer to our best life and favor here to-day, because he liked them and went with them. Religion felt his influence, and unassuming and BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 3 I little dogmatic as he was, he rebuked the spirit of sect and the pride of caste, so that our church fellowship is sweeter, more humane and godly because of his presence, his hymns and his example. More and more he loved the living Gospel and the living Christ, and the less he cared for any of the sects that set themselves up in place of God and his Christ. He seemed in a remarkable way to carry the years with him instead of being carried away by them, and the century of years invested him with a certain majesty, and went with him as a body guard. The " Flood of Years" did not drown, but floated the man and his muse. The great prin- ciples and tendencies which the eighteenth century, in its impatient individualism, brought to the nineteenth century, with its passion for reconciliation and unity, spoke in his word and lived in his thought. Franklin and Adam Smith led the way in that company, and Goethe and Manzoni, Keble and Wordsworth, Peel and Lincoln, Cavour and Thiers, Maurice and Channing followed in the great pro- cession that ever seemed to attend him in his public ad- dresses, and in fact to be around him in his quiet home, and to help him in his unpretending conversation. To those of us who were his neighbors, it was a great privilege to visit him, and when we saw him, we met the whole century in his presence. Old Homer too was his com- panion, and helped him to hold his Greek culture with his New Testament faith. So the ages joined to do him honor, and to keep him true. If I were asked to sketch a memorial or a monument for Bryant's memory, I would not presume to do it, or pre- tend to interfere with the proper artist's task. I would, however, venture upon a hint to the competent artist. I 3 2 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. would say, put something of Delphi and Jerusalem into your tribute to this Puritan Greek. Take from the Delphic porch the head of Homer, and these two inscriptions, MrjSev ayav, " No excess ;" rrcaOi aeavrov, " Know thy- self," and then put a fitting statue in front. What shall this be ? Not the Pythoness, with the tripod from the cave beneath where intoxicating gases breathed the inebri- ation that was mistaken for inspiration. Not that figure or that art, but put our poet himself there on a granite rock from his native hills, with one hand outstretched to- wards the fields mountains, and waters, and with the other hand lifted up, and holding a scroll of the everlasting Gospel, and showing plainly the words of Christ, " The truth shall make you free." So Delphi and Jerusalem, Greece and Judea meet together in this man, and give him hold on his country and the world. Poet, Patriot, Man, Friend of us all, Father of our Let- ters, what shall we say as we part ! Farewell forever ? No. Welcome forever ! Welcome to your lasting place in the love and honor of your countrymen ! Welcome to your home in the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven ! THE POET'S LAST MAY-DAY. May, 1878, came in with great beauty, and a company of Christian scholars, after consecrating the occasion by the celebration of the Holy Communion, at the Church of the Atonement, met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel for a social breakfast. There were but few invited guests, and among this choice number our poet held the place of honor, and sat at the right hand of the chairman. He came accompanied by two clergymen, his personal friends, Drs. Osgood and Powers, and was cordially welcomed by the whole company, most of whom had never met him before. He was in full health and spirits, and entered into all the life of the proceedings. The following is the charming little speech which he made at the chairman's call : THE POET'S LAST MA Y-DA Y. 33 " I obey the call which is made upon me, although in doing so I reverse the ordinary mode of proceeding. It is the province of the clergy to address the laity, and here am I, a layman, rising to address the clergy. Yet as the sermon to the clergy — the concio ad dentin — is for one of their own cloth to deliver, I shall take care, in what little I say, not to preach. " When my friend Dr. Osgood told me the other day that if I accepted the invitation to this breakfast I would be called upon to say something, he was good enough to suggest as a subject the Christian poets of our language. This seemed a good suggestion ; but in going over the list of our poets who had treated largely of subjects connected with the Christian religion, I perceived that the two most eminent among them — Milton and Cowper — were laymen. If Wordsworth is to be included in the same class, and Coleridge besides, the author of that glorious " Sunrise Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni," they were laymen also. I was puzzled to know how to twist this circumstance into a compliment to the clergy whose guest I was to be, who had graciously offered me a seat with this reverend company, and to whom I naturally desired to say something pleasant. I went over the list of Christian poets who were clergy- men, from the two Fletchers, Giles and Phineas, down to the present day, an illustrious brotherhood, but taking less lofty flights, and therefore belonging to the class of minor poets. It then occurred to me that in passages of their writings some of them had shown a genius which, if it had been guided principally in the direction of poetry, might have placed them in the class of their more eminent brethren. There is Young, a born poet if there ever was one, at whose torch Byron was wont to kindle his poetic fire. I cannot rank him with Cowper, for he had not the same delicate perception of beauty, the same just sense of symmetry and proportion, and the same affectionate observation of nature ; but what fine passages he has ! There is one which I have never seen selected for commendation, in which he imagined the gloomy spectre of the World before the Flood sorrowing for a whole generation of mankind engulfed in the waters, and predicting another destruction, as general, by fire. Will you hear it ? " l But oh, Lorenzo, far above the rest, Of ghastly feature and enormous size, One form assaults my sight, and chills my blood, And shakes my frame. Of one departed world I see the mighty shadow ; oozy wreath And dismal sea-weed crown her. O'er her urn Reclined she weeps her desolated realms And her drowned sons, and, weeping, prophesies Another's dissolution, soon, in flames.' '" What a fine poem, short as it is, that of Croly on the " Genius of Death " as represented on an ancient gem ! " ' Spirit of the drooping wing And the ever weary eye ! Thou of all earth's kings art king ; Empires at Thy footstool lie ; Before thee strewed Their multitude Sink like waves upon the shore Storms can never rouse them more.' There is yet another stanza quite as fine, but I cannot repeat it. LofC. 34 THE POET'S LAST MA Y-DA Y. " These and other passages in the works of poets who were of the clergy led me to the true solution of the problem that had perplexed me. I reflected that one important part of a clergyman's duty was the delivery of sermons, and that when a striking thought, a grand idea, a conception capable of the highest poetic expression, came into his mind, he had an immediate use for it. I perceived that he needed it to enforce the message he had to deliver. Instead of employing the time which should be given to parochial duties in the task of giving these high thoughts a poetic foi - m, for their preservation, the faithful clergyman takes them into the pulpit with him, and launches them at the audience winged with the living voice. He disinterestedly sacrifices present fame to future usefulness ; his reputation as a poet to his duty as a preacher." 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