Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/669

* BRYANT. 593 BRYAXIS. invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard College in 1821, and his poem on that occasion, "The Ages," was published with several others in the same year. In 1825 Bryant removed to New York, where he became editor of the Xew York Reinew. In the following year he became assistant editor of the Xew York Evening Post, and in 1828 was made editor-in-chief of that paper — a post which he held till his death. Dur- ing this time he wrote and published many poems and several works in prose, besides his regular newspaper articles. Aside from his poems, which were published occasionally in various newspapers and magazines, such as the now forgotten United States Literary Gazette, the Xew York Ledger, the Atlantic Souvenir, as well as in the Xew York Evening Post, Harper's Weekly, and the Xorth Aynerican Review, Bry- ant's chief published works are the following: Letters of a Traveler (1850); Letters from Spain and Other Countries (1859); Letters from the East (18G9) ; Orations and Addresses (1873) ; and several volumes of collected poems. During the period of his active literary work he found time to translate the epics of Homer, bis well-known version of the Iliad appearing in 1S70, and that of the Odyssey in 1871-72. His death occurred in Xew York, June 12, 1878, as the result of a sunstroke, while he was making an address at the unveiling of a statue in Central Park. The literary and journalistic career of Brj-ant comprises nearly two-tliirds of a century. Noted, as a boy for his precocity, and as a man, living for fifty years in the largest city in America, for the simplicitj- and wholesomeness of his life and for his distinction of mind and bearing, his ca- reer is one of the longest in the history of Ameri- can letters. He is best knom as a poet. His "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "The Death of the Flowers," "The Fringed Gentian," "The Crowded Street," "My Country's Call," "The Bat- tlefield," and several other poems are popular, and such lines as "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again" (from "The Battlefield"), and "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year" (from "The Death of the Flowers"), have become household quotations. The poems named were produced at widely different periods during his life, but they may be taken as representative of the quality of his work, which, during his long life, changed very little. Generally speak- ing, the poetry of Bryant is distinguished for its restrained and grave thoughtfulness. Its proto- types are to be found, if anywhere, in (Cray's Elegy, the discursive ver.se of Cowper, and the nature poetry of Wordsworth. Though in finish of form, restraint, lack of fire, reflectiveness, and sentiment, it belongs to the type of the Eigh- teenth Century rather than to the period of passionate expression which, in England, was contemporaneous with it, Bryant's poetry, nevertheless, is not wanting in originality. Be- sides its frequent tenderness and sympathy with sadness, one notes in it a feeling of refined patriotism, a constant love of liberty, and a zt^al for the institutions of freedom. Thus, the poet frequently expresses his sympathy with the Greeks in their struggle for liberty, and this emo- tion grows stronger in face of the battle of the North against slavery, rising, in "My Country's Call," to more impassioned expression than is ordinarily to be found in his verse. So, too, one finds in his poetry admiration for whatever is noble and generous in the life of the North American Indian and other primitive peoples, though his feeling for the red man is probably based on a vaguer and even more remote tra- dition than that of his contemporary. Cooper. In all the poems, however, the constant note is moralizing, void of subtlety. Most of the poems of Bryant are short, and the verse-forms are not very nimierous; the one in which he attained greatest skill is a simple blank verse, as in "Thanatopsis." This verse is employed in his translations of the Iliad. As a journalist, Bryant, though less popularly known to-day than such an editor as Horace Greeley, may be regarded as among the most distinguished of Americans. For a full half- eentury he was. as proprietor and editor of the ycic York Evening Post, one of the most insist- ent and uncompromisingly urgent of all the anti- slavery propagandists -of the North. The prose style of his editorial articles was simple, straight- forward, and vigorous, lacking in subtlety and ambiguity, and never failing to make its point, and is marked, in substance, by common sense and breadth of view. Like all ephemeral writ- ing, Bryant's leading articles are unread; and the same remark, in general, applies to his more elaborate prose productions — his books of travel, his addresses, his few stories, and his literary essays, of which that on Irving is the best. These essays belong to the judicial manner of Dr. Johnson rather than to a more modern and im- pressionistic school of criticism. It should be added that Bryant has had no superior a,s a poetic describer of American scen- ery, especially in its larger, more spacious phases. It is worth noting, also, that between 1828 and 1845, when the cares of journalism pressed heavily upon him, his poetic produc- tivity suffered. After the latter date almost to his death he showed a rather surprising affluence and power, publishing many of his best poems, such as "The Flood of Y'ears." Finally, readers should be cautioned against believing that "Thanatopsis" is entirely the product of a mere youth, since the famous passage about the quar- ry-slave was apparently added several years after Bryant reached his majority. The best edition of Bryant is that of his son- in-law, Parke Godwin, in six volumes. The Life and Works of William Cullen Bryant (New York, 1883-84). There is a Life by John Bigelow. in the American Men of Letters series (Boston, 1890). Good critical appreciations are those of E. C. Stedman, in Poets of America (Boston, 1885), and of Prof. Barrett Wendell, in A Lit'-r- ary History of America (New Y'ork, 1900). BRYAXIS (Gk. Bpia^is). A Greek sculptor, contemporary of Scopas. Timotheus, and Leo- chares, with whom he participated in the work on the Mausoleum at Haliearnassus about B.c 3.50. He also created five colossal figures of the gods at Rhodes, statues of Bacchus at Cnidus. of .^^sculapius and Hygeia at Megara, of Apollo in the grove of Daphne at .^ntioch, of Serapis at .Mexandria, and a portrait of Seleucus. In 1801 a basis for a tripod, bearing his signature and three small reliefs, was found in Athens, and has suggested the possibility of identifying his work among the reliefs from the Maiisoleum. His statue of Serapis seems to have given the type for all the later heads of this deity. Con-