Page:Unpublished poems by Bryant and Thoreau.djvu/19



wrote Bryant in a poem first printed by the New York Review for February, 1826. Bryant had just come to New York, in 1825, to be associate editor of this newly founded magazine. He had at last decided to give up his profession of the law, which was so irksome; no longer to

but to return to the "calm life" of thought and poetry—

and to have the courage to be, for better or for worse, a man of letters. This decision had been reached only after much reflection and hesitation, after many nightly wanderings