From this point on until his death, June 12th, 1878, in his eighty-fourth year, he was the central and commanding figure in the enlarging literary world of New York.  His newspaper had gained a potent reputation, and it brought to bear upon public affairs a strong influence of the highest sort.  Its editorial course and tone, as well as the earnest and patriotic part taken by Bryant in popular questions and national affairs, without political ambition or office-holding, had established him as one of the most distinguished citizens of the metropolis, no less than its most renowned poet.  His presence and co-operation were indispensable in all great public functions or humanitarian and intellectual movements.  In 1864 his seventieth birthday was celebrated at the Century Club with extraordinary honors.  In 1875, again, the two houses of the State Legislature at Albany paid him the compliment, unprecedented in the annals of American authorship, of inviting him to a reception given to him in their official capacity.  Another mark of the abounding esteem in which he was held among his fellow-citizens was the presentation to him in 1876 of a rich silver vase, commemorative of his life and works.  He was now a wealthy man; yet his habits of life remained essentially unchanged.  His tastes were simple, his love of nature was still ardent; his literary and editorial industry unflagging.

Besides his poems, Bryant wrote two short stories for ’Tales of the Glauber Spa’; and published ‘Letters of a Traveler’ in 1850, as a result of three journeys to Europe and the Orient, together with various public addresses.  His style as a writer of prose is clear, calm, dignified, and denotes exact observation and a wide range of interests.  So too his editorial articles in the Evening Post, some of which have been preserved in his collected writings, are couched in serene and forcible English, with nothing of the sensational or the colloquial about them.  They were a fitting medium of expression for his firm conscientiousness and integrity as a journalist.

But it is as a poet, and especially by a few distinctive compositions, that Bryant will be most widely and deeply held in remembrance.  In the midst of the exacting business of his career as an editor, and many public or social demands upon his time, he found opportunity to familiarize himself with portions of German and Spanish poetry, which he translated, and to maintain in the quietude of his country home in Roslyn, Long Island, his old acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics.  From this continued study there resulted naturally in 1870 his elaborate translation of Homer’s Iliad, which was followed by that of the Odyssey in 1871.  These scholarly works, cast in strong and polished blank verse, won high praise from American critics, and even achieved a popular success, although they were not warmly acclaimed, in England.  Among literarians they are still regarded as in a manner standards of their kind.  Bryant, in his long