George W. Bethune followed him, thundering out in that marvellous flow of ideas, with an eloquence that made him the pulpit orator of his generation in the South.  Bryant’s hair was then just touched with grey.  The last time I saw him was in my house on Oxford Street, two years ago, in a company of literary people.  I said:  “Mr. Bryant, will you read for us ’Thanatopsis’?” He blushed like a girl, and put his hands over his face and said:  “I would rather read anything than my own production; but if it will give you pleasure I will do anything you say.”  Then at 82 years of age, and without spectacles, he stood up and with most pathetic tenderness read the famous poem of his boyhood days, and from a score of lips burst forth the exclamation, “What a wonderful old man!” What made all the land and all the world feel so badly when William Cullen Bryant was laid down at Roslyn?  Because he was a great poet who had died?  No; there have been greater poets.  Because he was so able an editor?  No; there have been abler editors.  Because he was so very old?  No; some have attained more years.  It was because a spotless and noble character irradiated all he wrote and said and did.

These great men of America, how much they were to me, in their example of doing and living!

Probably there are many still living who remember what a disorderly place Brooklyn once was.  Gangs of loafers hung around our street corners, insulting and threatening men and women.  Carriages were held up in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen.  Kidnapping was known.  Behind all this outrage of civil rights was political outrage.  The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals, because they might need their votes in future elections.  They were immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or President.  It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large cities.  The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did not stop buying labour-saving machinery.  They were not the threats of the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country.  It is worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about.  The nation was under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled business conditions.  Every one was occupied in President-making, although we were two years from the Presidential election.  There was plenty of money, but people held on to it.

The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer of 1878, and softened the hearts of some.  There was some money contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been.  In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection plate.  What with this suffering of our neighbours