the first of our magazines which was founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely Yankee flavor.  Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could address the public.  A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes.  Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work.  Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and making their modest competence—­eked out in Emerson’s case by lecturing here and there—­suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling.  But, in default of some such pou sto, our men of letters have usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press.  It will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he afterward edited the Atlantic and the North American.  Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the break-up of the Brook Farm Community.

In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was

      “Forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
  And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen.”

Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western-most county of Massachusetts.  After two years in Williams College he studied law, and practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great Barrington.  Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theological affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Massachusetts.  Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the New York Review and Athenaeum, he assumed the editorship of the Evening Post, a Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected till his death.  He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered the ranks of metropolitan journalism.  In 1816 his Thanatopsis had been published in the North American Review, and had attracted immediate and general admiration.  It had been finished, indeed, two years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a wonderful instance of precocity.  The thought in this stately hymn was not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death.  Bryant’s