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Updated: June 15, 2025
Its curved portico was capped by a wrought-iron railing, its long windows were touched with purple, and its low garret set like a deckhouse on the wide roof suggested hidden secrets of the past. Here a Motley or a Longfellow might have dwelt, a Bryant penned his "Thanatopsis."
BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN. Born at Cummington, Massachusetts, November 3, 1794; studied at Williams College, 1810-11; admitted to the bar, 1815; published "Thanatopsis," 1816; editor-in-chief New York Evening Post, 1829; published first collection of poems, 1821, and others from time to time until his death, at New York City, June 12, 1878.
The frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple. Sarah's fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream.
Gingham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet, who could have written on death far more attractive verses than the Thanatopsis of Cullen Bryant, and under a title less likely to offend the public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself. So the Dean tried first this and then that and nothing would seem to suit.
In this little book were contained, besides 'The Ages' and 'Thanatopsis, several pieces which have kept their hold upon popular taste; such as the well-known lines 'To a Waterfowl' and the 'Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood.
"You know Thanatopsis, of course," he would ask, with a rapt and glowing eye "Lord Byron's beautiful poem on the philosophy of life? Now that is my idea of what poetry ought to be, Miss Weyland...." And Beverley Byrd, breaking his remark to Queed off short in the middle, would turn to Sharlee with a face of studious calm and say:
The determining mood of his best poems, from boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the first colonists. This is the central motive of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "The Rivulet," "A Forest Hymn," "An Evening Revery," "The Crowded Street," "The Flood of Years."
Could mere talent have written Bryant's lines "To a Waterfowl"? or his "Thanatopsis"? or "June"? Or the small volume of selections of great poetry which Arnold made from the massive works of Wordsworth? Talent could have produced a vast deal of Wordsworth's work all the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and much of "The Excursion."
Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them " "Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have!
"Thanatopsis" had been instantly regarded in 1817 as the finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to contribute to the "North American Review" an essay on American poetry, and this, like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He delivered his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Ages," in 1821, the year of Emerson's graduation.
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