On April 26, 1865, as Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege paused in
Union Square, New York, before being taken by rail to Springfield,
Illinois, William Cullen Bryant listened as his own verse elegy for
the slain president was read to a great concourse of mourners by
the Reverend Samuel Osgood. Only five years earlier and a few
blocks downtown, at Cooper Union, Bryant had introduced the prairie
candidate to his first eastern audience. There his masterful appeal
to the conscience of the nation prepared the way for his election
to the presidency on the verge of the Civil War. Now, Bryant stood
below Henry Kirke Brown's equestrian statue of George Washington,
impressing Osgood as if he were "the 19tth Century itself thinking
over the nation and the age in that presence." Bryant's staunch
support of the Union cause throughout the war, and of Lincoln's war
efforts, no less than his known influence with the president, led
several prominent public figures to urge that he write Lincoln's
biography. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him, "No man combines the
qualities for his biographer so completely as yourself and the
finished task would be a noble crown to a noble literary life." But
Bryant declined, declaring his inability to record impartially
critical events in which he had taken so central a part.
Furthermore, while preoccupied with the editorial direction of the
New York Evening Post, he was just then repossessing and enlarging
his family's homestead at Cummington, Massachusetts, where he hoped
his ailing wife might, during long summers in mountain air, regain
her health. But in July 1866, Frances died of recurrent rheumatic
fever, and, Bryant confessed to Richard Dana, he felt as "one cast
out of Paradise." After France's death Bryant traveled with his
daughter Julia for nearly a year through Great Britain and the
Continent, where he met British statesman and novelist Edward
Bulwer Lytton and French literary critic Hyppolyte Taine, renewed
his friendship with Spanish poet Carolina Coronado, Italian
liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi, and British and American artists, and
visited the family of the young French journalist Georges
Clemenceau, as well as the graves of earlier acquaintances Francis
Lord Jeffrey and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In his spare moments
Bryant sought solace by beginning the translation of Homer, and
Longfellow had found relief after his wife's tragic death by
rendering into English Dante's Divine Comedy. Home again in New
York, Bryant bought and settled in a house at 24 West 16th Street
which would be his city home for the rest of his life. Here he
completed major publications, including the Iliad and Odyssey of
Homer and an exhaustive Library of Poetry and Song, and added to
published tributes to earlier friends, such as Thomas Cole,
Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, memorial discourses on
Fitz-Greene Halleck and Gulian Verplanck. In addition to his
continued direction of the New York Homeopathic Medical college and
the American Free Trade League, he was elected to the presidency of
the Williams College Alumni Association, the International
Copyright Association, and the Century Association, the club of
artists and writers of which, twenty years earlier, he had been a
principal founder and which he would direct for the last decade of
his life.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
