WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT was essentially a poet, and it is in his poetry rather than his prose that he has attained his highest excellence. But though we do not find in his prose the same exalted feeling and sublimity of language which make his “Thanatopsis” and ode “To a Waterfowl” masterpieces of their kind, we do find even in his newspaper prose even when most loosely written the disjecta membra poetæ—the unmistakable evidences of the same genius which expresses itself in his noblest poems. The demands of the daily newspapers in the early days of the telegraph resulted in a style of essays which have almost ceased to exist—the “letters” dealing not with news, but with the life, habits, and morals of the peoples of other cities and countries. Bryant’s letters to the Evening Post of which for fifty years he was editor, are among the best of their class. In “A Day in Florence” he shows the same sympathy for form, the same imaginative power of grasping, grouping, and developing incident which makes the poet.

  He was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, November 3d, 1794. His genius was precocious, and its first adequate expression, “Thanatopsis,” written when he was nineteen, is in the general judgment his masterpiece. After leaving Williams College where he spent two years, he studied law, but after becoming connected with the New York Evening Post in 1826, he remained with it until his death, June 12th, 1878. His life as a journalist was one of the highest usefulness. He devoted himself and his paper to every worthy cause which needed help. The standard of metropolitan journalism as he represented it was rectitude, and he demonstrated that there is nothing absurd, unbusiness-like or unprofessional in so conducting a newspaper as to make it represent editorial brains and conscience. His “Letters of a Traveler” (1852), “Letters from Spain and Other Countries” (1859), and “Letters from the East” (1869), were all originally contributed to the Evening Post.