life it is necessary to know something of the city of his choice,
but to enter into the spirit of his poetry one must go back to
the hills of western Massachusetts.

Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from
Mayflower stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was
a sound country physician, with liberal preferences in theology,
Federalist views in politics, and a library of seven hundred
volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's mother records his birth in
her diary in terse words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov.
3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son
born." Two days later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794.
Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into
the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large head
and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy
spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat
unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone
with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading
English poetry from his father's library, used to pray that he
too might become a poet. At thirteen he produced a satire on
Jefferson, "The Embargo," which his proud Federalist father
printed
at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly one year at Williams
College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He wished to
continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money for
this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the
autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft
of "Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading
Blair's "Grave" and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke
White.