energies, Bryant held steadily to his daily task. His life in
town was sternly ascetic, but he allowed himself long walks in
the country, and he continued to meditate a somewhat thankless
Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prairies,
and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward uncouth lad" of
racy conversational powers, who was leading his company of
volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to
meet again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union
address of Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the
country that the former captain of volunteers was now a king of
men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that occasion, it is said, by
Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. Not so Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years before.
"There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he
were tired of seeing things and doing things. . . .He uttered
neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and
accurate information, on whatever subject transpired; a very
pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should
imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one's own."
Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted men than
Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the
Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand
for public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech
dedicating a statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when
Bryant was eighty-four, that a fit of dizziness caused a fall
which proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just seventy
years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published his boy's verses on
"The Embargo."

Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous