Bryant spent something like six years upon his Homer. He survived its completion by six years more, full of honours, rejoicing in a hale old age, still visited occasionally by poetical inspiration, still influential in the political thought of his nation, able at four score and four to make a public address in honour of the Italian patriot Mazzini. During this address, “his uncovered head was for a time exposed to the full glare of the sun. Shortly after, while entering a house, he fell backwards, striking his head upon the stone steps; concussion of the brain and paralysis followed.” He died in New York, June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, on Long Island Sound, near the beautiful country home where for thirty-five years his literary toils had been “sweetened to his taste.” Owing to his artistic reserve, Bryant had the reputation of a temperamental coldness, a reputation that is belied both by the tenderness of his domestic ties and by his well chosen and enduring friendships. His patriotism also was unswerving. If he “let no empty gust of passion find an utterance in his lay,” nevertheless he knew and valued ... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the boundless deep. He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant. Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead, and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was “_facile princeps_” among American poets, this eminence arose from no merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a noble, well rounded, and representative human life.