Bryant’s poetical work as a whole has an impassive quality often described as coldness. Partly due to his genius and accentuated by the excessive retouching to which he subjected his verse, it grew in still larger measure out of his determination not to impart to his verse any of the feverishness of spirit consequent upon a life of political warfare. The poet held himself wonderfully in check, as a man of iron will allows no mark of the strong passion under which he labors to show in his face. Bryant was rarely betrayed into so much of personal feeling as flashed out in that bitter stanza of ‘The Future Life:’-- For me the sordid cares in which I dwell, Shrink and consume my heart, as heat the scroll; And wrath has left its scar--that fire of hell Has left its scar upon my soul. While the detachment was not complete, Bryant undoubtedly kept his poetic apart from his secular life in a way to command admiration. This he accomplished by extraordinary self-restraint. As a part of the varied and long-continued discipline to which he subjected himself, the self-restraint made for character. The question, however, arises whether the poetry did not, in certain ways, suffer under the very discipline by which the character developed. FOOTNOTES: [1] Bryant’s contributions were the stories entitled ‘Medfield’ and ‘The Skeleton’s Cave.’ As originally planned the book was to have been called _The Sextad_, but Verplanck, who would have made the sixth author, withdrew. [2] John Bigelow. [3] W. C. Bronson. [4] Bryant’s apology to the public for his course, together with Leggett’s statement as an eye-witness, will be found in the ‘Evening Post’ of Thursday, April 21, 1831. Neither the guarded account of the episode in Godwin’s _Bryant_, nor the brief notice in Haswell’s _Reminiscences of an Octogenarian_ is quite accurate. [5] As in an ironical leader commending journalists who refuse to say that a man ‘was drowned,’ a dangerous innovation, and, ‘to preserve the purity of their mother tongue,’ stick to time-honored metaphors and say that the man ‘found a watery grave.’--‘Evening Post,’ August 17, 1831. [6] G. O. Trevelyan. III _James Fenimore Cooper_ REFERENCES: =W. C. Bryant=: _A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper_, 1852. =T. R. Lounsbury=: _James Fenimore Cooper_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ fourth edition, 1884. =W. B. Shubrick Clymer=: _James Fenimore Cooper_, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1900. I HIS LIFE