Bryant, too, everybody knows of. Now he is chiefly known as poet; but when I went to New York-people thought most about him as editor of the "Evening Post," and that with little enough complacency in the circles where I moved. How many a fight I had for him with my Whig friends! For he was my parishioner, and it was known that we were much together. The "Evening Post" was a thorn in their sides, and every now and then, when some keen editorial appeared in it, they used to say, "There! What do you say of that?" I always said the same thing: Whether you and I like what he says or not, whether we think it fair or not, of one thing be sure, he is a man of perfect integrity; he is so almost to a fault, if that be possible, regarding [98] neither feelings nor friendships, nor anything else, when justice and truth are in question. Speaking of Bryant brings to mind Audubon, the celebrated naturalist. I became acquainted with him through his family's attending our church, and one day proposed to Mr. Bryant to go with me to see him. Seating himself before the poet, Audubon quietly said, "You are our flower,"--a very pretty compliment, I thought, from a man of the woods. I happened to fall in with Mr. Audubon one day in the cars going to Philadelphia, when he was setting out, I think, on his last great tour across the American wilderness. He described to me his outfit, to be assumed when he arrived at the point of departure, a suit of dressed deerskin, his only apparel. In this he was to thread the forest and swim the rivers; with his rifle, of course, and powder and shot; a tin case to hold his drawing-paper and pencils, and a blanket. Meat, the produce of the chase, was to be his only food, and the earth his bed, for two or three months. I said, shrinking from such hardship, "I could n't stand that."--"If you were to go with me," he replied, "I would bring you out on the other side a new man." He broke down under it, however, rather prematurely; for in that condition I saw him once more,--his health and faculties shattered,--near the end of his life. [99] But to return,--turning and returning upon one's self must be the course of an autobiography, my health having a second time completely failed, I determined again to go abroad; and to make the measure of relief more complete, I determined to go for two years, and to take my family with me. The sea was a horror to me, but beyond it lay pleasant lands that I wanted to look upon once more, galleries of art by which I wished to sit down and study at my leisure, and, above all, rest: I wanted to be where no one could call on me to preach or lecture, to do this or do that. We sailed for Havre in October, 1841, passed the winter in Paris, the summer following in Switzerland, the next winter in Italy, and, returning through Germany, spent two months in England, and came home in August, 1843.