We must next speak of his travels; for Bryant was a great traveler. His first long journey was made in 1832 to visit his brothers, who had become the proprietors of a large landed estate in Illinois. He was three weeks on the journey out. While crossing the prairies between the Mississippi River and his brothers’ plantation he met a company of Illinois volunteers, who were going to take part in the Black Hawk War. They were led by a tall, awkward, uncouth lad, whose appearance attracted Bryant’s attention, and whose conversation pleased him, it was so breezy and original. He learned many years afterward that this captain was Abraham Lincoln. When in 1860 it was proposed to nominate Lincoln for President, Lincoln came to New York to speak, and Bryant introduced him to the audience. It was during his visit to his brothers that he wrote of The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name. He evidently liked the West, for we have seen that later he proposed to sell out his paper and go there to live. In 1834 he made his first trip to Europe. While he was gone he wrote letters regularly for his paper; but he traveled leisurely and enjoyed himself. He took his wife and daughters with him. He remained two years, when he was called home by the illness of the associate editor, who had charge of the paper in his absence. After this, at various times, he visited Europe again, crossing the Atlantic in all six times. One of these journeys, made in 1857, was chiefly for Mrs. Bryant’s health. They landed at Havre, and journeyed through Belgium and Holland, France and Spain to Madrid, whence they crossed to Naples, where Mrs. Bryant was ill for four months. She recovered somewhat, but when at last they returned to the United States she was not much better. Bryant had bought the old homestead at Cummington, and had invited all his relatives from Illinois to join him in “hanging the pot.” In July, 1858, he had to notify his brothers, some of whom were already at Cummington, that his wife was too ill to go there; and on the 27th of that month she died. In regard to her death he wrote to a friend, “I lived with my wife forty-five years, and now that great blessing of my life is withdrawn, and I am like one cast out of paradise and wandering in a strange world.” Nearly ten years before this, in 1849, he made a visit of two months to Cuba, going by way of the Carolinas and Florida. He was “received by the governor-general of Havana, and passed several days on a coffee estate at Matanzas, going then by rail to San Antonio in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked by an American engineer. He breakfasted at the inn of La Punta on rice and fresh eggs and a dish of meat. He witnessed a cock-fight, a masked ball, a murderer garroted, and slavery in some of its most inhuman phases.”