“Would that Mr. Bryant was employed in writing poetry ... and sending back his thoughts to the streams and mountains which his young eyes were familiar with, and from which he drank his first inspiration!” lamented a writer in the _New England Magazine_ for 1831. “But alas! he is busied about far other things, and what he is writing, is as little like poetry, as Gen. Jackson is like Apollo.” This writer had called on the editor in his little Pine Street office. “He is a man rather under the middle height than otherwise, with bright blue eyes and an ample forehead, but not very distinguished either in face or person,” we are told. “His manners are quiet and unassuming, and marked with a slight dash of diffidence; and his conversation (when he does converse, for he is more used to thinking than talking), is remarkably free from pretension, and is characterized by good sense rather than genius.” Why could he not have remained a lawyer in Great Barrington, amid his Berkshire hills and brooks? We cannot close this notice without again expressing our sorrow at the nature of Mr. Bryant’s present occupation, and that a man capable of writing poetry to make so many hearts throb, and so many eyes glisten with delight, should be lending himself to an employment in which the greater the success the more occasion there is for regret, for it must arise from the exertion of those very qualities which we are least willing a poet should possess. “’Tis strange, ’tis passing strange, ’tis pitiful, that” he should hang up his own cunning harp upon the willows, and take to blowing a brazen and discordant trumpet in the ranks of faction. An early number of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ regretted that Bryant was to be found “dashing in the political vortex” with those who “engage in party squabbles.” The New York _Courier and Enquirer_, in an utterance of 1832 which is to be discounted because of editorial jealousy, remarked that “he has embarked in a pursuit not suited to his genius and utterly at variance with all his studies and habits of mind. We wish him a better fate than can ever be his while doomed to follow a business for which he has not a solitary qualification, and compelled to give utterance to sentiments he most cordially despises.”