Bryant’s real editorial career dates from 1836, for all that had preceded was mere preparation. He quickly mastered his first discouragement, and throwing aside the idea of becoming an Illinois farmer or lawyer, devoted himself to the _Evening Post_ as the work, poetry apart, of his life. We catch a new and determined note in his letters by 1837, when he was laboring like a born journalist at his desk from seven to four daily, and, says his assistant, was so impatient of interruption that he often seemed irascible. He was so fully occupied, he wrote Dana in February, “that if there is anything of the Pegasus in me, I am too much exhausted to use my wings.” In an unpublished note to his wife, who had returned in the fall of 1836, he declared: “I have enough to do, both with the business part of the paper and the management of it as editor, to keep me constantly busy. I must see that the _Evening Post_ does not suffer by these hard times, and I must take that part in the great controversies now going on which is expected of it.” He still longed for literary leisure. But he courageously stuck to his post, writing Dana in June, 1838, that his editorial labors were as heavy as he could endure with a proper regard to his health, and that he managed to maintain his strength only by the greatest simplicity of diet, renouncing tea, coffee, and animal food, and by frequent walks of a half day to two days in the country. By this date, he said, he could look back rejoicing that he had never yielded to the temptation of giving up the newspaper. Leggett did not return. He had borrowed so much of Mrs. Coleman’s part of the dividend in the last year of his connection with the paper that she compelled him, by legal steps, to surrender his third share of the _Evening Post_ to her; and Bryant would not give him that freedom for vehement writing which he wished. In December, 1836, he established the _Plaindealer_, a short-lived weekly to which the _Evening Post_ made many complimentary references. But his health continued bad, and on May 29, 1839, just after President Van Buren had offered him the post of confidential agent in Central America in the belief that a sea voyage would benefit him, he died.