His place was supplied in part by chance. During the summer of 1836 Parke Godwin, a briefless barrister of only twenty, a graduate of Princeton, was compelled to remove to a cheaper boarding-house, and went to one at 316 Fourth Street, kept by a native of Great Barrington, Mass. He was introduced one evening to a newcomer, a middle-aged man of medium height, spare figure, and clean-shaven, severe face. His gentle manner, pure English, and musical voice were as distinctive as his large head and bright eyes. “A certain air of abstractedness made you set him down as a scholar whose thoughts were wandering away to his books; and yet the deep lines about his mouth told of struggle either with himself or with the world. No one would have supposed that there was any fun in him, but, when a lively turn was given to some remark, the upper part of his face, particularly the eyes, gleamed with a singular radiance, and a short, quick, staccato, but hearty laugh acknowledged the humorous perception.” On public affairs this stranger spoke with keen insight and great decision. That evening Godwin was told that he was the poet Bryant. For some months, till after Mrs. Bryant’s return, the two were thrown much together, without increasing their acquaintance. Bryant’s greeting to strangers was chilly, he never prolonged a conversation, he was fond of solitary walks, and he spent his evenings alone in his room. Godwin was therefore much surprised when one day the editor remarked: “My assistant, Mr. Ulshoeffer, is going to Cuba for his health; how would you like to take his place?” The young lawyer, after demurring that he had had no experience, went to try it--and stayed, with intermissions, more than forty years. “Every editorial of Bryant’s opens with a stale joke and closes with a fresh lie,” growled a Whig in these years. It was part of the change from Leggett’s slashing directness to Bryant’s suavity that the latter prefaced most political articles with an apposite illustration drawn from his wide reading. When the Albany _Journal_, Thurlow Weed’s newspaper, was arguing the self-evident proposition that the State should not buy the Ithaca & Oswego Railway, he told the story of the perspiring attorney who was interrupted by the judge in a long harangue: “Brother Plowden, why do you labor so? The Court is with you.” The effrontery of a Whig politician caught in a bit of rascality inspired an editorial which opened with the grave plea of a thievish Indian at the bar: “Yes, I stole the powder horn, but it is white man’s law that you must prove it.” Again, with more dignity, Bryant began an article on the Bank with a reference to Virgil’s episode of Nisus and Euryalus.