Nor was there so much drudgery in the office as when he had first returned in 1836. Parke Godwin draws an interesting picture of the editor’s life at this period. He liked to take a week of fine summer weather from the office and spend it in excursions to the Palisades, the Delaware Water Gap, the Catskills, or the Berkshires, sometimes alone, sometimes with another good walker. Bryant’s appreciative descriptions of these scenes did much to raise the public esteem of them. At the office there were many entertaining visitors. Cooper always called when he was in town, and the contrast between the novelist and the poet was striking: “Cooper, burly, brusque, and boisterous, like a bluff sailor, always bringing a breeze of quarrel with him; Mr. Bryant, shy, modest, and delicate as a woman--they seemed little fitted for friendship.” Yet warm friends they were. John L. Stephens, who had won a reputation by his travels in Arabia, Nubia, and Central America, and whose books were in considerable vogue, frequently came, “a small, sharp, nervous man,” and talked of his adventures. A more magnetic personality was that of Audubon, whose tall, athletic figure, Indian-bronzed face, bright eyes, eagle nose, and long white hair attracted the eyes of every worker. He, too, loved to tell of his exploits in the wilds, and his experiences in the salons of Europe. Bancroft, who liked Bryant’s Jacksonian zeal as much as he did his poetry, and William Gilmore Simms, author of “The Yemassee,” occasionally paid a visit, while Godwin believed he remembered seeing Edgar Allan Poe “once or twice, to utter nothing, but to look his reverence out of wonderful lustrous eyes.” CHAPTER EIGHT NEW YORK BECOMES A METROPOLIS; CENTRAL PARK