The story of his entry into literature, though well known, cannot be too often told. Born at Cummington, a little village on the Hampshire hills, Massachusetts, November 3, 1794, his father was a genial, fairly cultivated country doctor; his mother, Sarah Snell, an indefatigable housewife, with Yankee common-sense and deep-grained Puritan principles. William Cullen, the second of several children, was precocious; both parents encouraged his aptitude for verse-making, and a satire which he wrote in 1807 on Jefferson and the Embargo his father was proud to have printed in Boston. In 1810 young Bryant entered the sophomore class of Williams College, and spent a year there. He hoped to pass from Williams to Yale, where he looked for more advanced instruction, but his father’s means did not permit, and the son, instead of finishing his course at Williams, went into a country lawyer’s office and fitted himself for the bar. Just at the moment of indecision, in the autumn of 1811, Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis.” Contrary to his custom, he did not show it to his father, but laid it away with other papers in a drawer. Six years later Dr. Bryant, whose duties as a member of the Massachusetts legislature took him often to Boston, and whose bright parts and liberal views made him welcome in the foremost circles there, was asked by his friends, who edited the _North American Review_, for some contribution. On returning to Cummington, he happened to find his son’s sequestered papers, and, choosing “Thanatopsis”--of which, the original being covered with many corrections, he made a copy--and “The Waterfowl,” he sent them off to Boston, and they appeared in the _Review_ for September, 1817. The young poet, having meanwhile completed his legal studies, was practicing law at Great Barrington, unconscious of the fame about to descend upon him. Owing to the handwriting of the copy of the poems sent to the _Review_, however, Dr. Bryant had for a moment the credit of being the author of “Thanatopsis.” After duly allowing for the common tendency to make fame retroactive, we cannot doubt that “Thanatopsis” secured immediate and, relatively, immense recognition. The best judges agreed that at last a bit of genuine American literature was before them; the uncritical but appreciative, from ministers to school children, read, learned, admired, and quoted the grave, sonorous lines.