NYC #48: Bryant Park (5), William Cullen Bryant

'YET LET NO EMPTY GUST 
OF PASSION FIND AN UTTERANCE IN THY LAY, 
A BLAST THAT WHIRLS THE DUST 
ALONG THE HOWLLING STREET AND DIES AWAY; 
BUT CALM FEELINGS OF CALM POWER AND MIGHTY SWEEP,
LILE CURRENTS JOURNEYING THROUGH THE WINDLESS DEEP.'

 

The quotation is a verse from Cullen's poem 'The Poet'. Thomas Hastings was the architect, Herbert Adams the sculptor.

William Cullen Bryant, Cummington, MA

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was not only a famous poet but also the editor and publisher of the New York Evening Post for 50 years. His maternal grandfather Ebenezer Snell built this home in 1783, and Bryant spent his childhood and adolescence here. Bryant re-bought the property (which had been sold in 1835) in 1865 and made extensive alterations that essentially transformed it into a Victorian house. It was his summer home until his death.

The red barn is a distinctive feature of the property.

The Bryant Cemetery is a short distance away. Bryant himself was buried in Roslyn, New York, although his closest relative who lies here is his father, Dr Peter Bryant:

'Peter Bryant,

studious and skillful

Physician and Surgeon

and for sometime a member

of the State Senate.

Born at North Bridgwater

August 12, 1767.

Died March 19, 1820.'

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Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: New England Tour #19

Herman Melville (1819—91) married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, and in 1950 moved with his family to a farm in Pittsfield in the Berkshires, west Massachusetts, a town he was familar with through his uncle Thomas Melvill. He called it Arrowhead. He had had success with his novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which was very much inspired by his three-month stay on the Marquesas Islands after deserting the whaler Acushnet, on which he'd spent eighteen months in the early 1840s.

Melville began a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he'd met on Monument Mountain* and who lived a few miles away in Lenox. Melville spent his most productive writing years at Arrowhead. Here he wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (1853), 'Benito Cereno' (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). And of course Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne. He told his friend Evert A. Duyckinck in December 1850 that life in the country was like being at sea, and that he felt his writing room was a ship's cabin. Arriving very shortly after the season, I was unable to see and photograph his desk.
 

Unfortunately, Melville's work at Pittsfield was unsuccessful and The Confidence-Man was his last novel. The family returned to New York in 1863. Throughout his life his writings only brought him $10,000. Now, of course, he is recognized as a great writer, and Moby-Dick is generally thought of as one of the greatest American novels.

*William Cullen Bryant wrote the poem 'Monument Mountain' about the legend of the name, concerning the love of an Indian maid for her cousin, which disgusted her elders because they considered it incestuous. She retreated into herself, shunned company and threw herself to her death from the rocks. They buried her on the southern slope and left a simple monument: a cairn to which anyone passing would silently add.

Famously, on 5 August 1850 a group of literary people went for a picnic on Monument Mountain, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Annie Fields, and Evert A. Duyckinck. After climbing to the top, there was a reading of Bryant's poem, they had lunch in the rocks, and they drank a great deal. The event is commemorated every year by a climb up the mountain.