exquisite and now most pathetic poem, "June." These poems and others not specified here, if read continuously and in the order in which they were composed, show a wide range of sympathies, a perfect acquaintance with many measures, and a clear, capacious, ever-growing intellect. They are all distinctive of the genius of their author, but neither exhibits the full measure of his powers. We can say of none of them, "The man who wrote this will never write any better."

The publication of Mr. Bryant's little volume of verse was indirectly the cause of his adopting literature as a profession. It was warmly commended, and by no one more so than by Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, in the columns of the New York American. He was something of a literary authority at the time, a man of fortune and college-bred, known in a mild way as the author of an anniversary discourse delivered before the New York Historical Society in 1818, of a political satire entitled "The Bucktail Bards," and later of an "Essay on the Doctrine of Contracts." Among his friends was Mr. Henry D. Sedgwick, a summer neighbor, so to speak, of Mr. Bryant's, having a country-house at Stockbridge, a few miles from Great Barrington, and a house in town, which was frequented by the literati of the day, such as Verplanck, Halleck, Percival, Cooper, and others of less note. An admirer of Mr. Bryant, Mr. Sedgwick set to work, with the assistance of Mr. Verplanck, to procure him literary employment in New York, in order to enable him to escape his hated bondage to the law; and he was appointed assistant editor of a projected periodical called the New York Review and Athenæum Magazine. The at last enfranchised lawyer dropped his barbarous pen, closed his law-books, and in the winter or spring of 1825 removed with his household to New York. The projected periodical was started, as these sanguine ventures always are, with fair hopes of success. It was well edited, and its contributors were men of acknowledged ability. The June number contained two poems which ought to have made a great hit. One was "A Song of Pitcairn's Island;" the other was "Marco Bozzaris." There was no flourish of trumpets over them, as there would be now; the writers merely prefixed their initials, "B." and "H." The reading public of New York were not ready for the Review, which had been projected for their mental enlightenment; so, after about a year's struggle, it was merged in the New York Literary Gazette, which began its mission about four years before. This magazine shared the fate of its companion in a few months, when it was consolidated with the United States Literary Gazette, which in two months was swallowed up in the United States Review. The honor of publishing and finishing the 

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