This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Meanwhile, he made his living at the law and followed a course which, among his Berkshire County contemporaries, not seldom led to the legislature and to the national Congress. As tithing man, town clerk, Supreme Judicial Court Councilor, justice of the peace, clerk of the center school district, secretary of the Berkshire FederalβRepublican party convention, and occasional public orator, he was often in the public eye.
He tilted with legal opponents in the courtroom and quarreled with them outside, and he caricatured their craggy faces on drafts of his letters and poems. He attended agricultural fairs and Fourth of July festivities, danced at parties and balls, played whist, and poked fun at popular songs and common gossip. And he sang to the Barrington girls he courted, as he once had to those of Worthington and Bridgewater.
Between and Bryant busied himself with several diverse activities which, though they broadened his preparation for a later career, must at the time have seemed, even to him, to be at variance with his natural genius. His public appeal, at the close of , for aid to the Greek revolutionaries in their struggle against Turkish rule led to the composition of several poems hailing their cause, and showed his growing concern with world affairs.
His study of French with a sometime Napoleonic officer, L[ouis? And occasional letters to village and city newspapers reflected an impulse to propose opinions on social, political, and literary matters to a wider audience than that of the North American Review. Not until he was asked at the end of to furnish verses on a continuing basis to the United States Literary Gazette at Boston, and offered payment for them, did Bryant recover his best mode of composition.
In the meantime, his friendly critics had not forgotten him. Dana and Phillips, worried at his distraction with politics and other matters, wrote of their concern to the Sedgwick brothers. Here he began to think he might make a living at the literary career he had followed only fitfully for a decade. His visit to New York that spring did not, by itself, impel Bryant to abandon the law. But his resolution to quit his profession coincided closely with published praise of his poems in the Literary Gazette and of those which were reprinted in Great Britain.
