By Myrna Sloam
Having successfully managed the New York Evening Post newspaper from 1829 through 1832, journalist and poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) began a series of travels. He visited his brother in Illinois and then went to northern New England and Canada in 1833. In 1834 he embarked on his first journey to Europe with his wife, Frances, and his two daughters, Frances and Julia. Sailing from New York City on June 24, 1834 bound for Harve, France, Bryant remained in Europe for almost two years, returning to New York in March 1836 to resume his duties at the Evening Post. In letters to friends, and in dispatches back to the Evening Post, he reflected on politics, the arts, architecture, and the landscape of the Old World, as well as describing the challenges of an American living abroad.
The following was written from Paris on August 9, 1834, six weeks after his arrival:
“Every step of our journey reminded us that we were in an old country. Almost every thing we saw spoke of the past, of an antiquity without limit; every where our eyes rested on the handiwork of those who had been dead for ages and witnessed the customs which they had bequeathed to their descendants. The churches were so vast, so solid, and so time eaten; the dwellings so grey, and of such antique architecture and in the large towns rose so high along the narrow and cavernous streets; the thatched cottages were so mossy and their ridges so grown with grass! The very hills around them looked scarcely so old, for there was something like youthfulness in their vegetation—their shrubs and flowers…. There were old chateaus on the hills some of which were built with an appearance of military strength, telling of feudal times. The groves by which they were surrounded were often times clipped into regular walls, pierced with arched passages leading into various directions, and the single trees were compelled by the shears to take the shape of obelisks and pyramids. Here and there the lands were divided by an ancient hedgerow which had subsisted perhaps from the time of William the Conqueror….”
Hoping to find inspiration for his poetry, Bryant was a keen observer of nature. Four months after his arrival in Europe, he wrote from Florence on Oct. 11, 1834:
“Thus far I have been less struck with the beauty of the Italian scenery than I expected. The forms of the mountains are more picturesque, their summits more peaked, and their outline more varied than those of the mountains of our own country; and the buildings—of a massive and imposing architecture or venerable from time, seated on the heights, add much to the general effect. But if the hand of man has done something to embellish the scenery, it has done more to deform it. Not a tree is suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural channel; an exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage of soil, the country is without woods and green fields, and to him who views the vale of the Arno “from the top of Fiesole” or any of the neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which it is embellished, it will appear a vast dusty gulf, planted with ugly rows of the low pallid and thin-leaved olive and of the still more dwarfish and closely pruned maples on which the vines are trained. The simplicity of natural scenery, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no noble sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees clustering with grateful shade round the country seats, no rows of natural shrubbery following the courses of the rivers through the vallies. The streams, which are often but mere gravelly beds of torrents, dry during the summer, are kept in straight channels by means of stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces, and the trees kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until somewhat more than midway up the Apennines, when the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summits is barren steep rock without soil or herbage. The grander features of the landscape, however, are beyond the power of man to injure—the towering mountain summits, the bare walls and peaks of rock piercing the sky, which with the deep irregular vallies, betoken more than any thing I have seen in America and upheaving and ingulfing of the original crust of the world….”
After more than a year abroad, and on a more personal level, Bryant writes from Munich on September 14, 1835, detailing of the travails of being a traveler:
“You are quite right in your conjecture that a travelers life is not perpetual sunshine even in Italy. The dirty habits of the people, the fleas, the book up lodgings, getting into them and getting out of them, packing and unpacking, resisting attempts to cheat you, the being inevitably and helplessly cheated by your servants, the looking to your passports and waiting for them after you are ready to set out, making fatiguing excursions in hot weather and standing in cold weather on marble floors till you are chilled to the very marrow of your bones—these and many other little vexations of the same kind compose to[o] large a proportion of such a life to allow me to say that it is without its troubles…. You are wrong however in supposing that any of us are yet spoiled by our residence abroad—indeed we are more zealous Americans than ever, even little Julia, [born, June 22, 1831] who takes it quite in dudgeon that she is sometimes mistaken for English; and who stoutly denies that she even speaks English, the two languages she uses being according to her account American and Italian, to which she is now adding High Dutch.”
Bryant returned to New York City in March of 1836. He had visited Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and then traveled to Italy. He stayed a month in Rome, one in Naples, two months in Florence and four months in Pisa. After leaving Italy he then traveled to Munich and Heidelberg, where he stayed four months in each city. Upon his return to the United States, Bryant’s wife, Frances, and his daughters remained in Heidelberg. They then visited Paris and London before sailing for home in late September 1836. The above excerpts were taken from the publication, “The Letters of William Cullen Bryant,” Vol 1, Fordham University Press, 1975. Bryant’s travel writings were also published by Putnam in 1850, as “Letters of a Traveler.” This book can be found in the Bryant Library Local History Collection and online through Project Gutenberg, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11013/11013-h/11013-h.htm.
