THE RANDALL FAMILY 21
among authors and artists as a justification of similar in- trusions. Although personally unknown to you, I may truly say that to me you do by no meins seem like a stranger. Your poetical works, old and new, are identi- fied with my most agreeable recollections. Your " Green River," " The Waterfowl," and " The Lapse of Time " were scarcely more familiar to my earliest associations than are "The Crowded Street" and " The Apennines " to my more recent ones ; and I truly wish that the spirit of those pieces might be influential in subduing to the enjoyment of simple and thoughtful pleasures that restless spirit of my countrymen which, impatient of restraint, even that of contemplativeness, pushes ever aimlessly on from excitement to excitement.
I do not subscribe my name, because I intend only a tribute of respect. I well know that I have no claims upon your time, and do not wish you to feel it necessary, from motives of courtesy, to give yourself the trouble of acknowledgment. Suffice it to say that, if you should obtain from these little pieces a very small portion of the same kind of pleasure which I have been all my life deriving from your own, it will be to me a source of sub- stantial satisfaction.
I am, &c, with great respect.
��To this unsigned letter, of course, no reply was sent. But the New York "Evening Post" of December 17, 1856, contained a notice of the new poems which was written by William Cullen Bryant himself, and which for that reason is here reproduced, as follows : —
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