Excerpt from Thanatopsis and a Forest HymnThere is no other building in America so sacred in its associations with the beginnings of our literature as this. It should be as dear to us as Shahspere's house in Strat ford is to Englishmen, and Burns's house in Ayr to the peifervid Scots. For in this little domicile, when it was Dr. Peter Bryant's ofice, young Bryant wrote T hana topsis in its original form, and hid it in his father's desh. This was, apparently, in the fall of 1811, soon after the end of Bryant's half course in Williams College, when he was not quite seventeen years old. He could have had no apprehension of the significance of his achieve ment, for he allowed the poem to remain untouched for several years. It was first printed in 1817, in the Septem.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.