His arrival to reside in New York had attracted general notice. To all discerning lovers of literature in the city, and they were many, his best poems were well known. Verplanck had given his first volume a cordial review in the New York _American_, and when he had made a preliminary visit to the city in 1824 the _Evening Post_ had reprinted “Thanatopsis” with a warm word of praise. At the homes of Sedgwick and Verplanck, the former a sort of Holland House for New York, Bryant was at once made acquainted with Fitzgreene Halleck and J. G. Percival, with the aspiring young poets Hillhouse and Robert Sands, with the artists S. F. B. Morse and Dunlap, with Chancellor Kent and President Duer of Columbia. We may be sure that Coleman, who was proud of his friendship with Brockden Brown and Irving, did not fail to seek out the young New Englander who had come from near his former home, and whose poem “Green River” celebrated a stream that Coleman knew well. On Nov. 16, 1825, the _Evening Post_ republished from the _New York Review_ Bryant’s “The Death of the Flowers,” on March 3, 1826, it took from a magazine his “To a Cloud,” and on June 11 it reprinted “The Song of Pitcairn’s Island”; while various flattering references were made to his work.
Yet Bryant’s position was a precarious and anxious one. He wrote his friend Dana that, relieved as he was to get out of his “shabby” profession as a lawyer, in which he had been shocked by a bad miscarriage of justice and by the petty wrangles in which he was involved, he was not sure that he had found a better. Reviewing books was not the most congenial of employments. His salary was at first $1,000 a year; but the _Review_ drooped, and after an effort had been made to bolster it up by amalgamation with two other periodicals, Bryant found himself in the early summer of 1826 co-editor of the _United States Review and Literary Gazette_, with a quarter ownership and a salary of only $500. His confidence in his ability to live by his pen was so shaken that he obtained a permit to practice law in the city courts, and was actually associated with Henry Sedgwick in a case.
At this juncture, in the middle of June, William Coleman was thrown from his gig by a runaway horse. It was for a time doubted whether he would recover, and as he was confined to his room for ten weeks, it was necessary to find some one to assist his son on the _Evening Post_. A temporary position was offered Bryant, and Verplanck and others earnestly counselled him to take it. “The establishment is an extremely lucrative one,” wrote Bryant. “It is owned by two individuals--Mr. Coleman and Mr. Burnham. The profits are estimated at about thirty thousand dollars a year--fifteen to each proprietor. This is better than poetry and magazines.”