7i8 
THE BLACK BEAR. 
gestion in great personal kindness towards myself, 
and 1 cannot sufficiently express my sense of that un- 
wearied good-will which has more tiian once called 
my attention to this subject. But I feel reluctant to 
undertake such a thing, for several reasons. In the 
first place, a project of that sort on my hands would be 
apt to make me abstracted, impatient of business, and 
forgetful of my professional engagements, and my 
literary experience has taught me that it is to my pro- 
tession alone that I can look for the steady means of 
supplying the wants of the day. In the second place, 
I am lazy. In the third place, I am deterred by the 
difficulty of finding a proper subject. I began last 
•winter to write a narrative poem, which I meant should 
be a little longer than any I had already composed ; 
but finding that would turn out at last a poor story 
about a ' Spectre Ship,' and that the tradition on 
which I had founded it had already been made use of 
by Irving, I gave it up. I fancy that it is of some 
importance to the success of a work that the subject 
should be happily chosen. The only poems that have 
any currency at present are of a narrative kind — 
light stories, in which love is a principal ingredient. 
Nobody writes epic, and nobody reads didactic, poems, 
and as for dramatic poems, they are out of the ques- 
tion. In this uncertainty, what is to be done? It is a 
great misfortune to write what everybody calls frivo- 
lous, and a still greater to write what nobody can read. " 
As far as one is able to judge from the two 
or three hundred lines that remain of this 
poem, love was " the principal ingredient." 
The story involved the fortunes of a young 
man who sailed in the ill-fated vessel in which 
he experienced all the disasters of shipwreck, 
leaving behind him an orphan girl, to whom 
he was betrothed, who experienced the still 
more terrible disaster of captivity among the 
Indians — a scheme, it must be confessed, 
admitting of a good deal of wild romance 
and of vivid description of both forest and 
ocean. How the phantom element was to be 
brought in, is left to conjecture. 
Mr. Bryant says, in the letter just cited, 
that he was deterred from prosecuting his 
design by the fact that Irving had " already 
i^sr ^ - APR 3 
made use of the subject " : but we cannot 
recall any piece of Irving in which that was 
done. Irving wrote a tale called " The Spec- 
tre Bridegroom," but that is of German 
origin, and has nothing in it resembling the 
legend which Mather reports. In his story 
of Dolph HeylLnger, also, he refers to the Pil- 
grim superstition of a missing ship that re-ap- 
peared on the coasts, in bad weather, as a 
faith more or less prevalent in all the colo- 
nies, but he makes no use of it further than 
to remark upon it in the course of his narra- 
tive. Perhaps some of our readers can tell 
us more distinctly what it was in Irving that 
drove Mr. Bryant off the field. 
A third one of his attempts related, as far as 
we can now judge, to a hermit who, having run 
through the varied experiences of life, and seen 
what there was to be seen of our continent and 
climate, from the sea-coast to the Mississippi, 
withdraws to the solitudes of the forests, 
where, in his hut, he tells to some adventur- 
ous boys the story of his career. He was to 
do duty, we conjecture, as Wordsworth's ped- 
dler dbes in "The Excursion," — that is, he was 
to serve as the lay figure on which the poet was 
going to hang his fine descriptions of nature. 
Nothing more, however, came of this scheme 
than of the others, unless we are permitted to 
suppose that " The Fountain," the " Evening 
Reverie," " Noon," and one or two more of 
his pieces in blank verse, were parts of this 
projected whole. It would have been very 
easy to connect these pieces together, by 
some little story of this kind ; but we are not 
sure that the readers of poetry would have 
been the gainers. "The Excursion "is not now 
read as a whole, only in its episodes, and the 
narrative which is meant to give it imity only 
gives it length and heaviness. 
1917, 
, 7HE BLA 
The black bear ( Ursus Americantis ) derives 
its name from its fur, which is a rich, warm, 
and extremely glossy jet black, except on the 
muzzle, where, beginning at the mouth, the 
hair is a fawn color, which deepens into the 
dark tan color of the face, and ends in rounded 
spots over each eye. These color-marks and 
its peculiarly convex facial outline are the 
distinguishing marks of the species. The tan 
color becomes, with age, a brownish gray. 
The largest black bear I ever saw weighed 
five hundred and twenty-three pounds, and 
measured six feet and four inches from the 
tip of the nose to the root of the tail. One of 
this species seems to possess the power of 
transforming himself at will into a variety of 
CK BEAR. 
shapes. When stretched out at length he ap- 
pears very long; when in good condition, 
short and stout ; when upright, tall ; and when 
asleep, he looks like a ball of glossy black 
fur. The black bear of to-day may be termed 
omnivorous, inasmuch as fish, flesh, fowl, 
vegetables, fruit, and insects are all eagerly 
devoured by him. He mates in October, and 
the period of gestation lasts one hundred and 
twent}' days. Two to four cubs form a litter. 
The cubs are always jet black, and not ash 
color, as some of the older naturalists aflirm. 
If, according to Flourens, the natural life of an 
animal be five times the period of its growth to 
maturity, I should think that the black bear's 
limit was about twenty years. I knew of a 
S 
