The Literary World was established by Duyckinck and his brother, and was considered by the ]]»oet Dana to be the best journal of its kind ever published in America. One of the bibliographer's associates and warm admirers was William Allen Butler, the author of Nothing to Wear, who pronounced an eulogy upon his memory at a meeting of the New York Historical Society in 1879. Mr. Butler, himself a member of the bar, was of a well-known Hudson River family. His father was Benjamin F. Butler of Albany, in whose office Martin Van Buren studied law. The pages of Duyckinck, Griswold, and other editors disclose names once fragrant, but now withered as the handful of pressed rose petals that flutter out, leaving a faint, ghostly impression and a fleeting, musky
272 The Hudson River
perfume. There, for instance, we find reference to James Gordon Brooks, who was born in 1801, at Claverack, in Columbia County. He studied law at Poughkeepsie and passed most of his life at Albany, where he devoted much of his time to literary labour. It is said of him that, "half a century ago the now-forgotten singer's name was one of the brightest poetical names of the dcLY, and alwa^'s mentioned along with those of Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Percivale, Pierpont, Pinckney, Sprague, and Woodworth. " Leggett, in his Biographies of American Poets, included Brooks and excluded Dana. Another early poet, once of considerable celebrity, but long since forgotten, w^as Henry Pickering. He was born in the latter part of the eighteenth century at Newburgh, in the house which is now known as Washington's Headciuarters. His own description of that house may be appropriately quoted here :