William Cullen Bryant, Author of America

by Gilbert H Muller

a few weeks before the publication of The Fountain and Other Poems his youngest daughter, 20 year old Fanny married Parke Godwin, 26. virtually no mention of this marriage in his correspondence except a cryptic sentence in a letter to Dana: "You gave the true interpretation of my silence on another subject, so that there is no need of making any further explanation."
He did not approve of the marriage. Parke was outgoing, gregarious, enthralled by socialist causes, the opposite of his own personality.
he wrote typically warm letters to daughter Julia, letters to Fanny in tender moralizing tones noted faults in her shaky spelling and diction, tendancy toward boredom and frivolity, failure to write to him at any length. despite the rigorous education he had given the girls, it is thought he found her immature and not ready for marriage.
a month after the wedding, Fanny & husband moved out of the comfortable two story house on Ninth Street, and he left the Evening Post. using $6000 loaned by his father-in-law, he announced he would start his own paper, The New York Morning Post. Instead he purchased the Democratic New Era.
Godwin had kept the courtship of Fanny a secret from her parents.