I always get excited when I see a William Cullen Bryant reference in my reading......true, he is a very distant relation....but!

if memory serves, he was the great (possibly great great?) uncle of my great great grandmother Mary Alice Bryant Higdon McMican. I am reading Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer Girl The Annotated Biography Pamela Smith Hill, editor.

page 123 footnote 25. The New York Ledger was a popular family journal published by Robert Bonner from the early 1850s through 1887. It contained verse, moral essays, and fiction by such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Alfred, Lory Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. Mott, History of American Magazines, pp. 356-63, The New York Ledger.