Another thing to be said is that America has a unique history among great nations in that it has never been affected by any great religious influence except that which has issued from the Scriptures. No religion has ever been influential in America except Christianity. For many years there have been sporadic and spasmodic efforts to extend the influence of Buddhism or other Indian cults. They have never been successful, because the American spirit is practical, and not meditative. We are not an introspective people. We do not look within ourselves for our religion. Whatever moral and religious influence our literature shows gets back first or last to our Scriptures. The point of view of nature that is taken by our writers like Bryant and Thoreau is that of the Nineteenth Psalm. Moreover, we have been strongly under the English influence. Irving insisted that we ought to be, that we were a young nation, that we ought frankly to follow the leadership of more experienced writers. Longfellow thought we had gone too far that way, and that our poets, at least, ought to be more independent, ought to write in the spirit of America and not of traditional poetry. Whether we ought to have yielded to it or not, it is true that English influence has told very strongly upon us, and the writers who have influenced our writers most have been those whom we have named as being themselves under the Bible influence. We need not go into detail about these writers, though they are most attractive. Bryant did for us what Wordsworth did for England. He made nature seem vocal. "Thanatopsis" is not a Christian poem in the narrow sense of the word, and yet it could hardly have been written except under Christian influence. His own genial, beautiful character was itself a tribute to Christian civilization, and his life, as critic and essayist, has left an impression which we shall not soon lose. Professor Richardson thinks that the three problematical characters in American literature are Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The shrewdest estimate of Poe that has ever been given us is in Lowell's _Fable for Critics_: "There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind." That says it exactly. Poe knew many horrible situations, but he did not know the way out; and of all our American writers laying claim to place in the first class Poe shows least influence of the Bible, and apparently needs it most.