We are often reminded that a writer's environments have much to do with the character of his writings, and in Bryant's case this fact is particularly noticeable. His earliest poems, and especially that great masterpiece, "Thanatopsis," written at the early age of eighteen, show unmistakably that the boy had grown up in the closest familiarity with the theological tenets of the New England of his day, and that the bent of his young mind was, even then, toward graver subjects than would naturally occupy the thoughts of a boy of that age. His biographers assert that he drew his inspiration for this grand poem from the pages of Kirke White and Southey. But whatever his acquaintance with these poets may have done for him, there is a striking similarity of imagery and sentiment between his own and the writings of the sacred bards, whose utterances were as familiar to the children of a Christian household in those days as their own childish nursery songs and hymns. For instance, compare these lines from "Thanatopsis" with a well-known passage in the Book of Job:-- "... Yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep,--the dead reign there alone." The sacred poet says:-- "Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb. The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man shall draw after him as there are innumerable before him." Then, again, in "The Old Man's Funeral":-- "Then rose another hoary man, and said, In faltering accents, to that weeping train: 'Why mourn ye that our aged friend is dead? Ye are not sad to see the gathered grain.'" Compare this with: "Thou shall come to the grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season." Examples similar to these occur in many of Bryant's poems, and tend to show the result of the early religious training, that, as the son of a thoughtful, God-fearing New England gentleman of that day, he most certainly did receive. That he was intensely, grandly, sometimes fiercely patriotic, is also due, in a great measure, to the surrounding influences of his young life. The struggle for American independence was at last over, and the lusty young Republic, springing, Minerva-like, from the mighty brain of a no longer imperilled freedom, was ready to throw down the gauntlet of defiance to all the world, and assert her rights as queen regnant of the great Western World. The armies had been disbanded, and the war-scarred veterans had joyfully returned to their farms and workshops, ready to put their willing hands again to the plough and the plane, and help to restore, by patient toil and honest legislation, prosperity and peace to the land so long distracted by the commotions and uncertainties of war.