Bryant himself must have been subjected, consciously or unconsciously, to the influences we have surveyed,--for who can escape breathing the common atmosphere? But he had within him that which is more potent than any external mould, and is the one trait hereditary in genius of every kind,--he had sincerity. What he saw, he saw with his own eyes; what he spake, he spake with his own lips; and inevitably it followed that men proclaimed him original. His secret, his method, were no more than this. “I saw some lines by you to the skylark,” he writes to his brother in 1838. “Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to draw your images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around you, unless you are professedly composing a description of some foreign country, when, of course, you will learn what you can from books. The skylark is an English bird, and an American who has never visited Europe has no right to be in raptures about it.” That last sentence explains Bryant; it is worth a hundred essays on The American Spirit; it should be the warning of every writer. The raptures of Americans over English skylarks they had never seen were then, and have always been, the bane of our literature. Eighty years ago the lowlands at the foot of our Helicon had been turned into a slough by the tears of rhymesters who did not feel the griefs they sang of, and the woods howled with sighs which caused no pang to the sighers. Bryant, by merely being natural and sincere, was instantly recognized as belonging to that lineage every one of whose children is a king.