When Bryant became editor in chief of the New York Evening Post he was thirty-five years old. He had written about one third of the poetry saved in the collected editions and about one half of the better-known poems on which his reputation rests. This much is worth considering by itself, because it has a character of its own and is quite different from the output of the latter fifty years. In the first place it was consciously religious in tone. Bryant came from Puritan ancestry. He was brought up to believe in a stern God who had doomed all mankind to eternal destruction and who ruled them relentlessly, sometimes in sorrow but more often in anger. To the Puritans life on earth was a prelude to eternity, and eternity was to be spent possibly in bliss, but probably in torment. They were truly a people “whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests.” His mind and imagination were therefore wide open to the influence of Kirke White and the other “Graveyard Poets.” “Thanatopsis,” glimpse of death," was composed under the eye of God as Bryant knew him. In setting down “When thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight over thy spirit,” he was not indulging in any far-fetched fancy; he was alluding to what the minister brought home to him in two sermons every Sunday and to the unfailing subject of discussion at the mid-week prayer meeting. And when he wrote of approaching the grave “sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,” he was writing of a trust which needed to be especially strong to face the thought of possible damnation.
In a broad sense all true poetry is religious, for it deals with truths that lie beneath life and leads to higher thinking and better living, but the religion of the youthful Bryant was specialized to a single creed. The point is strikingly illustrated by the “Hymn to Death.” The first four fifths of this poem were written when he was twenty-five years old, a meditation based on Puritan theology. All men die, he said, even those one loves; but death is really God’s instrument to punish the wicked. Oppressors, idolaters, atheists, perjurers, revelers, slanderers, the sons of violence and fraud are struck down.
Thus, from the first of time, hast thou been found
On virtue’s side; the wicked, but for thee,
Had been too strong for the good; the great of earth
Had crushed the weak for ever.
Then, with the poem left at this stage, Bryant’s father died while still in the height of his powers and as the result of exposure in meeting his duties as a country doctor. In the face of this calamity the young poet’s verses seemed to him a bitter mockery:
Shuddering I look
On what is written, yet I blot not out
The desultory numbers; let them stand,