SOURCE: "William Cullen Bryant," in American Poets and Their Theology, The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1916, pp. 3-48.

In the following excerpt, Strong discusses various aspects of Christian theology in Bryant's poetry, including the poet's expressions of divine compassion, salvation, and immortality, and also notes his limitations.

There are patriotic people who maintain that America is the predestined home of poetry. They point to little Greece, with her rocky cliffs and bosky vales, her purple hills and encircling isles, and ask triumphantly if Greece was not the natural habitat of liberty and beauty. When we assent, they argue a fortiori that our great continent was even more manifestly ordained to nourish the largest and most precious growths of the human mind. Poetry is one of those largest and most precious growths, for it is the rhythmical expression of the world's meaning, in thoughts that breathe and words that burn...