weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways - I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them." These letters are a sad commentary on America (not that poets have not been lonely and discouraged in other countries), for they not only reveal a war-wasted South, but remind us how very little Lanier missed at that date in not being associated with the men of letters of New York and New England. The man he writes to, like an outsider yearning for good company, is Bayard Taylor, a first-rate man but a fourth-rate littérateur. The friendliness of Baltimore finally gave him much that he needed, and wonder of wonders! Johns Hopkins University made him instructor in literature; the new young college thought a true poet worthy to teach literature and helped a true poet to live. Lanier flourished alone, and taught himself all that he knew of books and poetry. Indeed he learned without a teacher to play the flute so well that he could support himself by playing in the orchestra at Baltimore, and was pronounced by professional musicians a distinguished player. In a somewhat florid but evidently sincere memorial the leader of the orchestra said: "I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute-concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert in 1878: his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius!" And he had never had a lesson in music. When he died at thirty-nine he had made himself a technically excellent musician; within ten years (for his literary life had scarcely begun before he was thirty) he had fitted himself to give lectures on the English novel, Shakespeare and old English poets; he had written the most original treatise in existence on English verse, equalled, so far as I know that kind of literature, only by the studies of Poe and Coleridge; and he was the unapproachably best American poet of his generation. If ever there was a born genius since Keats, it was Lanier. Let there be no sentimentalizing over him, for he was a man of humour, he spoke always of his difficulties in a manly fashion, and when death strides into his pages it is an honest figure and not a personification of the tuberculosis against which the poet fought to victorious defeat. But if ever lamentation for a poet's death be justifiable, there may well be a cry of pain for the unfinished "Hymns of the Marshes." His voice was growing greater when he ceased to sing, and, like Keats, his angel's tongue Lost half the sweetest song was ever sung. He bided his time, he wrote little verse, he studied all aspects of his art intensely, patiently, with a religious conscience. How sure and strong is his growth is wonderfully shown by comparing the two following poems, the first written when he was twenty-four and not published by him, and the second written ten years later, a perfect lyric: NIGHT Fair is the wedded reign of Night and Day. Like the round pearl that Egypt drunk in wine, EVENING SONG Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands, And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea, How long they kiss in sight of all the lands. Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun, Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart; Yet it is not for what he might have done but for what he did that the impartial assessment of time will sum his merits. It is humane to remember that he wrote "Sunrise" the year before he died, when he was too ill to eat and his temperature was at 104; then it is well to remove all the cross lights of biography and stand face to face with his "Sunrise," a poem magnificent in conception, perfect in workmanship, ultimate poetry. The following lines are the close of the poem: Good morrow, lord Sun! With several voice, with ascription one, Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll, O Artisan born in the purple, - Workman Heat, - It is thine, it is thine: Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright Than the eye of man may avail of: - manifold One, I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun: Old Want is awake and agag, every wrinkle a-frown; The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town: How dark, how dark soever the race that needs be run, I am lit with the Sun. Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-coloured smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of time's fen-politics And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labour, at leisure, in art, - till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The day being done. A blood brother to Lanier's "Sunrise" is Francis Thompson's "Ode to the Setting Sun," and I know not a third which so is closely its kin. These poems have much in common, opulence, splendour of metaphor and an amazing virtuosity in metrical matters which in turn allies them with Swinburne, from whom in thought they are, however, as remote as poets can be. If Thompson did not know the poems of Lanier, it is a case of predetermined affinities which the accidents of circumstance cheated of the earthly fulfilment of meeting. Have they some common earlier |