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i^smi
w^m.
SELECT POEMS OF SIDNEY LANIER
ipsww
'"'^.CV^-.-i- :'-JrWtX^~-r^'-. i.lii ^M 4 j^
SIDNEi' lyANIKR'S POEMS.
Edited by his Wife, with a Memorial by
Williaixi Hayes Ward. With portrait. New
edition. 12mo, ,52.00.
«ii-*'-^'-VOL-
^-v
'•^\;.\
FflTOWl^
jgr3S£-"W'?|
SELECT POEMS
OP
SIDNEY LANIER
/
EDITED
With an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography
BY
MORGAN CALLAWAY, Jr., Ph.D.
ASSOCIATE PS0FKS30R OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY IN THE UNI-
VERSITY OK TFXAS, FORMERLY FELLOW OF THE J.. HNS
HOPKINS university; author of "the abso-
lute PARTICIPLE !N At.GLO-SAXON "
■'%i\
TORONTO
GEORGE N. MORANG h CO.; Limited
1900
itir;^^
Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada in the
year Nineteen Hundred by George N. Morang &
Company, l,imited, at the Department
of Agriculture.
the
TO
MY FATHER
iS!m.-m^
I
It !
PREFACE
This edition of the Select Poems of Sidney
Lanier is issued in the hope of making his poetry
known to wider circles than hitherto, especially
among the students of our high-schools and col-
leges. To these as to older people, the poems
will, it is believed, prove an inspiration from the
stand-point both of literature and oi life.
The biographical section of the Introduction rests
in the main upon Dr. Ward's admirable Memorial
prefixed to the Poems of Sidney Lanier edited by
his wife, though a few additional facts have been
gleaned here and there. For most ' of the Bibliog-
raphy down to 1888 I am indebted to my Hopkins
comrade. Dr. Richard E. Burton, now of Hartford,
Conn., who compiled one for the Memorial of Sid-
ney Lanier, published by President Oilman, of the
Johns Hopkins University, in 1888. Obligations to
other publications about Lanier are in every instance
acknowledged in the appropriate place.
As to the selections made, 1 wished to include
The Marshes of Glynn and yet not to exclude Sun-
rise. But both could not be put in, and I finally
gave the preference to Sunrise, chiefly on the
» I say most of the Bibliography down to iSSS, because Dr.
Burton's different purpose led him to exclude items that could not
be emitted in a Bibliography that, like mine, tries to be complete.
:^mTm*^
Vlll
Preface
il
ground of its being Lanier's latest complete poem.
I believe all will admit that the poems selected fairly
exemplify the genius of the poet. The poems are
arranged, not as in the complete edition, but in their
chronological order, the only proper one, I think, for
a text-book. Of course, they are all given com-
plete.
In the Notes I have made rather copious quota-
tions from poems familiar to English scholars, be-
cause I hope that this book will go into the hands
of many to whom they are not familiar, and to
whom the original texts are not easily accessible.
And yet, if they at all attain their end, the Notes
must lead one to wish to know more of English
poetry, of which Lanier's is but a part.
Among the friends that have helped me by coun-
sel or otherwise I gratefully name Mr. Clifford
Lanier, brother of the poet; Professor Wm. Hand
Browne, of the Johns Hopkins University; Dr.
Charles H. Ross, of the Alabama Polytechnic Insti-
tute ; and m.y colleagues in the School of English in
the University of Texas, Mr. L. R. Hamberlin and
Professor Leslie Waggener. Chief-justice Logan
E. Bleckley, of Georgia, a man of letters as well as
of law, very kindly put at my use his correspond-
ence with the poet, the original draft of Corn, and
his criticisms upon the same. My chief indebted-
ness, however, is to Mrs. Sidney Lanier, who has
been most generous with her time and her hus-
band's papers.
Morgan Callaway, Jr.
University of Texas, October i, 1894.
jaii-^iivf Haiiim::^ir«is^^j?^iif3"s^.-»¥?i:
CONTENTS
Introduction,
L A Brief Sketch of Lanier's Life
II. Lanier's Prose Works, . .
III. Lanier's Poetry : Its Themes,
IV. Lanier's Poetry : Its Style,
V. Lanier's Theory of Poetry,
VI. Conclusion, ....
Poems, ........
Life and Song, ....
Jones's Private Argyment, .
Corn,
My Springs,
The Symphony, ....
The Power of Prayer, . .
Rose-morals,
To , with a Rose, . .
Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn,
The Mocking-bird,
PAGB
xi
• ••
xni
xxin
xxvi
xl
xlix
liv
3
4
6
12
14
26
30
'I
32
33
X Contents
PAGE
Song of the Chattahoochee, 34
The Revenge of Ilamish, 36
Remonstrance, 42
Opposition, . 45
Marsh Song — At Sunset, 46
A Ballad of Trees and the Master, ... 46
Sunrise, 47
Notes 57
Bibliography, 85
I!
,:i!fv»-ri,i^Mt)i!u:p« W! iit iijjB.ttmTBte ,^
INTRODUCTION
v?y
H P aB!il'll !W ( | MMIIlB«gWW«!M!IUl^.'"U^ ^ J!i.- J
I.
INTRODUCTION
A BRIEF SKETCH OF LANIER'S LIFE
(1842-1881)
Sidney Lanier has so recently passed from us
that it seems desirable briefly to recount the chief
incidents of his life. This task is much lightened
by Dr. Wm. Hayes Ward's Memorial} upon which,
as stated in the Preface, is based this section of my
essay. Born at Macon, Ga., February 3, 1842, Sid-
ney Lanier came of a family noted for their love
and cultivation of the fine arts. From the time of
Queen Elizabeth to the Restoration, several of his
paternal ancestors were connected with the English
court as musical composers and as painters. The
father of the poet, however, Robert S. Lanier, was
a most industrious lawyer, who, after a lingering
illness of three years, recently ' answered Adsum to
the summons of the supreme tribunal. The poet's
mother, Mary Anderson, a Virginian of Scotch de-
scent, likewise sprang from a family distinguished
for their love of oratory, music, and poetry.
With such an ancestry we are not surprised to
learn that Sidney's earliest passion was for music,
and that in boyhood he could, although untutored,
> For the fall title of works cited see Bibli<)fi/ ^phy.
' October 20, 1893, at Macon, Ga.
^SSfStKSfS^^
xiv
Introduction
play on almost every kind of instrument. He pre-
ferred the violin, in playing which he sometimes
sank mto a deep trance, but in deference to his
father's view gave it up for the flute, his power
over which we shall hear of farther on. At first,
strange to say, he considered music unworthy of
one's sole attention, but later he came to rank it as
his fullest expression of worship.
At fourteen Sidney entered the Sophomore Class
of Oglethorpe College, near Macon, Ga., and, with
a year's mtermission, graduated with first honor in
i860, when just eighteen. To Professor James
Woodrow, of Oglethorpe, now President of South
Carolina College, Lanier declared that he owed
" the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his
youth." On graduating he was given a tutorship
in his Alma Mater, a position that he held until
the outbreak of the Civil War.
The lecture - room was now exchanged for the
battle-field ; in April, 1861, Lanier entered the Con-
federate Army as a private in the Macon Volunteers
of the Second Georgia Battalion, an organization
among the first to reach Norfolk and that still keeps
up Its corporate existence. In the spring of 1862
Lanier was joined by his young brother, Clifford •
and throughout the war each seemed to vie with
the other in brotherly love ; for, while both were
offered promotion, neither would accept it, since to
do so would have entailed separation from the
other. The leisure time of his first year's service
Sidney spent in the study of music and the modern
language*.. He was engaged in several battles in
Virginia, but afterward was transferred, with Clif-
.^Hik;i;;t!E"1'ti*H,:^i!^h^#.f!^^.<ll*^.r^H*«f^•:.»■■^««^.^
Introduction
XV
ford, to the Signal Sennce, with head-quarters at
Petersburg. Here he had access to a small library,
of which he made sedulous use. In 1863 his com-
pany was mounted, and served in Virginia and
North Carolina. In the spring of 1864 both
brothers were transferred to Wilmington, the head-
quarters of the Marine Signal Service, in which they
remained to the end of the war. Finally the two
brothers were separated, each becoming signal offi-
cer' of a blockade -runner. Sidney's vessel was
captured, and for five months he was a prisoner
at Point Lookout, Md., with nothing but his flute
to solace him. It was the exposure of prison-life,
no doubt, that first led to decline of health by
developing the seeds of consumption, a disease that
was to carry off his mother and that he was to
struggle with the last fifteen years of his life. Re-
leased from prison in February, 1865, he returned
to Georgia, for the most part afoot, and reached
home March 15th. An account of his war-life is
given in his novel, Tiger-lilies, treated below\
During the succeeding nine years (1865-73) his
life was checkered indeed. Seriously ill for six
weeks, he arose from his bed to see his mother car-
ried off by consumption and to find himself suffer-
ing with congestion of the lungs. Slightly relieved,
Lanier turned his hand to various projects for mak-
ing a living: clerking in a hotel in Montgomery,
Ala., for two years; writing « and publishing his
novel, Tiger-lilies; teaching at Prattville, Ala,,
» It is sometimes erroneously stated that each was put in charge
of a blockade-runner.
' April, 1867.
xvi
Introduction
one year, during which time ' he married Miss Mary
Day, of Macon, Ga. ; studying and then practising
law with his father at Macon, Ga., for five years ;
now, in the winter of 1872-73, trying to recuperate
at San Antonio, Texas, for hemorrhages had begun
in 1868, and a cough had set in two years later;
and, finally, settling in Baltimore, December, 1873,
to devote himself to music and literature.
Against the son's devotion of his life to music and
literature the father protested, chiefly on business
grounds, and begged him to rejoin himself in the
practice of the law. Thanking his father for his
thoughtfulness, Lanier justified his own course in
these earnest words : " My dear father, think how,
for twenty years, through poverty, through pain,
through 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 un-
acquainted 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. Does it not seem to you as to me,
that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among
the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having
followed them so long and so humbly, and through
so much bitterness }" "^ Of course, the father yield-
ed and did all that his slender means would allow
toward keeping up his son, who henceforth devoted
every energy to music and literature. Despite con-
^ .December 19, 1867. ^ W^ard's Memorial^ p. xx. f.
4
5
•i
i
■^.
aUiil ri^ TiSSliHMH
Introduction
xvli
[iss Mary
)ractising
'e years ;
ecuperate
ad begun
ars later ;
)er, 1873,
nusic and
business
;lf in the
;r for his
course in
link how,
igh pain,
ough the
ge and of
iness Hfe,
'holly un-
ary ways
epressing
:h I could
id poetry
:ould not
as to me,
ilf among
er having
1 through
her yield-
)uld allow
h devoted
spite con-
p. XX. f.
tinued ill-health, which now and again necessitated
visits of months' duration to Florida, North Caro-
lina, and Virginia, Lanier did a vast amount of
work. He was engaged as first flute for the Pea-
body Symphony Concerts, a position that he filled
with rare distinction for six years. As to his liter-
ary work, this began with the publication of his
novel, riger-lilics, in 1867, and in the same year,
of occasional poems in The Round Table of New
York. Corn, published in Lippincott's Magazine
(Philadelphia) for February, 1875, "s the first of his
poems that attracted general notice, and the one
that gained him the friendship of Bayard Taylor.
To Taylor he owed his selection to write the Cen-
tennial Cantata, which gave him still greater noto-
riety, though, to be sure, some of it was not very
grateful to him. In 1876 the Lippincotts published
his Florida, and in 1877 his first volume of Poems,
which contained ninety-four pages and consisted
chiefly of pieces • previously published in the maga-
zines. Soon after settling in Baltimore, Lanier made
a careful study of Old and Middle English, the
fruits of which he partially embodied in courses of
lectures given to his private class and to the public,
the latter at the Peabody Institute, in 1879. During
these years, too, he had been steadily turning out
poems of high order. On his birthday, February
3, in 1879, he received notice of his appointment as
Lecturer on English Literature at the Johns Hop-
kins University of Baltimore for the ensuing scho-
lastic year, with a fixed salary, the first since his
marriage. In the summer of 1879 he wrote his
• They are named in the Bibliography.
xvm
Introduction
Science of English Verse, which constituted the
basis of his first course of lectures at the Johns
Hopkins University. Notwithstanding serious ill-
ness, this same winter, 1879-80, he lectured at three
private schools and kept up his musical engagement
at the Peabody Concerts. The next winter, 1880-
81, he came near dying, but still kept writing {Sun-
rise was written with a fever temperature of 104')
and went through his twelve lectures at the Hop-
kins, afterward embodied in The English Novel.
How trying this must have been to him can be
gathered from the following words of Mr. Ward :
" A few of the earlier lectures he penned himself ;
the rest he was obliged to dictate to his wife. With
the utmost care of himself, going in a closed car-
riage and sitting during his lecture, his strength
was so exhausted that the struggle for breath in the
carriage on his return seemed each time to threaten
the end. Those who heard him listened in a sort of
fascinated terror, as in doubt whether the hoarded
breath would suffice to the end of the hour." * After
this a trip was made to New York to arrange for
issuing some books for boys, and four were issued,
two posthumously: Boy's Froissart (iSyS), Bojy's
King Arthur (1880), Boys Mabinogion (1881), and
Boy's Percy (1882). Another work, an account of
North Carolina similar to that of Florida, was con-
tracted for and was definitely planned, but, owing
to aggravating infirmities, could not be completed.
For the end was near at hand. Desperate illness
had made it necessary to seek relief near Asheville,
N. C, where he was joined by Mrs. Lanier and by
• Ward's Memorial, p. xxviii.
ii I
a*iC:m'iii»iHr ««•■
rgSJBfT.rffS
Introduction
xix
his father and step-mother. Growing no better, he
was moved to Lynn, Polk County, N. C. Of the rest
we shall hear in the words of his wife : '* We are
left alone (it is August 29, 1881) with one another.
On the last night of the summer comes a change.
His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of
our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon
Of September 7th, and then falls the frost, and that
unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to
the will of God." ' Unusually checkered his life
had been, and yet for Lanier as for Timrod poetry
(and music) had " turned life's tasteless waters into
wine, and flushed them through and through with
purple tints." " The body was taken to Mr. Lanier's
home in Baltimore, thence to the Church of St.
Michael and All Angels, where services were con-
ducted by the rector, the Rev. Dr. William Kirkus.
It was then buried in Greenmount Cemetery, in the
lot of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence TurnbuU, two of the
dearest friends that Mr. and Mrs. Lanier had in
Baltimore.
Mr. Lanier left a family consisting of his wife and
four sons. Mrs. Lanier, who lives at Tryon, N. C,
was the inspiration not only of those glorious trib-
utes, Latis Maria and My Springs, but also of
the poet's whole life. The eldest son, Mr. Charles
Day Lanier, was born at Macon, Ga., September 12,
1868, and was graduated A.B. at the Johns Hopkins
University in 1888. At one time he was Assistant
Editor of The Cosmopolitan Magazine, a position
that he gave up only to become Business Manager
* Ward's Memorial, p. xxx.
' Timrod's A Vision 0/ Poesy, stanza xliv.
XX
Introduction
of The Review of Reviews, with which he has been
connected from its beginning. He is the author of
several graceful sketches in the magazines. The
second son, Sidney, is passionately fond of music,
and would have devoted himself thereto but for
life-long ill-health. After teaching three years in
West Virginia, he has started a fruit farm at Tryon,
N. C, where he hopes to build up his health. The
third son, Henry Wysham, was prevented from en-
tering the Johns Hopkins by a partial failure jf
sight, and for three years has devoted himself to
railroad engineering in Baltimore and in Jamaica.
The youngest, Robert Sampson, only fourteen, is
at Tryon, N. C, with his mother.
That interest in Lanier's life and work did not
cease with his death, there is abundant evidence.
On October 22, 1881, a memorial meeting was held
by the Faculty and students of the Johns Hopkins
University, at which addresses ' were made by Pres-
ident Oilman and Professor Wm. Hand Browne,
of the University, and by the Rev. Dr. William
Kirkus, of Baltimore, and a letter ' was read from
the poet-critic, Edmund C. Stedman, of New York.
In 1883 Tke English Novel was published, and in
1884 the Poems, edited by his wife, with the excel-
lent Memorial by Dr. Wm. Hayes Ward, who de-
clared that he thought Lanier would " take his final
rank with the first princes of American song." '
Numerous reviews of his life and works were pub-
lished, notably those by Mr. Wm. R. Thayer, Dr.
Merrill E. Gates, Professor Charles W. Kent, and
by the London Spectator. On February 3, 1888,
1 See the Bibliography. ' Memorial, p. xi.
Introduction
xxt
the Johns Hopkins University held another memo-
rial meeting in Baltimore, attended by many from
other cities. " A bust of the poet, in bronze (mod-
elled by Ephraim Keyser, sculptor, in the last period
of Lanier's life, at the suggestion of Mr. J. R. Tait),
was presented to the University by his kinsman,
Charles Lanier, Esq., of New York. It was also
announced that a citizen of Baltimore had offered a
pedestal, to be cut in Georgia marble from a design
by Mr. J. B. N. Wyatt. On a temporary pedestal
hung the flute of Lanier, which had so often been
his solace, and a roll of his manuscript music. The
bust was crowned with a wreath of laurel ; the
words of Lanier, * The Time needs Heart,' were
woven into the strings of a floral lyre ; and other
flowers, likewise brought by personal friends, were
grouped around the pedestal. As a memento a
card, designed by Mrs. Henry Whitman, of Boston,
was given to those who were present. Upon its
face was a wreath, with Lanier's name and the date,
and the motto — Aspiro diitn Exspiro ; upon the
reverse appeared the closing lines of the Hymn
of the Sun, taken from the poet's Hymns of the
M'lrshes — and beneath, a flute with ivy twined about
it." ' The exercises, which were interspersed with
music, were as follows : addresses by President Gil-
man of the Hopkins and President Gates of Rutgers
(now of Amherst) ; selections from Lanier's poetry,
read by Miss Susan Hayes Ward, of Newark, N. J. ;
a paper on Lanier's Science of English Verse, by
Professor A. H. Tolman, of Ripon College, Wis.
(now of the University of Chicago) ; poetic tributes
1 Gilman's A Memorial of Sidney Lanier, pp. 5-6.
! 11
(
! il
XXll
Introduction
i
by Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull, Miss Edith M. Thomas,
and Messrs. James Cummings, Richard E, Burton,
and John B. Tabb ; and letters from Messrs. Rich-
ard W. Gilder, Edmund C, Stedman, and James
Russell Lowell — all of which may be found in
President Gilmar/s dainty Memorial of Sidney
Lanier. Again, a replica of the above-mentioned
bust, the gift also of Mr. Charles Lanier, was un-
veiled at the poet's birthplace, Macon, Ga., on Octo-
ber 17, 1890; on which occasion tender tributes'
were again poured forth in prose and verse, by
Messrs. W. B. Hill, Hugh V. Washington, Charles
Lanier, Clifford Lanier, Wm. Hand Browne, Charles
G. D. Roberts, John B. Tabb, H. S. Edwards, Wm.
H. Hayne, Charles W, Hubner, Joel Chandler Har-
ris, Charles Dudley Warner, and Daniel C. Gilman.
But more significant than these demonstrations,
perhaps, is the steadily growing study devoted to
Lanier's works. Mr. Higginson" tells us, for in-
stance, that, when he wrote his tribute in 1887,
Lanier's Science of English Verse had been put
upon the list of Harvard books to be kept only a
fortnight, and that, according to the librarian, it
was out " literally all the time." Moreover, it
would not be difficult to cite various poems that
have been more or less modeled upon Lanier's ;
it is sufficient, perhaps, to point out that the marsh,
a theme almost unknown to poetry before Lanier
immortalized it, is not infrequently the subject
of poetic treatment now, as in the works of Charles
*
xi
1 Published In The Atlanta (,Ga.) Constitution of October 19,
1890.
" See The Chautauquan, as cited in the Bibliography,
I' lW i a ii iimiMM i B i JiJiiiigii 'i i' i H.iJi
Introduction
XXlll
G. D. Roberts," Clinton ScoUard,' and Maurice
Thompson.' It is noteworthy, too, that many of
the younger poets of the day, both in Canada and
the United States, have sung Lanier's praise. A
complete list is given in the Bibliography. Still
further, a devoted admirer, Mrs. Lawrence Turn-
bull, of Baltimore, in The Catholic Man, has in the
person of Paul, the poet, given us an imaginative
study of the character of Mr. Lanier. Finally, only
a few months ago the Chautauquans of the class of
1898 determined to call themselves*' The Laniers,"
in honor of the poet and his brother.
IL LANIER'S PROSE WORKS
With this brief sketch of his life, let us turn to
Lanier's works, and first to those in prose. At the
head of the list comes Tiger-lilies, 2l novel written
within three weeks and published immediately there-
after, in 1867. Under the figure of "a strange,
enormous, terrible flower," the seed of which he
hopes may perish beyond resurrection, the author
pictures the horror of war in general and of the
Civil War in particular. An entertaining love-story
runs through the book, the plot of which space does
not allow me to detail. In execution the novel has
grave defects : it lacks unity ; the characters talk as
learnedly as Lanier afterward wrote of music ; and
at times, as in the oft-quoted picture of the war,*
» See recent files of The Independent (New York).
» See his Pictures in Song-CScw York, 1884), pp. 45-49'
» See his Songs 0/ Fair Weather {Y!>QS\.on, 1883), pp. 27-28.
< Tiger-lilies, p. 115 ff.
I"
I
ij
\i
1
' i!
iil'i
111 ;
l|H
XXIV
Introduction
the style is grandiloquent ; owing to which blem-
ishes the author wisely discouraged its republica-
tion. But, in spite of these defects, the book has
one very strongly put scene,' the interview between
Smallin and his deserter brother, and several beau-
tiful passages" that distinctly proclaim the high-
souled poet.
Lanier's next publication, Florida : Its Scenery,
Climate, and History, was written by commission
of the Atlantic Coast Line, and appeared in 1876.
To use the author's own epithet, Florida is " a
spiritualized guide-book."
Exclusive of the 1877 volume of Poems, Lanier's
next original work was The Science of English
Verse, which in lecture-form was delivered to the
students of the Johns Hopkins in the winter of 1879
and was published in 1880. According to compe-
tent critics, the book gives as searching an investiga-
tion of the science of verse on its formal side as is to
be had in any language. Since the treatise is so evi-
dently an epoch-making one, I regret that the tech-
nicality of the subject forbids my attempting in this
connection even a brief exposition ^ of its principles.
I can say only that Lanier treats verse in the terms
of music ; that, according to the promise of the pref-
ace, he gives " an account of the true relations of
music and verse ; " and that in so doing he has given
us the best working theory for English verse from
Casdmon to Tennyson. This is a high estimate,
* Tiger-lilies, p. 149 ff.
' Thpt on " love " (p. 26) is quoted later.
» This may be found in Professor Tolman's article, cited in the
Bibliography.
Introduction
XXV
IS to
but it is by no means so high as that of the lament-
ed poet-p.ofessor, Edmund Rowland Sill, who said
of The Science of English Verse, " It is the only-
work that has ever made any approach to a rational
view of the subject. Nor are the standard ones
overlooked in making this assertion." '
Lanier's second course of lectures at the Johns
Hopkins University, delivered in the winter and
spring of 1881, was published in 1883 under the
title. The English No7>el and the Principles of Its
De7'clopment:^ According to the author's state-
ment, the purpose of the book is " first, to inquire
what is the special relation of the novel to the mod-
ern man, by virtue of which it has become a para-
mount literary form ; and, secondly, to illustrate
this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some
concrete readings in the greatest of modern Eng-
lish novelists " (p. 4). Addressing himself to the
former, Lanier attempts to prove (i) that our time,
when compared with that of ^schylus, shows an
" enormous growth in the personality of man " (p.
5) ; (2) that what we moderns call Physical Science,
Music, and the Novel, all had their origin at practi-
cally the same time, about the middle of the seven-
teenth century (p. 9) ; and (3) " that the increase of
personalities thus going on has brought about such
complexities of relation that the older forms of ex-
pression were inadequate to them ; and that the re-
1 Quoted by Tolman.
2 Mrs. Lanier informs me that The English Novel will soor. be
issued in an amended form and with a new sub-title, Studies in
the Development of Personality, which indicates precisely what
Mr. Lanier intended to attempt, and relieves the book of its seem-
ing incompleteness as to scope.
XXVI
Introduction
I <i il -w
ii-
iiiii
M;i
suiting necessity has developed the wonderfully
free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the
more rigid Greek drama, through the transition
form of the Elizabethan drama" (p. lo). In fulfil-
ment of his second purpose, the author gives a de-
tailed study of several of the novels of George Eliot,
whom he takes to be the greatest modern English
novelist. Even this brief synopsis of the book must
indicate its broad and stimulating character, in
which respect it is a worthy successor of The Sa-
ence of EtigUsh Verse. Despite the limitations
induced by failing life, which necessitated the cut-
ting down of the course of lectures from twenty to
twelve,' I know of few more life-giving books ; and
I venture to assert that it cannot safely be over-
looked by any careful student of the subject.
Among other prose works I may mention La-
nier's early extravaganza, Three Waterfalls ; Bob,
a happy account of a pet mocking-bird, worthy of be-
ing placed beside Dr. Brown s Rab and his Friends ;
his books for boys : Froissart, King Arthur, Ma-
binogi'on, and Percy, which have had, as they de-
serve, a large sale ; and his posthumous From Bacon
to Beethoven, a highly instructive essay on music.
III. LANIER'S POETRY: ITS THEMES
But it is chiefly as a poet that we wish to con-
sider Lanier, and I turn to the posthumous edition
of his Poems gotten out by his wife. At the out-
set let us ask, How did the poet look at the world ?
1 Spann.
•*"*W«*K4!»-.ai;f.'»c ;-!>/•.'■«
Introduction
xxvu
what problems engaged his attention and how were
they solved ? A careful investigation will show, I
believe, that, despite the brevity of his life and its
consuming cares, Lanier studied the chief questions
of our age, and that in his poems he has offered us
noteworthy solutions.
What, for instance, is more characteristic of our
age than its tendency to agnosticism ? I pass by
the manifestations of this spirit in the world of re-
ligion, of which so much has been heard, and give
an illustration or two from the field of history and
politics. Picturesque Pocahontas, we are told, is
no more to be believed in ; moreover, the Pilgrim
Fathers did not land at Plymouth Rock, nor did
Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence.
Which way we turn there is a big interrogation-
point, often not for information but for negation.
Of the good resulting from the inquisitive spirit,
we all know ; of the baneful influence of inquisitive-
ness that has become a mere intellectual pastime
or amateurish agnosticism, we likewise have some
knowledge ; but the evil side of this tendency has
seldom been put more forcibly, I think, than in this
stanza from Lanier's Acknowledgment :
" O Age that half believ'st thou half believ'st,
Half doubt'st the substance of thine own half doubt,
And, half perceiving that thou half perceiv'st,
Stand'st at thy temple door, heart in, head out!
Lo ! while thy heart's within, helping the choir,
Without, thine eyes range up and down the time,
Blinking at o'er-bright Science, smit with desire
To see and not to see. Hence, crime on crime.
Yea, if the Christ (called thine) now paced yon street,
Thy halfness hot with his rebuke would swell ;
XXVIU
Introduction
I ^>A
i!ii|M
Legions of scribes would rise and run and beat
His fair intolerable Wholeness twice to hell."' »
More hurtful than agnosticism, because affectintr
larger masses of people, is the rapid growth of .ae
mercantile spirit during the present century, es-
pecially in America. This evil the poet saw most
clearly and felt most keenly, as every one may
learn by reading The Symphotiy, his great poem
in which the speakers are the various musical in-
struments. The violins begin :
" O Trade ! O Trade ! would thou wert dead 1
The Time needs heart — 'tis tired of head. " "
Then all the stringed instruments join with the
violins in giving the wail of the poor, who " stand
wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand : "
" ' We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
We sieve mine-meshes under the hills,
And thieve much gold from the Devil's bank tills,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills ? —
The beasts, they hunger, and eat, and die ;
And so do we, and the world's a sty ;
Hush, fellow-swine : why nuzzle and cry ?
Swhtchood hath no remedy
Say many men, and hasten by.
Clamping the nose and blinking the eye.
But who said once, in the lordly tone,
Man shall not live by bread alone
But all that cometh from the throne ?
Hath God said so ?
But Trade saith A'b;
And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say Go :
There' s plenty that can, if you can't : we know.
1 Acknoivledgment^ 11. 1-12.
The Symphony, II.
i-a.
tm'M
Introduction
XXIX
Move out, if you think you're underpaid.
The poor are prolific ; we're not afraid;
Trade is Trade. '
" Thereat this passionate protesting
Meekly changed, and softened till
It sank to sad requesting
And suggesting sadder still :
'And oh, if men might some time see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be I
Does business mean. Die, you — live, 1 f
Then " Trade is trade " but sings a lie :
'Tis only war grown miserly.
If business is battle, name it so.' " '
Of even wider sweep than mercantilism is the
spirit of intolerance; for, while the diffusion of
knowledge and of grace has in a measure repressed
this spirit, it lacks much of being subdued. I do
not wonder that Lanier " fled in tears from men's
ungodly quarrel about God," and that, in his poem
entitled Remonstrance, he denounces intolerance
with all the vehemence of a prophet of old.
But Lanier had an eye for life's beauties as well
as its ills. To him music was one of earth's chief
blessings. Of his early passion for the violin and
his substitution of the flute therefor, we have already
learned. According to competent critics he was
possibly the greatest flute-player" in the world, a
fact all the more interesting when we remember
that, as he himself tells us,' he never had a teacher.
With such a talent for music the poet has naturally
' The Symphony, 11. 31-61.
' See Ward's Memorial, pp. xx, xxxi.
» Hayne's (P. H.) A Poefs Letters to a Friend.
M
XXX
Introduction
strewn his pages with fine tributes thereto. In
Ttger-lilieSy for instance, he tells us that, while ex-
plorers say that they have found some nations that
had no god, he knows of none that had no music,
and then sums up the matter in this sentence :
" Music means harmony ; harmony means love ;
and love means — God ! " ' Even more explicit is
this declaration in a letter of May, 1873, to Hayne:
" I don't know that I've told you that whatever
turn I may have for art is purely musical ; poetry
being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot
sometimes. I could play passably on several in-
struments before I could write legibly, and since
then the very deepest of my life has been filled with
music, which I have studied and cultivated far
more than poetry." "^ We have already seen inci-
dentally that in his Symphony the speakers are
musical instruments ; and it is in this poem that oc-
curs his felicitous definition,
" Music is love in search of a word." '
In To Beethoven he describes the effect of music
upon himself :
" I know not how, I care not why,
Thy music brings this broil at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies.
1 Tiger-lilies, p. 32.
2 Hayne's A Poet's Letters to a Friend. After settling in Bal-
timore Lanier devoted more time to poetry than to music, as we
may see from this sentence to Judge Bleckley, in his letter of
March 20, 1876 : " As for me, life has resolved simply into a time
during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the
poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket."
' The Symphony., I, 368.
M i iiu iB jiyioiiiiiiiMM i
Introduction
XXX(
" Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,
And tunes the task each day begins
By the last trumpet-note of Time." »
It was this profound knowledge of music, of course,
that enabled Lanier to write his work on The Sci-
ence of English Verse, and gave him a technical
skill in versification akin to that of Tennyson.
Like most great poets of modern times, Lanier
was a sincere lover of nature. And it seems to me
that with him this love was as all-embracing as with
Wordsworth. Lanier found beauty in the waving
corn ' and the clover ; ^ in the mocking-bird,* the
robin,'* and the dove ; " in the hickory,^ the dog-
wood,'' and the live-oak ;* in the murmuring leaves '
and the chattering streams ; '" in the old red hills "
and the sea ; '^ in the clouds," sunrise,'* and sunset ; *'
and even in the marshes,'* which " burst into bloom "
for this worshiper. Again, Lanier's love of nature
was no less insistent than Wordsworth's. We all
remember the latter's oft-quoted lines :
" To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears : " "
» To Beethoven, II. 61-68.
5 See The Waving of the Corn and Corn. • See Clover.
« See The Mocking-Bird &ad. To Our Mocking-Bird.
» See Tampa Robins. * See The Dove.
' See From the Flats, last stanza.
8 See Sunrise. • See Sunrise and Corn.
>" See The Song of the Chattahoochee axiA Sunrise.
" See Corn. '^ See Sunrise and At Sunset.
1' See Individuality. »* See Sunrise, etc. 1 » See /l/ Sunset.
I* See The Marshes of Glynn, and read Barbe's tribute to
Lanier, cited in the Bibliography.
1' Intimations of Immortality , 11. 202-203.
li
XXXll
Introduction
and beside them one may put this line of La-
nier's,
"The little green leaves would not let me alone in my
sleep," »
because, as the context shows, he was
" Shaken with happiness :
The gates of sleep stood wide." »
And how «rt/wand tender was this nature-worship !
He speaks of the clover' and the clouds * as cousins,
and of the leaves * as sisters, and in so doing re-
minds us of the earliest Italian poetry, especially of
The Canticle of the Sun, by St. Francis of Assisi,
who brothers the wind, the fire, and the sun, and
sisters the water, the stars, and the moon. Notice
the tenderness in these lines of Corn :
" The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands ; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness ;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart ; "«
to which we find a beautiful parallel in a poem by
Paul Hamilton Hayne, himself a reverent nature-
worshiper :
"Ah J Nature seems
Through something sweeter than all dreams
To woo me ; yea, she seems to speak
How closely, kindly, her fond cheek
' TAe Symphony, 1. 3. a The Symphony, II. 13-14.
• Clover, 1. 57. ♦ Individuality, I. i. * Sunrise, 1. 42.
• Corn, 11. 4-9. Compare The Symphony, 11. 183-190.
Ji
Introduction
xxxiu
La-
Rested on mine, her mystic blood
Pulsing in tender neighborhood,
And soft as any mortal maid,
Half veiled in the twilight shade.
Who leans above her love to tell
Secrets almost ineffable I " '
Moreover, this worship is restful :
" Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea ?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the
marshes of Glynn.
" By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God :
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of
Glynn.""
But to Lanier the ministration of nature was by
no means passive ; and we find him calling upon the
leaves actively to minister to his need and even to
intercede for him to their Maker :
" Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms.
Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,
Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,
Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves.
Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me
Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain rne, —
Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet
That advise me of more than they bring, — repeat
• Hayne's In the Gray of Evening: Autumn, 11. 37-46, in
Poems (Boston, 1882), p. 250.
2 The Marshes 0/ Glynn, 11. 61-64, 75-78.
XXXIV
Introduction
Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought breath
From the heaven-side bank of the river of death, —
Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach me,—
And there, oh there
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
Pray me a myriad prayer," »
In this earnest ascription of spirituality to the
leaves Lanier recalls Ruskin.^
To take up his next theme, Lanier, like every
true Teuton, from Tacitus to the present, saw
" something of the divine " in woman. It was this
feeling that led him so severely to condemn a vice
that is said to be growing, the marriage for con-
venience. I quote from The Symphony, and the
" melting Clarionet " is speaking :
" So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime,
Men love not women as in olden time.
Ah, not in these cold merchantable days
Deem men their life an opal pray, where plays
The one red sweet of gracious ladies'-praise.
Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye —
Says, Here, you lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy :
Come, heart for heart — a trade f What ! weeping f why f
Shame on such wooer's dapper-mercery I " ^
And then follows a wooing that, to my mind,
should be irresistible, and that, at any rate, is quite
as high-souled as Browning's One Way of Love,
which I have long considered the high -water -
* Sunrise, 11. 39-53.
2 See his Modern Painters, vol. v., part vi., chapter iv., and
Scudder's note to the same in her Introduction to Ruskin (Chi-
cago, 1892), p. 249.
• The Symphony, 11. 232-340.
Introduction
mark of the chivalrous in love,
ionet is still speaking :
XXXV
The Lady Clar-
" I would my lover kneeling at my feet
In humble manliness should cry, O Sweet f
I know not if thy heart my heart will greet :
I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say,
I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay :
I do but know I love thee, and I pray
To be thy knight until my dying day. " '
I imagine, too, that any wife that ever lived would
be satisfied with his glorious tribute to Mrs. Lanier
in Afy Springs, which closes thus :
" Dear eyes, dear eyes, and rare complete —
Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet—
I marvel that God made you mine,
For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine." '
Almost equally felicitous are these lines of Acknowl-
edgment :
" Somehow by thee, dear Love, I win content :
Thy Perfect stops th' Imperfect's argument."'
But the cleverest thing that Lanier has written of
woman occurs in his Laus Marice :
" But thou within thyself, dear manifold heart,
Dost bind all epochs in one dainty fact..
Oh, Sweet, my pretty sum of history,
I leapt the breadth of time in loving thee ! " *
• The Symphony, 11. 241-248.
• Acknowledgment, II. 41-42.
9 My springs, 11. 53-56.
♦ Laus Marice, II. 11-14.
XXXVl
Introduction
— a scrap worthy to be placed beside Steele's •' To
love her is a liberal education," Vv'hich has often
been declared the happiest thing on the subject in
the English language.
To Lanier there was but one thing that made life
worth living, and that was love. Even the super-
ficial reader must be struck with the frequent use of
the term in the poet's works, while all must be up-
lifted by his conception of its purpose and power.
The ills of agnosticism, mercantilism, and intolerance
all find their solution here and here only, as is ad-
mirably set forth in The Symphony, of which the
opening strain is, " We are all for love," and the
closing, " Love alone can do." The matter is no
less happily put in Tiger-lilies : " For I am quite
confident that love is the only rope thrown out by
Heaven to us who have fallen overboard i.ito life.
Love for man, love for woman, love for God, — these
three chime like beils in a steeple and call us to
worship, which is to work. . . . Inasmuch as
we love, in so much do we conquer death and flesh ;
by as much as we love, by so much are we gods.
For God is love ; and could we love as He does, we
could be as He is." ' To the same effect is his state-
ment in The English Novel: " A republic is the
government of the spirit." "^ The same thought re-
curs later : " In love, and love only, can great
work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done ;
it is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in
art." ' in the poem entitled How Love Looked for
Hell, Mind and Sense at Love's request go to seek
i Tiger-lilies, p. 26. a The English Novel, p. 55.
' The English Novel, p. 204.
Introduction
XXXVll
Hell ; but ever as they point it out to Love, whether
in the material or the immaterial world, it vanishes ;
for where Love is there can be no Hell, since, in
the words of Tolstoi's story, " Where Love is there
is God." But in one of his poems Lanier sums up
the whole matter in a line :
" When life's all love, 'tis life : aught else, 'tis naught." »
It is but a short way from love to its source, —
God. And, as Lanier was continually in the at-
mosphere of the one, so, I believe, he was ever in
the presence of the other ; for the poet's '• Love
means God " is but another phrasing of the evan-
gelist's " God is love." ' Of Lanier's grief over
church broils and of his longing for freedom to
worship God according to one's own intuition, we
have already learned from his Remonstrance. What
he thought of the Christ we learn from The Crystal,
which closes with this invocation :
" But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, —
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's —
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee.
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ ? " >
» In Absence, 1. 42. » I.John IV. 16.
• The Crystal^ 11. loo-rii.
XXXVIU
Introduction
11
illlil
How tenderly Lanier was touched by the life of our
Lord may be seen in his Ballad of Trees and the
Master, a dramatic presentation of the scene in
Gethsemane and on Calvary. How implicit was
his trust in the Christ may be gathered from this
paragraph in a letter to the elder Hayne : " I have
a boy whose eyes are blue as your ' Aethra's.'
Every day when my work is done I take him in my
strong arms, and lift him up, and pore m his face.
The intense repose, penetrated somehow with a
thrilling mystery of potential activity, A'hich dwells
in his large, open eye, leaches me nev/ things. I
say to myself. Where are the strong arms in which
I, too, might lay mc and repose, and yet be full of
the fire of life ? And always through the twilight
come answers from the other world, ' Master !
Master ! there is one — Christ — in His arms we
rest ! '" ' Perhaps, however, Lanier's notion of
God, whom he declared* all his roads reached, is
most clearly expressed in a scrap quoted by Ward,
apparently the outline for a poem : " I fled in tears
from the men's ungodly quarrel about God. I fled
in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the
earth. Then somewhat like the beating of many
hearts came up to me out of the ground ; and I
looked and my cheek lay close to a violet. Then
my heart took courage, and I said : ' I know that
thou art the word of my God, dear Violet. And
oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads.
Measure what space a violet stands above the
ground. 'Tis no further climbing that my soul and
'^'HdLyn&'s A Poefs Letters to a Friend.
5 In J Florida Sunday, 1. 85.
Introduction
XXXIX
angels have to do than that. '" ' In this high spir-
ituality Lanier is in line with the greatest poets of
oar race, from
" Caedmon, in the morn
A-calling angels with the cow-herd's call
That late brought up the cattle," >
to him
'• Who never turned his back, but marched breast for-
ward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong
would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake." "
Perhaps I may append here a paragraph upon
Lanier's criticisms of other writers, for they seem to
me acute in the extreme. Despite the elaborate
essays in defence of Whitman's poetry by Dowden,*
Symonds,* and Whitman himself, I believe Lanier
is right in declaring that " Whitman is poetry's
butcher. Huge raw coUops slashed from the rump
of poetry and never mind gristle — is what Whit-
man feeds our souls with. As near as I can make
it out. Whitman's argument seems to be, that, be-
cause a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is ad-
mirable, and because the Mississippi is long, there-
1 Ward's i1/tf^w/t>r/rt/, p. xxxix.
a Lanier's The Crystal, 11. 90-93.
3 Browning's ^J^'/rtWrt'c' •• Epilogue, 11. 11-15.
« See Dowden's Studies in Literature, pp. 468-523.
• See Symonds's Walt IVhittnan : A Study. London, 1893.
m
J! I
!f
u
xl
Introduction
fore every American is God." ' Notice, again, how
well the defect of Paradise Lost is pointed out :
" And I forgive
Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars
Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel,
Immortals smite immortals mortalwise
And fill all heaven with folly." »
Few better things have been said of Langland than
this. —
" That with but a touch
Of art hadst sung Piers Plowman to the top
Of English songs, whereof 'tis dearest, now
And most adorable ; " *
or of Emerson than this, —
" Most wise, that yet, in finding Wisdom, lost
Thy Self, sometimes ; " *
or of Tennyson than this, —
" Largest voice
Since Milton, yet some register of wit
Wanting." *
The Crystal abounds in such happy characteriza-
tions.
IV. LANIER'S POETRY: ITS STYLE
So much for the poet's thoughts ; what shall we
say of their expression ? In other words, is Lanier
the literary artist equal to Lanier the seer.? In
• Ward's Memorial^ p. xxxviii. ' The Crystal, 11. 66-70.
» Idid., il. 87-90. * Ibid., 11. 93-94. ^Ibid., 11. 95-97.
Introduction
xli
order the better to answer this question, let us begin
at the beginning, with the elements of style, some
of which, however, I pass by as not calling for
special comment.
Of Lanier's felicitous choice of words we have
already had incidental illustration ; but it is desir-
able, perhaps, to group here a few of his happiest
phrases, to show that, as Lowell ' said, he is " a man
of genius with a rare gift for the happy word."
Notice this speech about the brook :
" And down the hollow from a ferny nook
Lull sings a little brooK ! " ■-'
and this of the well-bucket :
" The rattling bucket plumps
Souse down the well , " =•
and this of the outburst of a bird :
" Dumb woods, have ye uttered a bird ? " ♦
and the description of a mocking-bird as
" Yon trim Shakspere on the tree ; " *
and of midnight as
" Death's and truth's unlocking time." «
Moreover, it should be observed that Lanier fre-
quently uses significant compounds, — a habit ac-
1 See Lowell m Bibliography.
5 Frotn the Flats, 11. 23-24 ; cited by Gates. ' Clover, 11. 29-30.
« Sunrise, 1. 57 ; cited by Gates. ' The Mocking-Bird, 1. 14.
• The Crystal, 1. i. Other illustrations may be found in the
paragraph on figures of speech.
xlii
Introduction
quired, no doubt, from his study of Old English, in
which, as in German, such compounds abound.
While in the main Lanier's sentence-construction
is good, occasionally his sentences are too long, as
in My Springs, To Bayard Taylor, and Sunrise, in
which we have sentences longer than the opening
one in Paradise Lost, and, what is of more moment,
not so well balanced, and hence affording fewer
breathing spaces. That this detracts from clear-
ness and euphony both, every reader will admit.
To come to the figures of speech, one must be
struck at once with the delicacy and the vigor of
Lanier's imagination. The poet's fancy personifies
what at first blush seems to us incapable of person-
ification. Thus at one time ' he likens men to
clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the brows-
ing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads ;
while at another he addresses an old red hill of
Georgia as
" Thou gashed and hairy Lear
Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, '
E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer. " «
Like other Southern poets,' Lanier sometimes fails
to check his imigination, and in consequence leaves
his readers " bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze," as
in his description of the stars m/une Dreams * and
in the Psalm of the West.'' While I do not like a
maze, brilliant though it be and sweet, I must say
that I prefer the embarrassment of riches to the em-
1 In Clover. 2 Corn, 11. 185-1S7.
» See on this point the remarks of Professor Trent in his admi-
rable life of Sinnns (Boston, 1892), p. 149.
*June Dreams, 1. 21 ff. » Fsaim of the West, 1. 183 fif.
^%
J II'
Introduction
barrassment of poverty. On the whole, however,
Lanier's figures strike me as singularly fresh and
happy. In Sunrise, for example, the poet speaks
of the marsh as follows :
" The tide's at full : the marsh with flooded streams
Glimmers a limpid labyrinth of dreams ; " ^
and of the heavens reflected in the marsh waters :
" Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies
A rhapsody of morning-stars. The skies
Shine scant with one forked galaxy, —
The marsh brags ten : looped on his breast they lie. " '
Later, as the ebb-tide flows from marsh to sea, we
are parenthetically treated to these two lines :
" Run home, little streams,
With your lapfuls of stars and dreams." ^
Finally, the heaven itself is thus pictured :
" Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew
The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue
Big dew-drop of all heaven ; " *
beside which must be hung this exquisite picture :
•' The dew-drop morn may fall from off the petal of the
sky." *
As to versification, Lanier uses almost all the
types of verse — iambic, trochaic, blank, the sonnet,
etc. — and with about equal skill. Three features,
however, specially characterize his verse : the care-
» Sunrise, 11. 80-81. » Ibid., 11. 82-85. ' ^''^-^ U- ii4-"5-
* Ibid., 11. 134-136. » The Ship 0/ Earth, 1. 5.
xliv
Introduction
ful distribution of vowel-colors and the frequent use
of alliteration and of phonetic syzyg^,' by which last
is meant a combination or succession of identical or
similar consonants, whether initially, medially, or
finally, as for instance the succession of m's in
Tennyson's
" The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees."
All of these phenomena are illustrated in Lanier's
Song of the Chattahoochee, which has often been
compared to Tennyson's The Brook, and which
alone proves the author a master in versification.
To be sure, Lanier occasionally gives us an im-
proper rhyme, as thwart : hearty etc., but so does
every poet. No doubt, too, his love of music some-
times led him, not " to strain for form effects," but
to indulge too much therein, or, in the words of
Mr. Stedman, " to essay in language feats that only
the gamut can render possible." ^ But, as Profes-
sor Kent admirably puts it, " Lanier was a poet as
well as an artist, and if at times his artistic tempera-
ment seemed to eclipse his poetic thought, grant
that to the poet mind the very manner of expression
may indicate the thought that lies beneath, while to
the duller ear the thought must come in completed
form." •* Moreover, as we shall see later, this ex-
traordinary musical endowment gave Lanier a
unique position among English poets.
After what has been said the qualities of style
• See The Science o/ English Verse, p. 306 ff.
• In the Foam, 11. 6, 8. See, too, Kent's Study 0/ Lanier's Po-
ints, which gives an exhaustive treatment of Lanier's versification.
• Stedman's Poets of A merica, p. 449. * Kent, p. 60.
Introduction
xlv
may be briefly handled. As we have already seen,
Lanier sometimes fails in clearness, or, more pre-
cisely, in simplicity. This comes partly from infeli-
citous sentence-construction, partly, perhaps, from
Lanier's extraordinary musical endowment, but
chiefly, I think, from over-luxuriance of imagination.
But this occasional defect has been unduly exag-
gerated. Thus Mr. Gosse ' declares that Lanier is
" never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric
natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza,"
— a statement so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to
call for notice. As a matter of fact, Lanier has
written numerous poems that offer little or no diffi-
culty to the reader of average intelligence, as Life
and Song, My Springs, The Symphony, The
Mocking-bird, The Song of the Chattahoochee,
The Waving of the Corn, The Revenge of Ham-
is h. Remonstrance, A Ballad of Trees and the
Master, etc. More than this, Lanier at times mani-
fests the simplicity that is granted only to genius
of the highest order : thus an English critic,'^
who by the way declares that Lanier's volume
has more of genius than all the poems of Poe, or
Longfellow, or Lowell (the humorous poems ex-
cepted), and who considers Lanier the most original
of ill American poets, and more original than any
England has produced for the last thirty years, says
that " nothing can be more perfect than —
' The whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,' »
1 See Bibliography.
^ The Spectator {l^ouAon) ; s,tt Bibliography,
• My Springs, 11. 49-50.
xlvi
Introduction
■!!
lines in My Springs, and that " the touch of won-
der in the last two lines,
' I marvel that God made you mine,
For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine,' *
is as simple and exquisite as any touch of tender-
ness in our literature." I frankly admit that several
of Lanier's best poems, as Corn, The Marshes of
Glynn, and Sunrise, are not simple ; but the same
thing is true of Milton's Paradise Lost and of
Browning's The Rmg and the Book, and yet this
fact does not exclude these two works from the list
of great poems. Mr. Gosse, however, declares that
Corn, Sunrise, and The Marshes of Glynn " simu-
late poetic expression with extraordinary skill. But
of the real thing, of the genuine traditional article,
not a trace " ! What do these poems show, then ?
Mr. Gosse answers : " I find a painful effort, a strain
and rage, the most prominent qualities in everything
he wrote ; " which strikes me as the reverse of the
facts. In one of his letters " to Judge Bleckley, La-
nier wrote this sentence : " My head and my heart
are both so full of poems which the dreadful strug-
gle for bread does not give me time to put on pa-
per, that I am often driven to headache and heart-
ache, purely fo** want of an hour or two to hold a
pen." If, then, he committed an error (and I am
far from considering him faultless), it was not that
he beat and spurred on Pegasus, but that he failed
to rein him in. Still, I repeat that I prefer the em-
1 My springs, 11. 55-56.
9 It is to be hoped that these letters may yet be published. I
quote from one dated November 15, 1874.
Introduction
xlvii
Darrassment of riches to the embarrassment of
poverty. Finally, just as Milton tells us that the
music of the spheres is not to be heard by the
gross, unpurged ear, so I believe that many intelli-
gent ears and eyes are at first too gross to hear
and see what Lanier puts before them, whereas a
bit of patient listening and looking reveals delights
hitherto undreamed of.
If not always simple, Lanier is often forcible in
the extreme, as in The Symphony, The Revenge of
Hamt'sh, Remonstrance, and Sunrise. Of course,
it is open to any one to see in these poems the
•' rage " attributed to Lanier by Mr, Gosse, but I
prefer to consider it divine wrath in all but the last,
and in it wonder unutterable, which yet is so uttered
that ears become eyes. I allude to the stanzas »
describing the break of dawn and the rising of the
sun.
Of the poet's marvelous euphony. The Song of
the Chattahoochee speaks clearly enough. As we
have seen in our treatment of versification, it is here
a question not of too little but of too much. But,
despite an occasional too great yielding to his pas-
sion for music, his extraordinary endowment in this
direction gave La.xier a unique position among Eng-
lish poets. I quote again from Professor Kent : "^
" But if his sense of beauty made him a peer of our
great poets, it was the heavenly gift of music that
distinguished him from them. Milton, it is true,
whom he most resembles in this respect, had a
knowledge of music, but not the same passion for
it. Milton's music was more a recreation, an ac-
1 Sunrise, 11. 86-152.
a P. 6a.
xlviii
Introduction
11
ir
companiment of reverie ; Lanier's was a fiery zeal ;
a yearning love, a chosen and adequate form of
expression of his soul's deepest feeling. Combined
with this passion for music was his technical knowl-
edge of the art, and these combined formed at r- *•
the foundation and the framework of his po
He seems literally to have sung his poems ; they are
essentially musical, tuneful, and melodious. Sur-
charged with music, he overflows in mellifluous
numbers. Here, then, Lanier stands out differen-
tiated in the choir of poets, and here we find that
distinctive quality which is the very flavor of his
writing."
While most of Lanier's poems are in a serious
strain, several disclose no mean sense of humor. I
refer to his dialect poems, such as Jonjs's P*'ivatc
Argymcnt^ Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn,
and The Po7uer of Prayer, especially the ' ,
written in conjunction with his brother, Mr. Cli
Lanisr.
There are passages in the poems no less pathetic
than the poet's life. In discussing his love of nat-
ure we have seen that he was a pantheist in the
best sense of the term. So delicate was his sensi-
bility that we do not wonder when we hear him de-
claring,
" And I am one with all the kinsmen things
That e'er my Father fathered," *
a saying as felicitous as the Roman's " I am a man,
and, therefore, nothing human is stranger to me."
The tenderness of the Ballad of Trees and the
1 A Florida Sunday, 11, 102-103.
I' W
Introduction
Xlll
Master must touch all readers. Few passages are
more pathetic, I think, than that, '\\\June Dreams
in January, telling of the poet's struggle for bread
and fame, while *' his worshipful sweet wife sat still,
afar, within the village whence she sent him forth,
waiting all confident and proud and calm."' And,
if there occurs therein a plaintive tone, let us re-
member that it is the only time that he complained
of his lot, and that here really he has more in mmd
his dearer self, his wife, and that calm succeeded to
unrest just as it does in this passage :
" ' Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
But cannot dream us bread ? Why, now, can I
Make, aye, create this fervid throbbing June
Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul,
Yet cannot make a poorest penny-loaf
Out of this same chill matter, no, not one
For Mary, though she starved upon my breast ? *
And then he fell upon ' 's couch, and sobbed,
And, late, just when hi heart leaned o'er
The very edge of break g, fain to fall,
God sent him sleep." '
V. LANIER'S THEORY OF POETRY
It is now time to say a word about Lanier's the-
ory of art, especially the art of poetry. His views
upon the formal side of poetry have already been
noticed in the consideration of his Science of Eng-
lish Verse, and hence receive no further comment
here.
That Lanier keenly appreciated the responsibility
ijune Dreams in January, 11. 68-78.
1
Introduction
resting upon the artist, appears from Individuality,
where he tells us,
and,
" Awful ia art because 'tis free," '
" Each artist— gift oi terror ! — owns his will." »
But he accepts the responsibility reverently and
confidently:
"I worK in freedom wild,
But work, as plays a little child,
Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone."' t
Again, the province of poetry is pointed out, as
in Clover :
" The artist's market is the heart of man ;
The artist's price, some little good of man ; " *
and in T/te Bee :
"Wilt ask, What profit e'er a poet brings?
He beareth starry stuff about his wings
To pollen thee and sting thee fertile." »
In Corti^ too, the " tall corn-captain " " types the
poet-soul sublime."
But it is in his prose works that Lanier has treated
the matter most at length, and to these I turn. In
the first place, he insists that to be an artist one
must know a great deal, a statement that would ap-
pear superfluous but for its frequent overlooking by
1 Individuality^ 1. 62.
^ Individuality, 11. 89-91.
• The Bee, 11. 40-42.
' Individuality, 1. 76.
* Clover, 11. 126-127.
« Corn, I. 52 ff.
l-JCq
I
\
Introduction U
would-be artists. Hence he is right in warning
young writers : " You need not dream of winning
the attention of sober people with your poetry un-
less that poetry and your soul behind it are informed
and saturated with at least the largest final concep-
tions of current science." ' That Lanier strove to
follow this precept, we have abundant evidence in
his life and in his works : and I think that, if we re-
member his environments, we must wonder at the
vastness, the accuracy, and the variety of his knowl-
edge. As additionally illustrative of the last, I may
add that Lanier invented some improvements for
the flute, and made a discovery in the physics of
music that the Professor of Physics in the Univer-
sity of Virginia thought considerable."
In the second place, Lanier thinks that a poet's
knowledge of his art should be scientific. It was
this cnat led him to write The Science of English
Verse, the motto of which is, " But the best con-
ceptions cannot be, save where science and genius
are." In The English Novel ho. declares that " not
a single verse was ever written by instinct alone
since the world began," ^ and fortifies his statement
by Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare, —
" For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou. "
But Lanier clearly saw that no formal laws and no
amount of scientific knowledge could alone make
a poet, as apoears from the motto above quot-
ed, from the closing chapter of The Science of
1 Gates, p. 29. ' See West, p, 23.
• The English Novel, p. 33.
Hi
Introduction
English Verse, which tells us that the educated
love of beauty is the artist's only law, and from this
other motto, from Sir Philip Sidney : " A Poet, no
Industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not car-
ried unto it."
In the third place, Lanier holds that a moral in-
tention on the part of an artist does not interfere
with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work ;
that in art the controlling consideration is rather
moral than artistic beauty ; but that moral beauty
and artistic beauty, so far from being distinct or op-
posed, are convergent and mutually helpful. This
thesis he upholds in the following eloquent and co-
gent passage : " Permit me to recall to you in the
first place that the requirement has been from time
immemorial that wherever there is contest as be-
tween artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral
side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor i.ew us
out the most ravishing combination of tender
curves and spheric softness that ever stood for wom-
an ; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints
of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minut-
est particular the physical beauty suggest a moral
ugliness, that sculptor — unless he be portraying a
moral ugliness for a moral purpose — may as well give
over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose
judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his
work. For indeed we may say that he who has not
yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty
are convergent lines which run back into a common
ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with
moral beauty just as with artistic beauty — that he,
in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet
Introduction
nil
and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness
and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as
one fire, shine as one light, within him ; he is not
yet the great artist." ' By copious quotations Lanier
then shows that " many fine and beautiful souls ap-
pear after a while to lose all sense of distinction be-
tween these terms. Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom,
Goodness, and the like," and concludes thus :
" And if this be true, cannot one say with authority
to the young artist, — whether working in stone, in
color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel :
so far from dreading that your moral purpose will
interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in
the clear conviction that unless you are suffused —
soul and body, one might say — with that moral
purpose which finds its largest expression in love —
that is, the love of all things in their proper relation
— unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare
to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused
with beauty, do not meddle with love ; unless you
are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with
goodness ;— in a word, unless you are suffused with
beauty, truth,, wisdom, goodness, afid love, abandon
the hope that the ages will accept" you as an artist."'
1 The English Novel, p. 272 f.
2 The English Novel, p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of
this thesis, the student should consult at least those by Matthew
Arnold (Pre/ace to his edition of IVordsworth' s Poems), John
Raskin {Stones of Venice, vol. iii., chap, iv.), and Victor Hugo
(William Shakespeare, Book VI.).
liv
Introduction
VI. CONCLUSION
Milton has somewhere said that in order to be
a great poet one must himself be a true poem, a
dictum none the less trustworthy because of its in-
applicability to its author along with several other
great poets. Now of all English poets, I know of
none that came nearer being a true poem than
did Lanier. He was as spotless as " the Lady of
Christ's," and infinitely more lovable. Indeed, he
seems to me to have realized the ideal of his own
knightly Horn, who hopes that some day men will
be " maids in purity." ' I will not recall his gentle
yet heroic life amid drawbacks almost unparalleled ;
for it is even sadder than it is beautiful. It is my
deliberate judgment that, while, as the poet says in
his Lt/e and Song, no singer has ever wholly lived
his minstrelsy, Lanier came so near it that we may
fairly say, in the closing 'ines of the poem,
" His song was only living aloud.
His work, a singing with his liand."
And, for my part, I am as grateful for his noble
private life as for his distinguished public work.
And yet I will not close with this picture of the
man ; for my purpose is rather to present the poet.
Hampered though he was by fewness of years, by
feebleness of body, by shortness of bread, and,
most of all perhaps, by over-luxuriance of imagina-
tion, Lanier was yet, to my mind, indisputably a
1 The Symphony, \. 302.
Introduction
Iv
great poet. For in technique he was akin to Ten-
nyson ; • in the love of beauty and in lyric sweetness,
to Keats and Shelley ; in the love of nature, to
Wordsworth ; and in spirituality, to Ruskin, the
gist of whose teaching is that we are souls tempor-
arily having bodies ; to Milton, " God-gifted organ-
voice of England ; " and to Browning, '* subtlest
assertor of the soul in song." To be sure, Lanier's
genius is not equal to that of any one of the poets
mentioned, but I venture to believe that it is of the
same order, and, therefore, deserving of lasting re-
membrance.
• Mr. Thayer puts it stronger : " As a master of melodious me-
tre only Tennyson, and he not often, has equalled Lanier." Mr.
F. F. Browne, Editor of The Dial (Chicago), compares the two
^oets in another aspect : " The Symphony of Lanier may recall
some parts of Maud : but the younger poet's treatment is as much
his own as the elder's is his own. The comparison of Lanier
with Tennyson will, indeed, only deepen the impression of his
originality, which is his most striking quality. It may be doubted
if any English oet of our time, except Tennyson, has cast his
work in an ampler mould, or wrought with more of freedom, or
stamped his product with the impress of a stronger personality.
His thought, his stand-point, his expression, his form, his treat-
ment, are his alone ; and through them all he justifies his right to
the title of poet."
I'
ilffi
i"l
i I
POEMS
iiii
POEMS
1868.
LIFE AND SONG
If life were caught by a clarionet,
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed.
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret.
And utter its heart in every deed,
Then would this breathine clarionet
Type what the poet fain would be ;
For none o' the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy.
Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life.
Or out of life and song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife ;
Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
Might each express the other's all,
Careless if life or art were long
Since both were one, to stand or fall :
So that the wonder struck the crowd,
Who shouted it about the land :
His song was only living aloud.
His work, a singing with his hand !
%1
Jones's Private Argyment
I
zi
21
JONES'S PRIVATE ARGYMENT
That air same Jones, which lived in Jones,
He had this pint about him :
He 'd swear with a hundred sighs and groans,
That farmers must stop gittin' loans.
And git along without 'em :
That bankers, warehousemen, and sich
Was fatt'nin' on the planter,
And Tennessy was rotten-rich
A-raisin' meat and corn, all which
Draw'd money to Atlanta :
And the only thing (says Jones) to do
Is, eat no meat that 's boughten :
But tear up every /, O, U,
And plant all corn and swear for true
To quit a-raisin' cotton /
Thus spouted Jones (whar folks could hear,
—At Court and other gatherin's),
And thus kep' spoutin' many a year,
Proclaimin' loudly far and near
Sich fiddlesticks and blatherin's.
But, one all-fired sweatin' day.
It happened I was hoein'
My lower corn-field, which it lay
'Longside the road that runs my way
Whar I can see what 's goin'.
1 i'l'
' if!
1 i
1 ||l
1
II
i
1 '
Jones's Private Argymcnt |
And a'ter twelve o'clock had come
I felt a kinder faggin',
And laid myself un'neath a plum
To let my dinner settle sum,
When 'long come Jones's waggin,
And Jones was settin' in it, so : 31
A-readin' of a paper.
His mules was goin' powerful slow,
Fur he had tied the lines onto
The staple of the scraper.
The mules they stopped -^out a rod
From me, and went to feedin'
'Longside the road, upon the sod.
But Jones (which he had tuck a tod)
Not knowin', kept a-readin'.
And presently says he : " Hit 's true ; 41
That Clisby's head is level.
Thar 's one thing farmers all must do,
To keep themselves from goin' tew
Bankruptcy and the devil !
" More corn ! more corn ! must plant less ground,
And musttit eat what 's bough ten !
Next year they '11 do it : reasonin 's sound :
(And, cotton will fetch 'bout a dollar a pound),
Tharfore, I 'II plant all cotton ! "
Macon, Ga., 1870.
'%
» r i
I
Corn
( L;;
CORN.
I To-day the woods are trembling through and
through
With shimmering forms, th-t flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawa-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands ; the embracing boughs ex-
press
A subtlety of mighty tenderness ;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The beech dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a
song;
XI Through that vague wafture, expirations strong
Throb from young hickories breathing deep and
long
With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring
And ecstasy of burgeoning.
Now, since the dew-plashed road of morn is dry,
Forth venture odors of more quality
And heavenlier giving. Like Jove's locks awry,
Long muscadines
Rich-wreathe the spacious foreheads of great pines,
And breathe ambrosial passion from their vines.
21 I pray with mosses, ferns, and flowers shy
That hide like gentle nuns from human eye
To lift adoring perfumes to the sky.
I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown a. *
Dying to silent hints of kisses keen
As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.
Corn 7
I start at fragmentary whispers, blown
From undertalks of leafy souls unknown,
Vague purports sweet, of inarticulate tone.
Dreaming of gods, men, nuns, and brides, between
Old companies of oaks that inward lean aj
To join their radiant amplitudes of green
I slowly move, with ranging looks that pass
Up from the matted miracles of grass
Into yon veined complex of space
Where sky and leafage interlace
So close, the heaven of blue is seen
Inwoven with a heaven of green.
I wander to the zigzag-cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense.
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
As pikes against the army of the corn.
i|
41
There, while I pause, my fieldward-faring eyes
Take harvests, where the stately corn- ranks rise,
Of inward dignities
And large benignities and insights wise,
Graces and modest majesties.
Thus, without theft, I reap another's field ;
Thus, without tilth, I house a wondrous yield.
And heap my heart with quintuple crops concealed. 51
Look, out of line one tall corn-captain stands
Advanced beyond the foremost of his bands,
And waves his blades upon the very edge
And hottest thicket of the battling hedge.
Thou lustrous stalk, that ne'er mayst walk nor talk,
■H
8
Corn
Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme —
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
6i By double increment, above, below ;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry
That moves in gentle curves of courtesy ;
Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense,
By every Todlike sense
Transmuted froip the four wild elements.
Drawn to high plans.
Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
Yet ever piercest downward in the mould
71 And keepest hold
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
That gave thee birth ;
Yea, standest smiling in thy future grave,
Serene and brave.
With unremitting breath
Inhaling life from death.
Thine epitaph writ fair in fruitage eloquent.
Thyself thy monument.
I !
As poets should,
81 Thou hast built up thy hardihood
With universal food,
Drawn in select proportion fair
From honest mould and vagabond air ;
From darkness of the dreadful night.
And joyful light ;
From antique ashes, whose departed flame
In thee has finer life and longer fame ;
i
Corn
From wounds and balms,
From storms and calms,
From potsherds and dry bones
And ruin-stones.
Into thy vigorous substance thou hast v^rought
Whate'er the hand of Circumstance hath brought ;
Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun
White radiance hot from out the sun.
So thou dost mutuclly leaven
Strength of earth with grace of heaven ;
So thou dost marry new and old
Into a one of higher mould ;
So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
The dark and bright,
And many a heart-perplexing opposite,
And so.
Akin by blood to high and low,
Fitly thou playest out thy poet's part.
Richly expending thy much-bruised heart
In equal care to nor.rish lord in hajl
Or beast in staii :
Thou took'"^ from all that thou mightst give to all.
steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot
Where thou wast born, that still repinest not-
Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot !—
Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land
Whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand
Of trade, for ever rise and fall
With alternation whimsical,
Enduring scarce a day.
Then swept av.ay
By swift engulf ments of incalculable tides
91
lOI
III
lO
Corn
121 Whereon capricious Commerce rides.
Look, thou substantial spirit of content !
Across this little vale, thy continent,
To wnere, beyond the mouldering mill,
Yon old deserted Georgian hill
Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest
And seamy breast,
By restless-hearted children left to lie
Untended there beneath the heedless sky,
As barbarous folk expose their old to die.
131 Upon that generous-rounding side,
With gullies scarified
Where keen Neglect his lash hath plied, *
Dwelt one I knew of old, who played at toil,
And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil.
Scorning the slow reward of patient grain,
He sowed his heart with hopes of swifter gain.
Then sat him down and waited for the rain.
He sailed in borrowed ships of usury —
A foolish Jason on a treacherous sea,
141 Seeking the Fleece and finding misery
Lulled by smooth-rippling loans, in idle trance
He lay, content that unthrift Circumstance
Should plough for him the stony field of Chance.
Yea, gathering crops whose worth no man might
tell.
He staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell,
And turned each field into a gambler's hell.
Aye, as each year began,
My farmer to the neighboring city ran ;
Passed with a mournful anxious face
151 Into the banker's inner place ;
Parleyed, excused, pleaded for longer grace ;
Pi
I \\
Corn
II
Railed at the drought, the worm, the rust, the
grass ;
Protested ne'er again 'twould come to pass ;
With many an oh and if and but alas
Parried or swallowed searching questions rude.
And kissed the dust to soften Dives's mood.
At last, small loans by pledges great renewed,
He issues smiling from the fatal door,
And buys with lavish hand his yearly store
Till his small borrowings will yield no more. i6i
Aye, as each year declined.
With bitter heart and ever-brooding mind
He mourned his fate unkind.
In dust, in rain, with might and main.
He nursed his cotton, cursed his grain.
Fretted for news that made him fret again,
Snatched at each telegram of Future Sale,
And thrilled with Bulls' or Bears' alternate wail—
In hope or fear alike for ever pale.
And thus from year to year, through hope and 171
fear.
With many a curse and many a secret tear,
Striving in vain his cloud of debt to clear,
At last
He woke to find his foolish dreaming past,
And all his best-of-life the easy prey
Of squandering scamps and quacks that lined his
way
With vile array,
From rascal statesman down to petty knave ;
Himself, at best, for all his bragging brave,
A gamester's catspaw and a banker's slave. 181
Then, worn and gray, and sick with deep unrest
1 H
1 1;'
12 My Springs
He fled away into the oblivious West,
Unmourned, unblest.
Old hill ! old hill ! thou gashed and hairy Lear
Whom the divine Cordelia of the year,
E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer —
King, that no subject man nor beast may own,
Discrowned, undaughtered and alone—
Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,
191 And bring thee back into thy monarch state
And majesty immaculate.
Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,
Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn ;
Visions of golden treasuries of corn —
Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart
Tl.\at manfully shall take thy part,
And tend thee,
And defend thee,
With antique sinew and with modern art.
SUNNYSIDB, Ga., August, 1S74.
I (i
ill
IP
MY SPRINGS
In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know
Two springs that with unbroken flow
Forever pour their lucent streams
Into my soul's ' ar Lake of Dreams.
Not larger than two eyes, they lie
Beneath the many-changing sky
And mirn all of hfe and time,
— Serene a:-d dainty pantomime.
! Mi
Hi!
My Springs 13
Shot through with lights of stars and dawns,
And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns,
—Thus heaven and earth together vie n
Their shining depths to sanctify.
Always when the large Form of Love
Is hid by storms that rage above,
I gaze in my two springs and see
Love in his very verity.
Always when Faith with stifling stress
Of grief hath died in bitterness,
I gaze in my two springs and see
A Faith that smiles immortally.
Always when Charity and Hope, 21
In darkness bounden, feebly grope,
I gaze in my two springs and see
A Light that sets my captives free.
Always, when Art on perverse wing
Flies v/here I cannot hear him sing,
I gaze in my two springs and see
A charm that brings him back to me.
When Labor faints, and Glory fails,
And coy Reward in sighs exhales,
I gaze in my two springs and see 31
Attainment full and heavenly.
O Love, O Wife, thine eyes are they,
— My springs from out whose shining gray
Issue the sweet celestial streams
That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams.
««».. j^=*fe..
If • c
up
14 The Symphony
Oval and large and passion-pure
And gray and wise and iionor-sure ;
Soft as a dying violet-breath
Yet calmly unafraid of death ;
41 Thronged, like two dove-cotes of gray doves,
With wife's and mother's and poor-folk's loves,
And home-loves and high glory-loves
And science-loves and story-loves,
And loves for all that God and man
In art and nature make or plan,
And lady-loves for spidery lace
And broideries and supple grace
And diamonds and the whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,
51 And loves for God and God's bare truth,
And loves for Magdalen and Ruth,
Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete —
Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet,
— I marvel that God made you mine,
For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine !
Baltimore, 1874.
THE SYMPHONY
" O Trade ! O Trade ! would thou wert dead !
The Time needs heart— 'tis tired of head :
We're all for love," the violins said.
" Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale ?
The Symphony
IS
Grant thee, O Trade ! thine uttermost hope .
Level red gold with blue sky-slope,
And base it deep as devils grope :
When all 's done, what hast thou won
Of the only sweet that 's under the sun ?
Ay, canst thou buy a single sigh n
Of true love's least, least ecstasy ? "
Then, with a bridegroom's heart-beats trembling,
All the mightier strings assembling
Ranged them on the violins' side
As when the bridegroom leads the bride,
And, heart in voice, together cried :
" Yea, what avail the endless tale
Of gain by cunning and plus by sale ?
Look up the land, look down the land.
The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand at
Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand
Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore :
They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh
For the outside leagues of liberty.
Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky
Into a heavenly melody.
' Each day, all day ' (these poor folks say),
' In the same old year-long, drear-long way.
We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns, 31
We sieve mine-meshes under the hills.
And thieve much gold from the Devil's bank tills,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills ? —
The beasts, they hunger, and eat, and die ;
And so do we, and the world 's a sty ;
Hush, fellow-swine : why nuzzle and cry ?
Szuinehood hath no remedy
I
.A*H,4iit.iL,.j,.
«.':»:&&;
i6
The Symphony
:!,
Say many men, and hasten by,
Clamping the nose and bhnking the eye.
41 But who said once, in the lordly tone,
Matt shall not live by bread alone
But all that comet h from the Throne ?
Hath God said so ?
But Trade saith No :
And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say Go :
There s plenty that can, if you can't : ive know.
Move out, if you think you 're underpaid .
The poor are prolific ; we 're not afraid ;
Trade is trade.' "
51 Thereat this passionate protesting
Meekly changed, and softened till '
It sank to sad requesting
And suggesting sadder still :
" And oh, if men might some time see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be !
Does business mean, Z>/^,/(7// — live, If
Then ' Trade is trade ' but sings a lie :
'Tis only war grown miserly.
5i If business is battle, name it so : |
War-crimes less will shame it so, \\
And widows less will blame it so.
Alas, for the poor to have some part
In yon sweet living lands of Art,
Makes problem not for head, but heart.
Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it : /
Plainly the heart of a child could solve it."
And then, as when from words that seem but rude
We pass to silent pain that sits abrood /
The SympJiony
17
Back in our heart's great dark and solitude, 71
So sank the strings to gentle throbbing
Of long chords change-marked with sobbing—
Motherly sobbing, not distinctlier heard
Than half wing-openings of the sleeping bird,
Some dream of danger to her young hath stirred.
Then stirring and demurring ceased, and lo !
Every least ripple cf the strings' song-How
Died to a level with each level bow
And made a great chord tranquil-surfaced so,
As a brook beneath his curving bank doth go 81
To linger in the sacred dark and green
Where many boughs the still pool overlean
And many leaves make shadow with their sheen.
But presently
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony.
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone
And hoatwise dropped o' the convex side
And fl 3ated down the glassy tide
And clarified and glorified
The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.
From the warm concave of that fluted note
Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float.
As if a rose might somehow be a throat :
" When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again ;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone, loi
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
<jH
™»«"'a»-:
w
i8
TAe Symphony
V
I '
! fi''
! '
liii'
'I
1 iijiii
"111
1 iiiii
Sweet friends,
Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends
For I, e'en I,
As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
III Demand of Science whence and why
Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
When he doth gaze on earth and sky ?
I am not overbold :
I hold
Full powers from Nature manifold.
I speak for each no-tongued tree
That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
And dumbly and most wistfully
His mighty prayerful arms outspreads
121 Above men's oft-unheeding heads.
And his big blessing downward sheds.
I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves.
Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves ;
Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
Ana Driery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins ;
For every long-armed woman-vine
131 That round a piteous tree doth twine ;
For passionate odors, and divine
Pistils, and petals crystalline ;
All purities of shady springs,
All shynesses of film-winged things
That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings ;
mBi»«.*w-i«*.'i^- ■;
The Symphony
19
All modesties of mountain-fawns
That leap to covert from wild lawns,
And tremble if the day but dawns ;
All sparklings of small beady eyes
Of birds, and sidelong glances wise 141
Wherewith the jay hints tragedies ;
All piquancies of prickly burs,
And smoothnesses of downs and furs
Of eiders and of minevers ;
All limpid honeys that do lie
At stamen-bases, nor deny
The humming-birds' fine roguery,
Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly ;
All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark-moitlings, fibre-spiralings, 151
Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings :
Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell
Wherewith in every lonesome dell
Time to himself his hours doth tell ;
All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones,
Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans.
And night's unearthly under-tones ;
All placid lakes and waveless deeps,
All cool reposing mountain-steeps.
Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps ; — 161
Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights.
And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
Of Nature's utmost depths and heights,
— These doth my timid tongue present,
Their mouthpiece and leal instrument
And servant, all love-eloquent,
I heard, when ' All for love ' the violins cried :
So, Nature calls through all her system wide.
^ik;
Ml
.'I!
30
The Symphony
i
Give me thy love, O man, so lonjr denied,
171 Much time is run, and man hath changed his
ways.
Since Nature, in the antique fable-days,
Was hid from man's true love by proxy fays.
False fauns and rascal gods that stole her praise.
The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder brain.
Chilled Nature's streams till man's warm heart
was fain
Never to lave its love in them again.
Later, a sweet Voice Love thy ncii^hbor said ;
Then first the bounds of neighborhood outspread
Beyond all confines of old ethnic dread.
l%% Vainly the Jew might wag his covenant head :
• All men are neighbors' so the sweet Voice said.
So, when man's arms had circled all man's race.
The liberal compass of his warm embrace
Stretched bigger yet in the dark bounds of space ;
With hands a-grope he felt smooth Nature's
grace.
Drew her to breast and kissed her sweetheart
face :
Yea man found neighbors in great hills and trees
And streams and clouds and suns and birds and
bees.
And throbbed with neighbor-loves in loving these.
tgt But oh, the poor ! the poor ! the poor!
That stand by the inward-opening door
Trade's hand doth tighten ever more.
And sigh their monstrous foul-air sigh ' /
For the outside hills of liberty, •/
Where Nature spreads her wild blue sky '
For Art to make into melody !
i i;i)'
III*
il
The Symphony
81
Thou Trade ! thou king of the modern days !
Change thy ways,
Change thy ways ;
Let the sweaty laborers file
A little while,
A little while,
Where Art and Nature sing and smile.
Trade ! is thy heart all dead, all dead ?
And hast thou nothing but a head ?
I 'm all for heart," the flute-voice said,
And into sudden silence fled.
Like as a blush that while 'tis red
Dies to a still, still white instead.
201
Thereto a thrilling calm succeeds, 211
Till presently the silence breeds
A little breeze among the reeds
That seems to blow by sea-marsh weeds:
Then from the gentle stir and fret
Sings out the melting clarionet.
Like as a lady sings while yet
Her eyes with salty tears are wet.
" O Trade ! O Trade ! " the Lady said,
" I too will wish thee utterly dead
If all thy heart is in thy head. 221
For O my God ! and O my God !
What shameful ways have women trod
At beckoning of Trade's golden rod !
Alas when sighs are traders' lies,
And heart's-ease eyes and violet eyes
Are merchandise !
O purchased lips that* kiss with pain !
O cheeks coin-spotted with smirch and stain !
22
j
"
(
(
I
I
1
h
iW I
T/ie Symphony
O trafficked hearts that break in twain !
jl3t —And yet what wonder at my sisters' crime ?
So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime,
•. Men love not women as in olden time.
Ah, not in these cold merchantable days
Deem men their hfe an opal gray, where plays
The one red Sweet of gracious ladies'-pratse.
Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye-
Says, Here, you Lady, if you '11 sell I 'II buy :
Come, heart for heart-a trade ? What! weep-
ing? why ?
Shame on such wooers' dapper mercery !
i4i I would my lover kneeling at my feet
In humble manliness should cry, O sweet '
I know not zf thy heart 7ny heart will greet :
I ask not if thy love my love can meet :
Whateer thy worshipful soft tongue shall say,
I 'II kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay :
I do but know I Iffve thee, and I pray
To be thy knight until my dying day.
Woe him that cunning trades in hearts contrives !
Base love good women to base loving drives.
251 If men loved larger, larger were our lives;
And wooed they nobler, won they nobler wives."
rhert :hrust the bold straightforward horn
To bivU'e for that laay lorn,
With heartsome voice of mellow scorn,
Like any knight in knighthood's morn.
" Now comfort thee," said he,
" Fair I,ady.
For God shall right thy grievous wong.
And man shall sin,*? thee a true-love song,
!i
■.•i-.-.m-,'f-4.tl^'
Ill
The Symphony 23
Voiced in act iiis whole life lonr;, 261
Yea, all thy sweet life long,
Fair Lady.
Where 's he that craftily hath said,
The day of chivalry is dead ?
I '11 prove that lie upon his head.
Or I will die instead,
Fair Lady.
Is Honor gone into his grave ?
Hath Faith become a caitiff knave,
And Selfhood turned into a slave 271
To work in Mammon's cave,
Fair Lady }
Will Truth's long blade ne'er gleam again }
Hath Giant Trade in dungeons slain
All great contempts of mean-got gain
And hates of inward stain,
Fair Lady }
For aye shall name and fame be sold.
And place be hugged for the sake of gold,
And smirch-robed Justice feebly scold 281
At Crime all money-bold.
Fair Lady }
Shall self-wrapt husbands aye forget
Kiss-pardons for the daily fret
Wherewith sweet wifely eyes are wet —
Blind to lips kiss-wise set —
Fair Lady }
Shall lovers higgle, heart for heart.
Till wooing grows a trading mart
Where much for little, and all for part, 291
Make love a cheapening art,
Fair Lady ?
1!
24
30I
m
321
The Symphony
Shall woman scorch for a single sin
That her bet-.-ayer may revel in,
And she be burnt, and he but grin
When that the flames begin.
Fair Lady ?
Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
We maids would far, far whiter be
If that our eyes might sometimes see
Men maids in purity.
Fair Lady ?
Shall Trade aye salve his conscience-aches
With jibes at Chivalry's old mistakes—
The wars that o'erhot knighthood makes
For Christ's and ladies' sakes,
Fair Lady ?
Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed
To fight like a man and love like a maid,
Since Pembroke's life, as Pembroke's blade,
r the scabbard, death, was laid.
Fair Lady,
I dare avouch my faith is bright
That God doth right and God hath might.
Nor time hath changed His hair to white,
Nor His dear love to spite.
Fair Lady.
I doubt no doubts : 1 strive, and shrive my clay.
And fight my fight in the patient modern way
For true love and for thee— ah me ! and pray
To be thy knight until my dying day,
Fair Lady."
Made end that knightly horn, and spr-red away
into the thick of the melodious fray.
ii
I'J
The Symphony 25
And then the hautboy played and smiled,
And sang like any large-eyed child,
Cool-hearted and all undefiled.
" Huge Trade ! " he said,
" Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head
And run where'er my finger led ! 331
Once said a Man — and wise was He —
Never shall Ihou the heavens see,
Save as a Utile child thou be''
Then o'er sea-lashings of commingling tunes
The ancient wise bassoons.
Like weird
Gray-beard
Old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes,
Chanted runes :
" Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss, 341
The sea of all doth lash and toss,
One wave forward and one across :
But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest.
And worst doch foam and flash to best.
And curst to blest.
ill
" Life ! Life ! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to
west,
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings.
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole rnusic-master blest.
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To fellow Time's dying melodies through.
351
26 The rower of Prayer
And never to lose the old in the new.
And ever to solve the discords true—
Love alone can do.
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
361 And ever Love hears the women's sighing,
And ever swee: knighthood's death-defying.
And ever wise childhood's deep implying,
But never a trader's glozing and lying.
" And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred ;
■ O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred :
Music is Love in search of a word."
Baltimore, 1875.
:,1 1
THE POWER OF PRAYER ; OR, THE
FIRST STEAMBOAT UP THE
ALABAMA
BY SIDNEY AND CLIFFORD LANIER
I YGU, Dinah ! Come and set me whar de ribber-
roads does meet.
De Lord, He made dese black-jack roots to twis
into a seat. ,
Umph dar ! De Lord have mussy on dis blin old
nigger's feet.
It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June.
I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de
fiddle soon ! . . ,
Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringm
in de moon.
1
1
I
!j
The Power of Praye^^
V
Well, ef dis nigger is been blind for fo'ty year or
mo',
Dese ears, dey sees de world, like, th'u' de cracks
dat 's in de do'. , '.
For de Lord has built dis body wid de windows
'hind and 'fo'.
I know my front ones zs stopped up, and things is
sort o'dim,
But den, th'u' dem, temptation's rain won't leak in ii
on ole Jim !
De back ones show me earth enough, aldo' dey 's
mons'ous slim.
And as for Hebben,— bless de Lord, and pr. /
His holy name —
Dai shines in all de co'ncrs of dis cabin j de
same
As ef dat cabin hadn't nar' a plank upon de frame !
Who call me } Listen down de ribber, Dinah !
Don't you hyar
Somebody holl'in' '' Hoo, Jim, hoof My Sarah
died las' y'ar ;
Is dat black angel done come back to call oie Jim
f 'om hyar }
My stars, dat cain't be Sarah, shuh ! Jes' listen.
Dinah, now !
What kin be comin' up dat bend, a-makin' sich a
row ?
Fus' bellerin' like a pawin' bull, den squealin' like a 21
sow .'*
38
The Power of Prayer
m^
I .
.1
i!
i ■
1!
De Lord 'a' mussy sakes alive, jes' hear. — ker-woof,
ker-woof —
De Debbie 's comin' round dat bend, he 's comin
shuh enuff,
A-splashin' up de water wid his tail and wid his
hoof!
I 'se pow'ful skeered; but neversomeless I ain't
gwine run away :
I'm gwine to stand stiff-legged for de Lord dis
blessed day.
You screech, and swish de water, Satan ! I 'se
a gwine to pray.
hebbenly Marster, what thou wiliest, dat mus' be
jes' so,
And ef Thou hast bespoke de word, some nigger 's
bound to go.
Den, Lord, please take ole Jim, and lef young Di-
nah hyar below !
31 'Scuse Dinah, 'scuse her, Marster ; for she 's sich a
little chile.
She hardly jes* begin, to scramble up de homeyard
stile,
But dis ole traveller's feet been tired dis many a
many a mile.
1 'se wufless as de rotten pole of las' year's fodder-
stack.
De rheumatiz done bit my bones ; you hear 'em
crack and crack ?
I cain'st sit down 'dout gruntin' like 'twas breakin'
o* my back.
The Power of Prayer
29
What use de wheel, when hub and spokes is warped
and split, and rotten ?
What use dis dried-up cotton-stalk, when Life
done picked my cotton ?
I 'se like a word dat somebody said, and den done
been forgotten.
But, Dinah ! Shuh dat gal jes' ^'ke dis little hick'ry
tree,
De sap 's jes' risin' in her ; she do grow owdacious- 41
lee —
Lord, ef yo" *s clarin' de underbrush, don't cut her
down, cut me !
I would not proud persume— but I 'II boldly make
reques' ;
Sence Jacob had dat wrastlin'-match, I, too, gwine
do my bes' ;
When Jacob got all underholt, de Lord he answered
Yes !
And what for waste de vittles, now, and th'ow away
de bread,
Jes' for to strength dese idle hands to scratch dis
ole bald head ?
T'ink of de 'conomy, Marster, ef dis ole Jim was
dead !
Stop ; — ef I don't believe de Debbie 's gone on up
de stream !
Jes' now he squealed down dar ;— hush ; dat's a
mighty weakly scream !
Yas, sir, he 's gone, he 's gone ;— he snort way off, 51
like in a dream !
30
Rose-Morals
II
I
■Jl'v
'■I ! •,
li I
glory hallelujah to de Lord dat reigns on high !
De Debbie 's fai'ly skeered to def, he done gone fly-
in' by ;
1 know'd he couldn't stand dat pra'r, I felt my
Marster nigh !
You, Dinah ; ain't you 'shamed, now, dat you didn'
trust to grace ?
I heerd you thrashin' th'u' de bushes when he
showed his face !
You fool, you think de Debbie couldn't beat j^« in
a race ?
I tell you, Dinah, jes' as shuh as you is standin' dar.
When folks starts prayin', answer-angels drops
down th'u' de a'r.
Vas, Dinah, whar 'ould you be now, jes 'ceptin
fur dat pra'r ?
Baltimore, 1875.
ROSE-MORALS
L— Red
Would that my songs might be
What roses make by day and night —
Distillments of my clod of misery
Into delight.
Soul, could'st thou bare thy breast
As yon red rose, and dare the day.
All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest ?
Say yea — say yea !
To
-, with a Rose
3»
Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye ;
The wind is up ; so ; drift away.
That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly,
I strive, I pray.
II
II.— White
Soul, get thee to the heart
Of yonder tuberose : hide thee there —
There breathe the meditations of thine art
Suffused with prayer.
Of spirit grave yet light.
How fervent fragrances uprise
Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white
Virginities !
Mulched with unsavory death, ai
Grow, Soul ! unto such white estate,
That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath,
Thy work, thy fate.
Baltimore, 1875.
TO
-.WITH A ROSE
I ASKED my heart to say i
Some word whose wot^th my love's devoir might pay
Upon my Lady's natal day.
Then said my heart to me :
Learn from the rhyme that now shall come to thee
What fits thy Love most lovingly.
mmamimm&E^
32 Uncle Jim's Baptist /Revival Hymn
This gift that learning shows ;
For, as a rhyme unto its rhyme-twin goes,
I send a rose unto a Rose.
Philadelphia, 1876.
UNCLE JIM'S BAPTIST REVIVAL HYMN
BY SIDNEY AND CLIFFORD LANIER
I Soio. — Sin's rooster 's crowed, Ole Mahster 's riz,
De sleepin'-time is pas' ;
Wake up dem lazy Baptissis,
Chorus. — Dey 's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily itt de grass.
Ole Mahster's blowed de mornin' horn.
He 's blowed a powerful bias';
O Baptis' come, come hoe de corn,
You 's mightily in de grass, grass,
You 's mightily in de grass.
II
De Meth'dis team 's done hitched ; O fool,
De day's a-breakin' fas';
Gear up dat lean ole Baptis' mule.
Z>ey 's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily in de grass.
De workmen 's few an' mons'rous slow,
De cotton 's sheddin' fas' ;
Whoop, look, jes' look at de Baptis' row,
Hit 's mightily in de grass, grass.
Hit 's mightily in de grass.
The Mockiiig'Bird
33
De jay-bird squeal to de mockin'-bird : " Stop ! 21
Don' gimme none o' yo' sass ;
Better sing one song for de Haptis" crop,
Dey 's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dty 's mightily in dc grass."
And de ole crow croak : " Don' work, no,
no ; "
But de fiel'-lark say, " Yaas, yaas,
An* I spec' you mighty glad, you dcbblish
crow,
Dat de Baptissis 's in de grass, grass,
Dat de Baptissis 's in de grass I "
1876
Lord, thunder us up to de plowin'-match.
Lord, peerten de hoein' fas'.
Yea, Lord, hab mussy on de Baptis' patch,
Dey 's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey 's mightily in de grass.
31
! !
Ill
THE MOCKING-BIRD
Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew.
He summ'd the woods in song ; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray.
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
What e'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
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34
Song of the Chattahoochee
II Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his ait again^
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain :
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree ?
1877.
II
91
SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE
Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall.
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide.
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.
All down the hills of Habersham,
All through the valleys of Hall,
The rushes cried Abide, abide.
The willful waterweeds held me thrall,
The laving laurel turned my tide,
The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay,
The dewberry dipped for to work delay,
And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide^
Here in the hills of Habersham^
Here in the valleys of Hall.
High o'er the hills of Habersham,
Veiling the valleys of Hall,
Song of the Chattahoochee
35
The hickory told me manifold
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall
Wrought me her shadowy self to hold,
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine,
Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign,
Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold
Deep shades of the hills of Habersham,
These glades in the valleys of Hall.
And oft in the hills of Habersham,
And oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-
stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl.
And many a luminous jewel lone
— Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet, and amethyst —
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.
:il
31
But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall
Avail : I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call —
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn.
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.
1877.
41
fi!-l
^6 The Revenge of Hamish
THE REVENGE OF HAMISH
I It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the
bracken lay;
And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
Avvaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
Down the hill-side and sifted along through the
bracken and passed that way.
Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril ; she was the
daintiest doe ;
In the priiit of her velvet flank on the velvet fern
She reared, and rounded her ears in turn.
Then the buck leapt up, and his head as a king's to
a crown did go
Full high in the breeze, and he stood as if Death
had the form of a deer ;
And the two slim does long lazily stretching
arose,
1 r For their day-dream slowlier came to a close,
Till they woke and were still, breath-bound with
waiting and wonder and fear.
Then Alan the huntsman sprang over the hillock,
the hounds shot by.
The does and the ten-tined buck made a marvel-
ous bound.
The hounds swept after with never a sound.
But Alan loud winded his horn in sign that the
quarry was nigh.
The Revenge of Hamish
37
For at dawn of that day proud Maclean of Lochbuy
to the hunt had waxed wild,
And he cursed at old Alan till Alan fared off with
the hounds
For to drive him the deer to the lower glen-
grounds :
" I will kill a red deer," quoth Maclean, " in the
sight of the wife and the child."
So gayly he paced with the wife and the child to 21
his chosen stand ;
But he hurried tall Hamish the henchman ahead :
•• Go turn,"—
Cried Maclean — " if the deer seek to cross to the
burn.
Do thou turn them to me : nor fail, lest thy back
be red as thy hand."
Now hard-fortuned Hamish, half blown of his
broath with the height of the hill.
Was white m the face when the ten-tined buck
and the does
Drew leaping to-burn-ward ; huskily rose
His shouts, and his nether lip twitched, and his legs
were o'er-weak for his will.
So the deer darted lightly by Hamish and bounded
away to the burn.
But Maclean never bating his watch tarried
waiting below.
Still Hamish hung heavy with fear for to go 31
All the space of an hour ; then he went, and his
face was greenish and stern,
38
The Revenge of Hamish
And his eye sat back in the socket, and shrunken
the eyeballs shone,
As withdrawn from a vision of deeds it were
shame to see.
" Now, now, grim henchman, what is 't with
thee ? "
Brake Maclean, and his wrath rose red as a beacon
the wind hath upblown.
*' Three does and a ten-tined buck made out," spoke
Hamish, full mild,
" And I ran for to turn, but my breath it was
blown, and they passed ;
1 was weak, for ye called ere I broke me my fast."
Cried Maclean : " Now a ten-tined buck in the sight
of the wife and the child
41 I had killed if the gluttonous kern had not wrought
me a snail's own wrong ! "
Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and
clansmen all :
•' Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let faU,
And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the
bite of thong ! "
So Hamish made bare, and took him his strokes ;
at the last he smiled.
"Now I'll to the burn," quoth Maclean, "for it
still may be,
If a slinimer-paunched henchman will hurry with
me,
I shall kill me the ten-tined buck for a gift to the
wife and the child ! "
The Revenge of Hamish
39
Then the clansmen departed, by this path and that ;
and over the hill
Sped Maclean with an outward wrath for an in-
ward shame ;
And that place of the lashing full quiet became ; 51
And the wife and the child stood sad ; and bloody-
backed Hamish sat still
But look ! red Hamish has risen ; quick about and
about turns he.
" There is none betwixt m.e and the crag-top ! "
he scieams under breath.
Then, livid as Lazarus lately from death,
He snatches the child from the mother, and clam-
bers the crag toward the sea.
Now the mother drops breath ; she is dumb, and
her heart goes dead for a space.
Till the motherhood, mistress of death, shrieks,
shri«iks through the glen,
And that place of the lashing is live with men.
And Maclean, and the gillie that told him, dash up
in a desperate race.
Not a breath's time for asking ; an eye-glance 61
reveals all the tale untold.
They follow mad Hamish afar up the crag toward
the sea.
And the lady cries : " Clansmen, run for a fee !—
Yon castle and lands to the two first hands that
shall hook him and hold
it! I
40
The Revenge of Hamish
IP
fast Hamish back from the brink ! " — and ever she
Hies up the steep,
And the clansmen pant, and they sweat, and they
jostle and strain.
But, mother, 'tis vain ; but, father, 'tis vain ;
Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and dangles
the child o'er the deep.
Now a faintness falls on the men that run, and they
all stand still.
And the wife prays Hamish as if he were God,
on her knees,
71 Crying : " Hamish ! O Hamish ! but please, but
please
For to spare him ! " and Hamish still dangles the
child, with a wavering will.
On a sudden he turns ; with a sea-kawk scream,
and a gibe, and a song.
Cries : " So ; I will spare ye the child if, in sight
of ye all,
Ten blows on Maclean's bare back shall fall.
And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at
the bite of the thong ! "
Then Maclean he set hardly his tooth to his lip that
his tooth was red.
Breathed short for a space, said : " Nay, but it
never shall be !
Let me hurl off the damnable hound in the sea ! "
But the wife : " Can Hamish go fish us the child
from the sea, if dead ?
The Revenge of Hamish
41
" Say yea !— Let them lash vie, Hamish ? "— " Nay ! " 81
— *' Husband, the lashing will heal ;
But, oh, who will heal me the bonny sweet bairn
in his grave ?
Could ye cure me my heart with the death of a
knave ?
Quick! Love! I will bare thee— so — kneel ! "
Then Maclean 'gan slowly to kneel
With never a word, till presently downward he
jerked to the earth.
Then the henchman— he that smote I-famish—
would tremble and lag ;
" Strike, hard ! " quoth Hamish, full stern, from
the crag ;
Then he struck him, and " One ! " sang Hamish,
and danced with the child in his mirth.
And no man spake beside Hamish ; he counted
each stroke with a song.
When the last stroke fell, then he moved him a
pace down the height.
And he held forth the child in the heartaching 91
sight
Of the mother, and looked all pitiful grave, as re-
penting a wrong.
And there as the motherly arms stretched out with
the thanksgiving prayer —
And there as the mother crept up with a fearful
swift pace.
Till her finger nigh felt of the bairnie's face-
In a flash fierce Hamish turned round and lifted the
child in the air,
1 (
I «B
42
Remonstrance
m
And sprang with the child in his arms from the hor-
rible height in the sea,
Shrill screeching, " Revenge ! " in the wind-rush ;
and pallid Maclean,
Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain.
Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked
hold of dead roots of a tree —
loi And gazed hungrily o'er, and the blood from his
back drip-dripped in the brine,
And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as he
flew.
And the mother stared white on the waste of
blue,
And the wind drove a cloud to seaward, and the
sun began to shine.
Baltimore, 1878.
REMONSTRANCE
I Opinion, let me alone : I am not thine.
Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear
To feature me my Lord by rule and line.
Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair,
Not one sweet inch : nay, if thy sight is sharp,
Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp ?
Forbear, forbear.
Oh let me love my Lord more fathom deep
Than there is line to sound with : let me love
My fellow not as men that mandates keep ;
II Yea, all that 's lovable, below, above,
Remonstrance
That let me love by heart, by heart, because
(Free from the penal pressure of the laws)
I find it fair.
The tears I weep by day and bitter night,
Opinion ! for thy sole salt vintage fall.
—As morn by morn I rise with fresh delight,
Time through my casement cheerily doth call,
" Nature is new, 'tis birthday every day,
Come feast with me, let no man say me nay,
Whate'er befall."
43
St
So fare I forth to feajt : I sit beside
Some brother bright : but, ere good-morrow 's
passed.
Burly Opinion wedging in hath cried,
" Thou Shalt not sit by us, to break thy fast.
Save to our Rubric thou subscribe and swear—
Religion hath blue eyes and yellow hair :
She 's Saxon, all."
Then, hard a-hungered for my brother's grace
Till well-nigh fain to swear his folly 's true.
In sad dissent I turn my longing face 31
To him that sits on the left : " Brother,— with you } "
— •• Nay, not with me, save thou subscribe and
swear
Religion hath black eyes and raven hair :
Nought else is true."
Debarred of banquets that my heart could make
With every man on every day of life,
I homeward turn, my fires of pain to slake
44
Remonstrance
In deep endearments of a worshiped wife.
•' I love thee well, dear Love," quoth she, " and
yet
4X Would that thy creed with mine completely met.
As one, not two."
Assassin ! Thief ! Opinion, 'tis thy work.
By Church, by throne, by hearth, by every good
That 's in the Town of Time, I see thee lurk.
And e'er some shadow stays where thou hast stood.
Thou hand'st sweet Socrates his hemlock sour ;
Thou sav' jt Barabbas in that hideous hour,
And stabb'st the good
Deliverer Christ ; thou rack'st the souls of men ;
51 Thou tossest girls to lions and boys to flames ;
Thou hew'st Crusader down by Saracen ;
Thou buildest closets full of secret shames ;
Indifferent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze
Round Ridley or Servetus ; all thy days
Smell scorched ; I would
— Thou base-born Accident of time and place-
Bigot Pretender unto Judgment's throne—
Bastard, that claimest with a cunning face
Those rights the true, true Son of Man doth own
61 By Love's authority — thou Rebel cold
At head of civil wars and quarrels old —
Thou Knife on a throne —
I would thou left'st me free, to live with love.
And faith, that through the love of love doth find
My Lord's dear presence in the stars above,
opposition 45
The clods below, the flesh without, the mind
Within, the bread, the tear, the smile.
Opinion, damned Intriguer, gray with guile,
Let me alone.
Baltimore, 1878-9.
OPPOSITION
Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill.
Complain no more ; for these, O heart,
Direct the random of the will
As rhymes direct the rage of art.
The lute's fixt fret, that runs athwart
The strain and purpose of the string,
For governance and nice consort
Doth bar his willful wavering.
The dark hath many dear avails ;
The dark distils divinest dews ;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse.
Bleeding with thorns of petty strife,
I '11 ease (as lovers do) my smart
With sonnets to my lady Life
Writ red in issues from the heart.
What grace may lie within the chill
Of favor frozen fast in scorn !
When Good 's a-freeze, we call it III \
This rosy Time is glacier-born.
12
H':
46 Mars/t Song— At Sunset
21 Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill.
Complain thou not, O heart ; for these
Bank-in the current of the will
To uses, arts, and charities.
Baltimore, 1879-80.
MARSH SONG— AT SUNSET
I Over the monstrous shambling sea.
Over the Caliban sea,
Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest :
Oh wait, oh wait, in the warm red West,—
Thy Prospero I '11 be.
Over the humped and fishy sea,
Over the Caliban sea,
O cloud in the West, like a thought in the heart
Of pardon, loose thy wing, and start,
And do a grace for me.
II Over the huge and huddling sea.
Over the Caliban sea,
Bring hither my brother Antonio,— Man,—
My injurer : night breaks the ban :
Brother, I pardon thee.
Baltimore, 1879-80.
A BALLAD OF TREES AND THE MASTER
X Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
Sunrise 47
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him :
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,*^
From under the trees they drew Him last :
' Twas on a tree they slew Him — last
When out of the woods He came.
Baltimore, November, 1880.
:i|
II
heart
.STER
SUNRISE
In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship*, fain
Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.
The litde green leaves would not let me alone in
my sleep ;
Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range
and of sweep.
Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drift-
ing,
Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,
Came to the gates of sleep.
Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-
keep
Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep,
Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling :
The gates of sleep fell a-trembling
II
yi
El«: .1
fir
illfl
. »'g^
1 1-. .
ij r-
liii
ii'i
I
48
Sunrise
Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter j<?j,
Shaken with happiness :
The gates of sleep stood wide.
I have waked, I have come, my beloved ! I might
not abide :
I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks,
to hide
In your gospelling glooms, — to be
As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the
sea my sea.
Tell me, sweet burly-bark'd, man-bodied Tree
That mine arms in the dark are embracing, dost
know
21 From what fount are these tears at thy feet which
flow ?
They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent
deeps.
Reason 's not one that weeps.
What logic of greeting lies
Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the
eyes?
O cunning green leaves, little masters ! like as ye
gloss
All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks
that emboss
The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan,
So,
(But would I could know, but would I could know,)
31 With your question embroid'ring the dark of the
question of man, —
It
Sunrise
49
So, with your silences purfling this silence of man
While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is
under the ban,
Under the ban, —
So, ye have wrought me
Designs on the night of our knowledge, — yea, ye
have taught me.
So,
That haply we know somewhat more than we
know.
■J'
Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,
Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,
Ye ministers meet for each passion that 41
grieves,
Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves,
Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me
Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain me, —
Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet
That advise me of more than they bring, — repeat
Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought
breath
From the heaven-side bank of the river of death, —
Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach
me, —
And there, oh there 51
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the
air.
Pray me a myriad prayer.
My gossip, the owl, — is it thou
That out of the leaves of the low-hanging bough,
ii
Ipl!
50 Sunrise
As I pass to the beach, art stirred ?
Dumb woods, have ye uttered a bird ?
Reverend Marsh, low-couched along the sea,
Old chemist, rapt in alchemy,
Distill'r ST silence, — lo,
61 That which our father-age had died to know —
The menstruum that dissolves all matter — thou
Hast found it ; for this silence, filling now
The globed clarity of receiving space,
This solves us all : man, matter, doubt, disgrace.
Death, love, sin, sanity,
Must in yon silence clear solution lie.
Too clear ! That crystal nothing who '11 peruse ?
The blackest night could bring us brighter news.
Yet precious qualities of silence haunt
71 Round these vast margins, ministrant.
Oh, if thy soul 's at latter gasp for space.
With trying to breathe no bigger than thy race
Just to be fellow'd, when that thou hast found
No man with room, or grace enough of bound
To entertain that New thou tell'st, thou art, —
'Tis here, 'tis here thou canst unhand thy heart
And breathe it free, and breathe it free.
By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty.
The tide 's at full : the marsh with flooded streams
81 Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams.
Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies
A rhapsody of morning-stars. The skies
Shine scant with one forked galaxy, —
The marsh brags ten : looped on his breast they lie.
Sunrise
51
Oh, what if a sound should be made !
Oh, what if a bound should be laid
To this bow-and-string tension ot beauty and si-
lence a-spring, —
To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of si-
lence the string !
I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam
Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, —
Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of
night.
Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light,
Over-sated with beauty and silence, \\\\\ seem
But a bubble that broke in a dream.
If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,
Or a sound or a motion made.
91
i\
But no : it is made : list ! somewhere, — mystery,
where ?
In the leaves ? in the air ?
In my heart ? is a motion made :
'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on loi
shade.
In the leaves 'tis palpable : low multitudinous stir-
ring
Upwinds through the woods ; the little ones, softly
conferring.
Have settled my lord 's to be looked for ; so ; they
are still ;
But the air and my heart and the earth are a-
thrill,—
And look where the wild duck sails round the bend
of the river, —
And look where a passionate shiver
im
52
Sunrise
!i l!
* ; I
II
Expectant is bending the blades
Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades, —
And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
III Are beating
The dark overhead as my heart beats, — and steady
and free
Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea —
(Run home, little streams,
With your lapfuls of stars and dreams), —
And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak.
For list, down the inshore curve of the creek
How merrily flutters the sail, —
And lo, in the East ! Will the East unveil ?
The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed
121 A flush : 'tis dead ; 'tis aUve : 'tis dead, ere the
West
Was aware of it : nay, 'tis abiding, 'tis unwith-
drawn :
Have a care, sweet Heaven ! 'Tis Dawn.
Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a
flush is uproUed :
To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling
gold
Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the
sea:
The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee,
The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee,
Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee
That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea.
131 Yet now the dew-drop, now the morning gray,
Shall live their little lucid sober day
I
Sunrise
53
ades,—
steady
d
;re the
mwith-
n of a
azzling
of the
ee,
ea.
:gray,
Ere with the sun their souls exhale away.
Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew
The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue
Big dew-drop of all heaven : with these lit shrines
O'er-silvered to the farthest sea-confines,
The sacramental marsh one pious plain
Of worship lies. Peace to the ante-reign
Of Mary Morning, blissful mother mild,
Minded of nought but peace, and of a child.
141
Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and a
measure
Of motion,— not faster than dateless Olympian
leisure
Might pace with unblown ample garments from
pleasure to pleasure, —
The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreel-
ing,
Forever revealing, revealing, revealing.
Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewis:,— 'tis
done!
Good-morrow, lord Sun !
With several voice, with ascription one.
The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul
Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all mor- j^j
rows doth roll.
Cry good and past-good and most heavenly mor-
row, lord Sun.
O Artisan born in the purple,— Workman Heat,—
Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet
And be mixed in the death-cold oneness,— inner-
most Guest
WW
54
Sunrise
At the marriage of elements, — fellow of publicans,
—blest
King in the blouse of flame, that loiterest o'er
The idle skies yet laborest fast evermore, —
Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the beat
Of the heart of a man, thou Motive, — Laborer
Heat :
i6i Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news,
With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues,
Pearl-glint, shell-tint, ancientest perfectest hues
Ever shaming the maidens, — lily and rose
Confess thee, and each mild flame that glows
In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine,
It is thine, it is thine :
Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds
a-swirl
Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl
In the magnet earth, — yea, thou with a storm for a
heart,
171 Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part
From part oft sundered, yet ever a globed light,
Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright
Than the eye of a 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 agog, every wrinkle a-
frown ;
The worker must pass to his work in the terrible
town :
But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be
done ;
Sunrise
55
I am strong with the strength of my lord the
Sun :
How dark, how dark soever the race that must
needs be run,
I am lit with the Sun. iSi
Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
Hide thee.
Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
Hide thee,
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.
Labor, at leisure, in art,— till yonder beside thee
My soul shall float, friend Sun, 191
The day being done.
Baltimore, December, 1880.
mm-
NOTES
)U
!
NOTES
LIFE AND SONG
Life and Song^ is the fifth of a series of seven poems
published under the general heading of Street-cries, with,
the two stanzas following as an introduction :
" O^t seems the Time a market-town
Where many merchant-spirits meet
Who up and down and up and down
Cry out along the street
" Their needs, as wares ; one thus, one so :
Till all the ways are full of sound :
— But still come rain, and sun, and snow,
And still the world goes round."
The remaining numbers of the series are : i. Hemoti'
strance, given in this volume ; 2. The Ship of Earth ; 3.
How Love Looked for Hell ; 4. Tyranny ; 6. To Richard
Wa^er ; 7. A Song of Love.
I can think of no more helpful comment on the subject
of our poem than this sentence from Milton's Afology
for Smectymnuus , already alluded to in the Introduction
(p. liv) : "And long it was not after, when I was con-
firmed in this jpinion, that he who would not be frustrate
of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought
himself to be a true poem ; that is, a composition and pat-
tern of the best and honorablest things ; not presuming to
sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he
have in himself the experience and the practice of all that
which is praiseworthy."
Lines 10-!iO. 1 have been pleased to discover that
the application I have made of this poem, especially of
these lines (see Introduction, p. liv), is likewise made by
most students of Lanier's life, and that Mrs. Lanier has
chosen these two lines for inscription on the monument to
6o
Notes — Joneses Private Argyment
be erected to his memory. On the reverse side of the
stone, I may add, are to be put these words: " He that
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God " (i John iv. i6).
I:fe
JONES'S PRIVATE ARGYMENT
Thk themes of this poem, the relative claims of corn and
cotton upon the attention of the farmer and the disastrous
results of speculation, are treated indirectly in Thar's
More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land, and directly
and with consummate art in Corn.
1. " I'hat air same Jones" appears in Thar's More,
etc. , written in 1869, in which we are told :
" And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,
And his mules was nuthin' but skin and bones,
And his hogs was flat as his corn-bread pones,
And he had 'bout a thousand acres o" land."
He sells his farm to Brown at a dollar and fifty cents an
acre and goes to Texas. Brown improves the farm, and,
after five years, is sitting down to a big dinner when Jones
is discovered standing out by the fence, without wagon or
mules, " fur he had left Texas afoot and cum to Georgy to
see if he couldn't git some employment." Brown invites
Jones in to dinner, but cannot refrain from the inference-
drawing that names the poem. — " Which lived in Jones,"
"which Jones is a county of red hills and stones " ( Thar's
More, etc.) in central Georgia.
13. Readers of David Copperfield will recall Micaw-
ber's frequent use oi I-O-U-s.
4T, " Clisby's head" refers to Mr. Joseph ClisL-",
then editor of the Macon (Ga.; Telegraph and Messenger,
who had written editonals favoring the planting of more
corn.
CORN
Corn was
attention ;
the poem
As stated elsewhere {Introduction, p. xvii),
the first of Lanier's poems to attract general
for this reason as well as for its absolute merit
deserves careful study.
In the first of his letters to the Hon. Logan E. Bleckley,
Chief-justice of Georgia, dated October 9, 1874, Lanier
tells us how he came to write Corn .• " I enclose MS. of a
Notes — Corn
6i
ars More,
:all Micaw-
poem in which I have endeavored to carry some very pro-
saic matters up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with
alarm m seemg the numbers of deserted old homesteads
and gulhed hills m the older counties of Georgia : and
though they are dreadfully commonplace, I have thought
they are surely mournful enough to be poetic."
In the introductory note to Jones's Private Arpyntent I
nave mcidentaliy stated the theme of Corn. Instead of
addmg a more detailed statement of my own here, I give
Judge Bleckley's analysis of the poem, which occurs in his
reply to the above-mentioned letter. After giving various
mmute criticism (for Lanier had requested his unreserved
judgment). Judge Bleckley continues : " Now, for the
general impression which your Ode has made upon me
It presents lour pictures ; three of them landscapes and
one a portrait. You paint the woods, a corn-field, and a
worn-out hill. These are your landscapes. And your
portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-
planter who always spends his crop before he has made it.
borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year
to year, wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin,
and migrates to the West. Your second landscape is
turned into a vegetable person, and you give its portrait
mth many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable
life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form
and tragic state of King Lear ; you thus make it seize on
our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then
restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible
beneficence in the distant future."
A cc nparison of the first draft of Corn, as sent Tudge
Bleckley, with the final form shows that Lanier made many
minute changes in the poem, especially in the earlier part,
.atill this earlier draft agrees substantially with the later,
and was so fine in conception and execution as to call forth
this commendation of Judge Bleckley, which, despite the
shortcomings of Corn, may with greater justice be applied
to the poem m its present form : " As an artist you seem
to be Itahan m the first two pictures, and Dutch or Flem-
ish in the latter two. In your Italian vein you paint with
the utmost delicacy and finish. The drawing is scrupu-
lously correct and the color soft and harmonious. When
you paint m Dutch or Flemish you are clear and strong
but sometimes hard. There is less idealization and more
of the realistic element— your solids predominate over
your fluids."
As already stated, Lanier has two other poems that in-
directly treat the theme of Corn, namely, Thar's More in
L
62
Notes — Corn
Hi;
!!
the Man and yonc^'s Private Argyment. Moreover, he
has The Waving of the Corn, which, though charming, is
neither so elaborate nor artistic as Corn.
Among poems on corn by other writers may be men-
tioned the following :
1. Whittier's The Corn-song (before 1872), a poem of
praise and thanksgiving at the end of The Huskers, which
tells of the gathering of the corn and of the " corn-husk-
ing," known in the South as the " corn-shucking."
2. Woolson's (Constance F.) Corn Fields, a description
of Ohio fields, in Harper's Monthly, 45, 444, Aug., 1872.
3. Thompson's (Maurice) Dropping Corn (1877), a dainty
love lyric, in Poefns (Boston, 1892), p. 78.
4. Cromwell's (S. C. ) Corn-shucking Song, a dialect
poem, in Harper, 69, 807, Oct., 1884.
5. Coleman's (C. W,) Corn, in The Atlantic Monthly,
70, 228, Aug., 1892, which, since it consists of but four
lines and is more like Lanier's poem than are the others,
may be quoted :
" Drawn up in serried ranks across the fields
That, as we gaze, seem ever to increase,
With tassslSd flags and sun-emblazoned shields,
The glorious army of earth's perfect peace."
6. Hayne's (AV. H.) Amid the Corn, a charming account
of the denizens of the corn-fields, in his Sylvan Lyrics
(New York, 1893), p. 12.
7. Dumas's (W. T.) Corn-shucking and The Last Ear of
Corn, both life-like pictures of plantation life, in his The
Golden Day and Miscellaneous Poems (Phila. , 1893).
Other interesting articles are : Movdamin, or the Origin
of Indian Corn, in The Southern Literary Messenger (Rich-
mond, Va.), 29, 12-13, July, ^859 ; A Georgia Corn-shuck
ing, by D. C. Barrow, Jr., in The Century Magazine (New
York), 2, 873-878, Oct., 1882 ; and Old American Customs :
A Corn-party, an account of a corn-husking in New York, in
The Saturday Review (London), 66, 237-238, Aug. 25, 1888.
4-9. See Introduction, p. xxxii, and compare The Sym-
phony, 11. 183-190.
1§. Paul Hamilton Hayne, whose love of nature rivals
Lanier's, has an interesting poem entitled Muscadines
{Poems, Boston, 1882, pp. 222-224).
ai. Compare The Symphony, 1. 117 fF.
5T. See Introduction, p. 1.
195. In her introduqtory note to Corn Mrs. Lanier
thus localizes the poem : " His ' fieldward-faring eyes took
tm
dialect
Noies — My Springs
63
harvest' 'among the stately corn-ranks,' in a portion of
middle Georgia sixty miles to the north of Macon. It is a
high tract of country from which one looks across the
lower reaches to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, whose
wholesome breath, all unobstructed, here blends with the
woods-odors of the beech, the hickory, and the muscadine :
a' part of a range recalled elsewhere by Mr. Lanier as
' that ample stretch of generous soil, where the Appala-
chian ruggednesses calm themselves into pleasant hills be-
fore dying quite away into the sea-board levels '—where ' a
man can find such temperances of heaven and earth —
enough of struggle with nature to draw out manhood,
with enough of bounty to sanction the struggle— that a
more exquisite co-adaptation of all blessed circumstances
for man's life need not be sought.' "
140. See J^ason in any Dictionary of Mythology. 1
157. Dtves: See Appendix to Webster s International
Dictionary.
168. Future Az/^- sale for future delivery.
l'<^5«6. See Shakespeare's King Lear.
MY SPRINGS
For my appreciation of this tribute to the poet's wife
see Introduction, p. xxxv. Mr. Lanier's estimate is given in
a letter of March, 1874, quoted in Mrs. Lanier's introduc-
tory note : "Of course, since I have written it to print I
cannot make it such as / desire in artistic design : for the
forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-
shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I
must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these
tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future.
Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful as I would have
it ; and I therefore have another still in my heart, which I
\i\\ some day write for myself."
Other tributes to his wife are : In Absence., Acknowledg-
ment, Laus Marice, Special Pleading, Evening Song,
Thou and I, One in Two, and Two in One ; while she is re-
ferred to in The Hard Tinus in Elfiand and June Dreams
in January.
It will be interesting to compare My Springs with other
1 Gayley's The Classic Myths in English Literature (Boston,
Ginn & Co.) is an excellent tiook.
<<■
64
Notes — My Springs
poems on the eyes. Among the most noteworthy i may
be cited Shakespeare's
Lodge's
Jonson 5
" And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn ; "
" Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
ResembHng heaven by every wink ;
I'he Gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble when I think,
Heigh ho, would she were mine 1 "
" Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine," etc. ;
Herrick's
" Sweet, be not proud of those two eyes
Which starlike sparkle in their skies ; "
Thomas Stanley's
Byron's
" Oh turn away those cruel eyes,
The stars of my undoing ;
Or death in such a bright disguise
May tempt a second wooing; "
" She walks in beauty, like the night,
Of cloudless climes and starry skies ;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes ;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies ; "
H. Coleridge's
" She is not fair to outward view,
As many maidens be ;
1 These may be found either in Gosse's English Lyrics (D.
Appleton & Co., New York) or in Palgrave's Golden Treasury oj
Songs and Lyrics (Macmillan & Co., New York).
6s
may
Notes — The Symphony
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me,
O then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.
" 5,"* "°^ "^^^ ^^'^^^ ^^^ ^^y and cold,
To mine they ne'er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye :
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are ; "
and Wordsworth's
" Her eyes are stars of twilight fair."
49-50. See Introduction, p. xlv.
■.Jir\ ^^^^1%}^}^^^^^^ English literature a most interest-
If- P^^y f "titled ^a,:y^/.^^rf«/^«^, see Pollard's i^«^//V^
^ J:^'ii^^T ^^^^ ^°'"^)' ^here extracts are given.*^
55-56. See Introduction, p. xlvi.
THE SYMPHONY
The Introduction (pp. xxviii f., xxxiii ff., xlvii) gives be-
sides the plan of The Symphony, a detailed statement of its
two themes.-the evils of the trade-spirit in the commercial
ana social world and the need in each of the love-spirit
I hese questions preyed on the poet's mind and were to be
treated at length in The Jacquerie ^\%o, which he expected
to make his great work, but which he was unable to com-
plete. This he tells us in a noble passage to Tudee Bleck-
H^','\^''r """'". ^^■^^^^'"^^^ ^5. 1874 Af^er deploring
the lack of time for literary labor (see quotation m Intrt
auctton, p. xlvi) he continues: "I manage to get a little
time tho to work on what is to be my first ma^fum opus, a
long poem founded on that strange uprising in the middle
ofthefourteenth century in France, called < The Jacquerie '
It was the first time that the big hungers oi the People ap-
pear in our modern civilization ; and it is full of sign if-
cance The peasants learned from the merchant poten-
tates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord bv
birth might be one by wealth ; and so Trade arose, and
overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of
the civilized world for four hundred years : it controls all
things, It interprets the Bible, it guides our national and
•lliii
66
Notes — 7 he Symphony
almost all our individual life with its maxims ; and its op-
pressions upon the moral existence of man have come to
be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyran-
nies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the re-
versals of time, it is noiv the gentleman who must rise and
overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in
some degree, in his heart ; which does not depend upon
birth, but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair
dealing, of scorn of mean advantages ; which contemns the
selling of stock which one knows is going to fall, to a man
who pclieves it is going to rise, as much as it would con-
temn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of mean-
ness ; — it is this which must in these latter days organize
its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning
moral castles' from which Trade sends out its forays upon
the conscience of modern society. — This is about the plan
which is to run through my book : though I conceal it un-
der the form of a pure novel."
Mr. F. F. Browne is doubtless right in saying that The
Symphony recalls parts of Tennyson's Maud, but the closest
congeners of The Symphony in English are, I think, Lang-
land's Piers The Plowman in poetry and Ruskin's Unio
This Last in prose. Widely as these two works differ from
The Symphony in form, they are one with it in purpose and
in spirit. All three voice the outcry of the poor against
the hardness of their lot and their longing for a larger life ;
all three show that the only hope of relief lies in a broader
and deeper love for humanity. Analogues to individual
verses of The Symphony are cited below.
l-"4. See Introduction, p. xxviii.
31-61. See Introduction, p. xxix.
4-^-43. See St. Matthew iv. 4.
55-60. It is precisely this evil that Ruskin has in mind,
I take it, when he condemns the commercial text, " Buy
in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," and when
he declares that " Competition is the law of death" {Unto
This Last, pp. 40, 59).
117. Compare Corn.^ 1, 21 ff.
161. For lotos-sleeps see Tennyson's The Lotos-eaters,
which almost lulls one to sleep, and The Odyssey ix. 80-
104.
178. See St. Matthew xix. 19.
18«. See St. Luke x 29, ff.
183-190. Compare Corn., 11. 4-9, and see Introduction,
p. xxxii.
93^-^4:8. See Introduction, p. xxxiv f., and Peacock's
Lady Clarinda s Song (Gosse's English Lyrics).
a94r-298. See Tiger-lilies., p. 49, and Betrayal in
k<'vVJ^j
Notes — The Power of Prayer
67
Lanier s complete Poems, p. 213. These lines of The
^Symphony show clearly that I.anier did not believe that
God made one law for man and another for woman or that
one very grievous sin should forever blight a woman's life
What Christ himself thought is clear from Si. Luke vii
36-50, and Si.John viii. i-ii.
30"4. See Introduction, p. liv.
33«. For a full account of the hautboy and other musi-
cal instruments mentioned in the poem see Lanier's The
Orchestra of To-duy, cited in the Bibliography.
359. See Introduction, p. xxxvi. Compare i Corinthians
xiu. ; Drummond's The Greatest Thing in the IVorld-
William Morris's Love Is Enough,- Aurora Leigh Book
ix. :
" Art is much, but Love is more !
O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is morel
Art symbolizes Heaven, but Love is God
And makes Heaven ; "
and Langland's Piers the Plowman (ed. by Skeat, i. 202-3) '■
" Love is leche of lyf and nexte oure I^rde selve,
And also the graith gate that goth into hevene." »
368. See Introduction, p. xxxii.
oduction,
'eacock's
'rayal in
THE POWER OF PRAYER ; OR, THE FIRST
STEAMBOAT UP THE ALABAMA
As the title-page shows, The Power of Prayer is the
joint production of Sidney and Clifford Lanier. The lat-
ter gentleman informs me that once he read a newspaper
scrap of about ten lines stating that a Negro on first see-
mg a steamboat coming down the river was greatly fright-
ened. Mr. Lanier then wrote out in metrical form the
plot of The Power of Prayer, substantially as we now have
It, and sent it to his brother Sidney, who polished it up
and published it under their joint names. Mr. Clifford
Lanier had not seen the piece mentioned in the next par-
agraph, nor had his brother ; but on being shown the
piece, the former was of the opinion that his newspaper
clipping must have been based on the work to which I
1 The two lines may be translated : " Love is the physician of
life and next to our Lord himself ; moreover, it is the wav that
goes straight to Heaven."
ml
m
I'.j
W:
68
A^oUs — TAe Power of Prayer
turn, as it had already appeared and the incidents were so
much alike.
In the third chapter of The Gilded Age (Hartford, Conn.,
1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, there
is a piece. Uncle Daniel's Apparition and Prayer, so sim-
ilar to The Power of Prayer that I quote it almost entire.
Uncle Dan'l ( a Negro), his wife, his young mistress, and
his two young masters were sitting on a log by the Mis-
sissippi River one moonlight night a-talking. " Suddenly
Uncle Dan'l exclaimed : ' Chil'en, dah's sumfin a com-
in'l'
" All crowded close together and every heart beat faster.
Uncle Dan'l pointed down the river with his bony finger.
" A deep coughing sound troubled tlie stillness, way
toward a wooded cape that jutted into the stream a mile
distant. All in an instant a fierce eye of fire shot out from
behind the cape and sent a long brilliant pathway quiver-
ing athwart the dusky water. The coughing grew louder
and louder, the glaring eye grew larger and still larger,
glared wilder and still wilder. A huge shape developed
itsdf out of the gloom, and from its tall duplicate horns
dense volumes of smoke, starred and spangled with sparks,
poured out and went tumbling away into the farther dark-
ness. Nearer and nearer the thing came, till its long sides
began to glow with spots of light which mirrored them-
selves in the river and attended the monster like a torch-
light procession.
" ' What is it ? Oh ! what is it, Uncle Dan'l ? *
" With deep solemnity the answer came :
*' * It's de Almighty ! Git down on yo' knees ! '
" It was not necessary to say it twice. They were all
kneeling in a moment. And then while the mysterious
coughing rose stronger and stronger and the threatening
glare reached farther and wider, the negro's voice lifted up
its supplications.
** * O Lord, we's ben mighty wicked, an* we knows dat
we 'zerve to go to de bad place, but, good Lord, deah
Lord, we ain't ready yit, we ain't ready — let dese po*
chil'en hab one mo' chance, jes' one mo' chance. Take
de ole niggah if you's got to hab somebody. — Good Lord,
good deah Lord, we don't know whah you's a gwine to,
we don't know who you's got yo' eye on, but we knows
by de way you's a comin', we know by de way you's a
tiltin' along in yo' charyot o' fiah dat some po' sinner's a
gwine to ketch it. But, good Lord, dese chil'en don't
'blong heah, dey's f m Obedstown -whah dey don't knov/
nuffin, an' you knows, yo' own sef, dat dey ain't 'sponsible.
An' deah Lord, good Lord, it ain't like yo' mercy, it ain't
II
Notes — The Power of Prayer
69
like yo' pity, it ain't like yo' long-sufFerin' lovin'-kindness
for to take dis kind o* 'vantage o' sich little chil'en as dese
is when dey's so many ornery grown folks chuck full o'
cussedness dat wants roastin* down dah. O Lord, spah
de little chil'en, don't tar de little chil'en away f m dey
frens, jes' let 'em off jes' dis once, and take it out'n de ole
niggah. Hsah I is, Lord, hkah I is I De ole nig-
gah's ready. Lord, de ole '
" The flaming and churning steamer was right abreast
the party, and not twenty steps away. The awful thunder
of a mud-valve suddenly burst forth, drowning the prayer,
and as suddenly Uncle Dan'l snatched a child under each
arm and scoured into the woods with the rest of the pack
at his heels. And then, ashamed of himself, he halted in
the deep darkness and shouted (but rather feebly) :
" ' Heah I is, Lord, heah I is ! '
•• There was a moment of throbbing suspense, and then,
to the surprise and comfort of the party, it was plain that
the august presence had gone by, for its dreadful noises
were receding. Uncle Dan'l headed a cautious recon-
noissance in the direction of the log. Sure enough ' The
Lord ' was just turning a point a short distance up the
river, and while they looked, the lights winked out and
the coughing diminished by degrees and presently ceased
altogether.
" ' H'wsh ! Well now dey's some folks says dey ain't no
'ficiency in prah. Dis chile would like to know whah we'd
a ben now if it warn't fo' dat prah ? Dat's it. Dat's it ! ' "
There follows a discussion as to whether or not the
prayer caused the apparition to go by, of which of course
Uncle Dan'l has no doubt. The apparition reappears and
Uncle Dan'l betakes himself to prayer again, this time a
long way off.
I wrote the authors of The Gilded Age and asked the
source of Uncle Daniel's Apparition and Prayer. Mr.
Clemens kindly replied that he is the author of the piece,
and that it is pure fiction without either history or tradition
back of it.
A comparison of the two stories shows some differences.
The scene in the one case is the Alabama River, in the
other the Mississippi. Moreover, the personnel is dif-
ferent. The Negro man in Twain's story is about forty,
in Lanier's he is old and has been blind for forty years.
Another difference Mr. Sidney Lanier points out to his wife
in his letter of October i, 1874 : " Cliff's and my ' Power
of Prayer ' will come out in the Scribner's ; probably in
the ' Etchings ' at the end of the Magazine. I wrote thee
what Dr. Holland said anent its resemblance to some-
r<::.JI |.T, ..^
ffl
IP If
in
70
No^es — T/ie Power of Prayer
thing of Mark Twain's in plot. Day before yesterday I
called and asked Dr. Holland what work of Mark Twain's
he referred to. ' Well,' said he, ' I know nothing about
it myself : I read the poem to a friend, and he suggested
that the plot was like something of Mark Twain's. But
yesterday I read him your note, and he then recollected
that in 'I wain's version it is God Almighty that is coming
up the bend. In yours it is the Devil : — which certainly
makes a little difference ! ' and here he broke into a great
laugh. ' Yes,' I rejoined, ' a difference toto ccelo,' where-
at he laughed again, and told me he had already ordered
a check to be sent me for the poem."
Mr. Clifford Lanier was born at Griffin, Ga., April 24,
1844, entered business in Montgomery, Ala., at fotirtten,
subsequently attended college for a year and a halt", \nd
in May, x&ua, joined his brother in the Confederate Arny.
His soldier life has been detailed in connection with that
of the poet. In October, 1864, Mr. Clifford Lanier was
assigned as signal officer to the blockade-runner Talisthan,
which, after two successful runs to the; Bermuda Islands,
was wrecked in December, 1864. He escaped, however,
anci surrendered to the Federal authorities at the end of
April, 1865. He has been successively lawyer, hotel man-
ager, and superintendent of schools in Montgomery, Ala.
For several years past he has been a director of the Bank
of Montgomery and other corporations. All the while,
however, he has been deeply interested in literature and
has written some graceful sketches and poems, among
which may be mentioned the following : Thorn-fruit
(1867), Love and Loyalty at War (1893), Bid'ng Tryst
(1894), prose ; Greatest of These is Love, The American
Philomel. Keats and Fanny B , The Spirit of Art, An-
tinousto Hadrian, Time, Tireless, Tramp (in Stedman and
Hutchinson's Library of American Literature), Love and
Lift-, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. As stated in the Introduction,
the Chautauquans of 1898 have named themselves " The
Laniers" in honor of Messrs. Sidney and Clifford Lanier.
The motto of the class is the first line of Mr. Clifford La-
nier's Transformation (Sunday- school Times, Phila. , June
30, 1894) :
*' The humblest life that lives may be divine."
8. The complete Poems has the before world, but Mrs.
Lanier thinks the poet must have used cU here as else-
where.
Notes— Rose- Morals
71
ROSE-MORALS
Rose-morals in English literature probably begin with
Sir John Mandeville in the fourteentn century. At any
rate, in the eighteenth chapter of his Voyage and Traveti
he professes to tell us the origin of red and white roses.
A fair maid had been unjustly accused of wrong-doing and
doomed to die by fire. " And as the woode began to
brenne (bum) about hir, she made hir prayer to our Lorde
as she was not gyltie of that thing, that he would helpe
hir that it might be knowne to all men. And whan (when)
she had thus sayde, she entered the fyre and anone the
fyre went out, and those braunches that were brenninge
(burning) became red Roses and those braunches that
were not kindled became white Rosiers (rose bushes) full
of white roses, and those were the fyrst roses and rosyers
that any man sawe, and so was the mayden saved through
the grace of God. "
Thomas Carew has several rose-moralities, as The True
Beauty, beginning " He that loves a rosy cheek," and his
exquisite Red and White Roses :
" Read in these roses the sad story
Of my hard fate and your own glory :
In the white you may discover
The paleness of a famting lover ;
In the red, the flames still feeding
On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding.
The white will tell you how I languish,
And the red express my anguish :
The white my innocence displaying,
The red my martyrdom betraying.
The frovvns that on your brow resided
Have t?iose roses thus divided ;
Oh ! let your smiles but clear the weather,
And then they both shall grow together. " ' '
Rollicking Robert Herrick, too, draws his morals, now
advising the virgins to make much of time, as in his Gather
ye rose-budi while ye may, now preaching a rarely pathetic
sermon, as in To Blossoms :
" Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast ?
' See Saintsbiiry's Elizabethan Literature (Macmillan & Co.,
New York, 1887), p. 363.
72
Notes— To-
with a Rose
Your date is not so past.
But you may stay yet here awhile
To blush and gently smile,
And go at last.
" What, were ye born to be
An hour or half's delight,
And so to l)id good-night ?
'Twas pity Nature brought ye forth
Merely to show your worth.
And lose you quite.
" But you are lovely leaves, where we
May read how soon things have
Their end, though ne'er so brave:
And after they have shown their pride
Like you, awhile, they glide
Into the grave." »
I
!'!
;,.j!!"
'I1.1
ii
Much like this last piece in importi and scarcely inferior
to it in execution, is My life is like the summer rose oJ
Richard Henry Wilde, which is familiar to every one.
Paul Hamilton Hayne's The Red and the White Rose
[Poems, pp. 231-232) is an interesting dialogue, which tlie
author concludes by making the former an " earthly
queen" and the latter a " heaven-bound votaress."
Mrs. Browning's A Lay 0/ the Early Rose shows that we
are not to strive " for the dole of praise."
TO-
., WITH A ROSE
This poem was sent to Mrs. Gibson Peacock, of Phila-
delphia, who was one of Mr. Lanier's kindest and most
appreciative friends. The poet's letters to Mr. and Mrs.
Peacock have recently been published in The Atlantic (see
Thayer in Bibliography).
Of the numerous rose-compliments in English I can here
specify but a few. One of the prettiest is that by Henry
Constable (Saintsiury, p. 113) :
" My Lady's presence makes the Roses red,
Because to see her lips they blush for shame."
' Palgrave^ p. 89.
Notes— To , with a Rose
11
»re
le
y inferior
»r rose ot
one.
'kite Rose
ivhich the
" earthly
irs that we
, of Phila-
and most
and Mrs.
lantic (see
I can here
by Henry
ed,
tne.'
Carew's compliment is hardly equal to his morals (Gosst
p. loi) :
" Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose ;
For in your beauty's orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep."
Few better things have been written than this, the second
stanza of Jonsons Drink to tne only with thine eyes (Gosse,
p. ooj';
" I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me ;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee."'
Even more felicitous, perhaps, is Waller's Go, lovely rose I
which IS at once a compliment and a moral {Gosse, p. 134):
" Go, lovely rose
Tell her that wastes her time and me.
That now she knows.
When I resemble her to thee.
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
" Tell her that's young.
And shun^ to have her graces spied.
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
"Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired ;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.
"Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
1 The fact that Jonson here translates a prose love-letter of
Fhilostratus, the Greek sophist, may detract from the originalitv
but not the beauty of his poem. '
1^
If fi
Pi
n
m
74 Ncft^s — C/nck Jim^s Baptist Revival Hyvin
May read in thee ;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wond'rous sweet and fair."
Browning's Women and Roses ^oxAC^ also be mentioned,
and Mrs. Browning's translation of Sappho's lovely Song
of the Rose.
UNCLE JIM'S BAPTIST REVIVAL HYMN
I THINK that the following note, prefixed by the authors
to their poem, sufficiently explains what is to me one of
their best humorous pieces :
' ' Not long ago a certain Georgia cotton-planter, driven to
desperation by awaking each morning to find that the grass
had quite outgrown the cotton overnight, and was likely
to choke it, in defiance of his lazy freedmen's hoes and
ploughs, set the whole State in a laugh by exclaiming to a
group of fellow-sufferers : ' It's all stuff about Cincinna-
tus leaving the plough to go into poliucs /or patriotism ;
he was just a-runnin' from grass ! '
" This state of things — when the delicate young rootlets
of the cotton are struggling against the hardier multitudes
of the grass-suckers — is universally described in plantation
parlance by the phiase ' in tbj grass ; ' and Uncle Jim ap-
pears to have found in it so much similarity to the condi-
tion of his own ('Baptis' ') church, overrun, as it was, by
the cares of this world, that he has embodied it in the
refrain of a revival hymn such as the colored improvisator
of the South not infrequently constructs from his daily sur-
roundings. He has drawn all the ideas of his stanzas from
the early morning phenomena of those critical weeks when
the loud plantati(Mi-horn is blown before daylight, in order
to rouse all hands for a long day's fight against the com-
mon enemy of cotton-planting mankind.
" In addition to these exegetical commentaries the
Northern reader probably needs to be informed that the
phrase ' peerten up ' means substantially to spur up, and
is an active form of the adjective ' peert ' (probably a cor-
ruption oi pert), which is so common in the South, and
which has much the signification of 'smart ' in New Eng*
land, as e.g., a 'peert' horse, in antithesis to a ' sorry '-
i.e., poor, mean, lazy one."
Notes— The Mocking-Bird
75
THE MOCKING-BIRD
Besides this sonnet Mr. Lanier wrote a longer To Our
Mocking-bird, consisting of three sonnets, and Bob a
charming account, in prose, of the life and death of the
bird apostrophized.
In his Birds and Poets (Boston, 1877), Mr. John Bur-
roughs says that he knows of only two noteworthy poetical
tributes to the mocking-bird, those by Whitman and by
Wilde, both of which he quotes. But since the appear-
ance of his book many poems have been written to the
mocking-bird, several of which are of enduring worth In-
deed, several noteworthy poems had been published be-
fore the appearance of Mr. Burroughs's essay, as will-
appear from the list below. In a search of two days I
found thirty-two different authors paying tribute to our mar-
velous singer : Julia Bacon (see J. W. Davidson's Livinp
Writers of the ^outh. New York : Carleton, 1869), St L
L Carter (ib.), Edna P. Clarke (Centiay, 24. -.gi Tulv"
1893), Fortunatus Crosby (Davidson, l.c ), J. R. Drake
(Duyckinck's Cyclopcedia of American Literature New-
York i»55), R. T. W. Duke, Jr. {Southern Bivouac, 2. 6:11,
March, 1887), W. T. Dumas ( The Golden Day and Miscci-
laneous Poems, Philadelphia, 1893), F. {Southern Literary
Messenger, Richmond, Va. , 5. 523, August. 1839), H. L.
i-lash {Davidson, I.e.), Va. Gentleman {Harper's Map:
azine, 15, 566, September, 1857), Caroline Gilman (May's
American Female Poets, Philadelphia, 1865), Hannah F
Gould {Davidson, I.e.), Paul Granald {So. lit Mes 8
508 August, 1842), P. H. Hayne (Poems, Boston. 1882!
^'"'^hr t; ^- ^''^y"e {Century, 24. 676, September, 1805),
C. W. Hubner (Poems and Es.uiys, New York, 1881) C
Lanier (Sunday-school Times, Phila., July 8. 189^) SI a-
nier (two. as above cited), Gen. Edwin G. Lee {Southern
Metropolis, Baltimore. 1869). A. B. Meek (in his Songs and
Poems of the South, New York. 1857), W. Mitchell (Scrib-
ners Magazine 11. 171, December. 1875), Nugator (J)o.
Lit Mes \ 356. June, 1838). C. J. O'Malley (So. Bivouac,
2. 698, April, 1887), Albert Pike (Stedman & Hutchinson's
Amer Lit., New York, 1891. vol. 6). D. Robinson {Century,
vf- 4^°V Jy^y- ^^93), Clinton Scollard (Pictures in Song.
New York. 1884), H. J. Stockard (7he Century, xlvil
898, Oct., 1894). T (So. Lit. Mes., 11. 117, February.
1845), Maurice Thompson (Poems, Boston, 1892: several-
^\so Lippincott's Magazine, 32. 624, December, 1883). l'
V. (So. Lit. Mes., 10. 414, July, 1844), Walt Whitman
7(5
Notes — The Mocking-Bird
f 1^
{Burroug'hs^ I.e., also in Whitman's Poems), R. H. Wilde
(Burroughs, I. c, and Stedman & Hutchinson's ^m. Lit.,
vol. 5).
Roughly speaking, the poems may be divided into two
classes — first those that, as in the Indian legend cited be-
low, make out the mocking-bird only or chiefly a thief and
thing of evil, and second those that find him, though a
borrower, original and great. The former view, fortu-
nately upheld by few, is strikingly set forth in Granald's
The Xlock-bird and the Sparrow. After describing minutely
the various songs of the mocking-bird and emphasizing
that they all come from other birds, the author gives the
dialogue between the mock-bird and the sparrow. The
former taunted the latter and insisted on his singing ; and
" The sparrow cock'd a knowing eye,
And made him this most tart reply —
' You steal from all and call it wit,
But I prefer my simple twit.' "
But the latter view is espou:ed by most of the writers
mentioned, notably and nobly by Drake, the Haynes, the
Laniers, Lee, Meek, and Thompson, the poet-laureate of
the mocking-bird, whose poems should be read by every
lover of nature and especially of the mocking-bird. As
Thompson's tributes are all too long for quotation, I give
here Meek's, in the hope that I may rescue it from the
long oblivion of an out-of-print. My attention was called
to it by my friend, Dr. C. H. Ross, to whom every reader
will be indebted along with myself. It runs as follows :
" From the vale, what music ringing,
Fills the bosom of the night ;
On the sense, entranced, flinging
Spells of witchery and delight !
O'er magnolia, lime and cedar.
From yon locust-top, it swells.
Like the chant of serenader.
Or the rhymes of silver bells !
Listen ! dearest, listen to it !
Sweeter sounds were never heard !
'Tis the song of that wild poet —
Mime and minstrel — Mocking-bird.
" See him, swinging in his glory,
On yon topmost bending limb !
Carolling his amtirous story,
Like some wild crusader's hymn !
Notes — The Mocking- Bird yj
Now it faints in tones delicious
As the first low vow of love !
Now it bursts in swells capricious,
All the moonlit vale above !
Listen ! dearest, etc.
" Why is't thus, this sylvan Petrarch
Pours all night his serenade ?
"Tis for some proud woodland Laura,
His sad sonnets all are made !
But he changes now his measure —
Gladness bubbling from his mouth —
Jest and gibe, and mimic pleasure —
Winged Anacreon of the South !
Listen ! dearest, etc.
" Bird of music, wit and gladness,
Troubadour of sunny climes,
Disenchanter of all sadness. —
Would thine art were in my rhymes.
O'er the heart that's beating by me,
I would weave a spell divine ;
Is there aught she could deny me,
Drinking in such strains as thine ?
Listen! dearest, etc."
As is well known, the mocking-bird is often called the
American nightingale. As to their relative merits as sing-
ers, here is the judgment of one that has heard both birds.
Professor James A. Harrison (The Critic, New York
2. 284, December 13, 1884) : " Well, it is my honest opinion
that philomel vill not compare with the singer of the
South in sweetness, versatility, passion, or lyrical beauty.
The mocking-bird— better the echo-bird, with a voice
compounded of all sweet sounds, as the blossom of the
Chinese olive is compounded of all sweet scents— is a pure
lyrist ; its throat is a lyre— ^olian, capricious, many-
stringed ; as its name suggests, it is a polyglot mime, a
bird linguist, a feathered Mezzofanti singing all the bird
languages ; yet over and above all this, with a something
of its own that cannot be described." The mocking-bird
speaks for himself in Thompson's To an English NiPhtin-
gale :
" What do you think of me ?
Do I sing by rote ?
Or by note ?
Have I a parrot's echo-throat ?
< t ■
■IKI
I
78 Notes — T/te Song of the Chattahoochee
Oh no! I caugbt my strains
From Nature's freshest veins.
"He
A match for me !
No more than a wren or a chickadee !
Mine is the voice of the young and strong,
Mine the soul of the brave and free ! "
This self-appreciation is confirmed by the greatest author-
ity on birds, Audubon : " There is probably no bird in the
world that possesses all the musical qualifications of this
king of song, who has derived all from Nature's self. Yes,
reader, all ! "
It will be interesting and instructive to compare the
tributes to the mocking-bird with Keats's Ode to a Night-
■in,^ale, Shelley's To a Skylark, and Wordsworth's To the
Skylark.
Aside from Audubon's Birds 0/ America and Ridgway's
Manual of North American Birds^ the student may con-
sult with profit Burroughs's Birds and Poets, Thompson's
Jn the Haunts of the Mocking-bird ( The Atlantic, 54. 620,
November, 1884), various articles by Olive Thome Miller in
The Atlantic (vol. 54 on), and Winterfield's The Mocking-
bird, an Indian Legend ( The American Whig Review^ New
York, I. 497, May, 1845).
14. Wilde compares the mocking-bird to Yorick and
to Jacques ; Meek, to Petrarch ; Lanier, to Keats, in To
Our Mocking-bird^ as does Wm. H. Hayne :
" Each golden note of music greets
The listening leaves divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird."
THE SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE
The Chattahoochee River rises in Habersham County,
in northeast Georgia, and, intersecting Hall County, flows
southwestward to West Point, then southward until it
unites with the Flint River at the southwestern extremity of
Georgia. The Chattahoochee is about five hundred miles
long, and small steamboats can ascend it to Columbus, Ga.
Hon. Henry R. Jackson, of Savannah, Ga. , late Minister
to Mexico, has an interesting poem To the Chattahoochee
Notes — The Revenge of Hamish
79
River, in his Tallulah and Other Poems (Savannah, Ga.,
1850) ; and Mr, M. V. Moore, in his poem, Southern Rivers
(Harper, 66. 464, February, 1883), has a paragraph on the
rivers of Georgia, in which he speaks of " the sandy Chat-
tahoochee. "
In the Introduction (pp. xxxi, xliv, xlvii) I have spoken of
this Song as Lanier's most finished nature poem, as the
most musical of his productions. "The music of a song
easily eludes all analysis and may be dissipated by a crit-
ic s breath, but let us try to catch the means by which the
effect is in part produced. In five stanzas, of ten lines
each, alliteration occurs in all save twelve lines. In eleven
of these twelve lines internal rhyme occurs, sometimes
joining the parts of a line, sometimes uniting successive
lines. Syzygy is used for the same purpose. Of the letters
occurring in the poem about one-fifth arc liquids and
about one-twelfth are sibilants. The effect of the whole
is musical beyond description. It sings itself and yet no-
where sacrifices the thought " (Kent).
Another way to test the beauty of The Song of the Chat-
tahoochee is to compare it with other kindred poems.
There are many stream-songs in English, several of which
are very pretty, but there is, I think, but one rival to our
Song, and that is Tennyson's The Brook. Even so careful
a critic as Mr. Ward says that The Song of the Chatta-
hoochee " strikes a higher key, and is scarcely less musical."
It will be instructive, too, to compare Lanier's poem with
Southey's 7 he Cataract of Lodore (see Gates, p. 25), which
exhibits considerable talent, if not inspiration ; with P. H.
Hayne's The Meadow Brook, which is simple and sweet ;
and with Wordsworth's Brook ! whose society the Poet
seeks^ which is grave and elevated. Professor Kent sug-
gests as interesting analogues Poe's U/a/ume and Buchanan
Read's Bay of Naples ; and, if the student cares to extend
his list, he should read the stream-songs by Bryant, Mary
Ainge De Vere {Century^ 21. 283, December, 1891), Long-
fellow, Weir Mitchell {Atlantic, 65. 629, May, 1890), Clin-
ton ScoUard {Lippincott, 50. 226, August, 1892), etc., etc.
THE REVENGE OF HAMISH
For an appreciation of this fine poem see Introduction,
pp. xlv, xlvii, Mr. J. R. Tait, a friend with whom Mr. La-
nier discussed The Revenge of Hamish, kindly writes me
that the author took the plot from William Black's novel,
Macleod of Dare. In chapter iii. Macleod, of Castle
Dare, Mull, tells the story to his London entertainer ; but,
I'M i
80
Notes — Remonstrance
i
as the story of the novel is identical with that of the poem,
it need not be given here. The novel, I should add, gives
the name of the chieftain only, though, as it has a Hamish
in another connection, it doubtless gave Lanier this name
for the henchman. Previous to the reception of Mr. Tait's
letter I supposed that Lanier had borrowed his plot from
a poem by Charles Mackay, Alaclaine's Child, A Legend
of Lockbuy, Mull, which in plot is identical with Lanier's
poem, except that the former begins with the speech of the
flogged henchman, here named Evan, and ends by telling
us that the bodies were found and that of Evan was hanged
on a gallows-tree. The poem is too long for quotation,
but may be found in any edition of Mackay or in Garrett's
One Hundred Choice Selections: Number Nine (Fhila.,
1887).
17. The Macleans, for centuries one of the most power-
ful of Scottish clans, have since the fourteenth century
lived in Mull, one of the largest of the Hebrides Islands.
The two leading branches of the clan were the Macleans
of Dowart and the Macleans of Lochbuy, both taking their
names from the seats of their castles. The Lochbuy fam-
ily now spells its name Mac/a««^. For a detailed history
of the clan see Keltie's History of the Scottish Highlands,
Highland Clans, etc. (London, 1885). Interesting books
about Mull and the Hebrides are : Johnson's A Journey
to the Hebrides and Robert Buchanan's The Hebrid Isles
fLondon, 1883). Instructive, too, is Cummins's Around
Mull {The Atlantic Monthly, 16, 11-19, 167-176, July, Au-
gust, 1865).
REMONSTRANCE
This is the first and the greatest of the Street-criet :
see the introductory note to Life and Song,
For an interpretation of the poem see Introduction, pp.
xxix, xlv, xlvii.
$86, 33. Amusing illustrations of such intolerance may
be found in yack-knife and Brambles (Nashville, 1893),
by Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, of the Methodist Church,
South. One brother, we are told (p. 278), objected to
hearing Bishop Haygood in 1859 because of his wearing a
beard ; while another (p. 281), along in the thirties, voted
against licensing Bishop George F. Pierce because his hair
was " combed back from his forehead " !
46. For an account of Socrates, the Greek philosopher,
poisoned in 399 B.C., see Xenophon's Memorabilia and
Plato's dialogues.
47. See St. Matthew xxvii. 20.
Notes— Opposition
8i
Ri ?• ^°'' *'^« burning of Nicholas Ridley, an English
Bishop on October i6. 1555. see Green's ^'horter Hiliory
%J'f^^"^- ^^''^hael Servetus. a Spanish scientific and
Octobfr? '^'""^'"' ^^^ ^"'"^'^ ^^ ^ ''^'■^^'^ ^^ Geneva.
OPPOSITION
As an introduction to this poem I quote a sentence from
Dr Gates s excellent essay : " As we look at the circum-
stances of his life, let us carry with us the strains of this
poem which interprets the use of crosses, interferences
lltT3T^^^ ^hwartings of one's purpose ; for the ethicai
vaue of Lanier's lite and writings can be fully understood
only by remembering how much he cvercame and how
heroically he persisted in manly work in his chosen art
through years of such broken health as would have driven
most men to the inert, self-indulgent life of an invalid
The superb power of will which he displayed is a lesson as
forces "^ ^' "°^^^ P°^'"' ^hich it illustrates and en!
AT SUNSET
Ait:"^ the first reading, no doubt, this song appears in-
distinct, hough poetical. On a second reading; however
nf ,Wy ^ft'st'^ : and we wonder at the happy use made
of the Shakespearean characters : the gracious, forgiving
Prospero the rightful Duke of Milan ; Antonio, his Ssurp?
ic£ H°r •^^'■^J''u'].."°*T'^^'^^"ding; Caliban, the sav-
>¥;sp1rto?fhea'f ''^ ^^^^^ = ^'^^ ^"^^' ^^^ --^^-
an^^'m^/e^-ila^bTfu^^se'^t^^re^^^^
A BALLAD OF TREES AND THE MASTER
In the Introduction (p. xxxi ff.) I have tried to show
the intensity and the breadth of Lanier's love of nat-
lire m general. President Gates gives a separate section
to Lanier s love of trees and plant-life ; and, after quoting
some lines on the soothing and inspiring companionship of
rees.thus speaks of our Ballad: "This ministration of
trees to a mind and heart ■ forspent with shame and grief
finds Its culmination in the pathetic lines upon that olive-
garden near Jerusalem, which to those of us who have sat
82
Notes — Sunrise
within its shade must always seem the most sacred spot on
earth. The ahnost mystic exaltation of the power of
poetic sympathy which inspired these intense lines, Into
the Wood my Muster went, may impair their religious
effect for many devout souls. But to many others this
short poem will express most wonderfully that essential
human-heartedness in the Son of Man. our Divine Saviour,
which made Him one with us in His need of the quiet,
sympathetic ministrations of nature — perhaps the heart of
the reason why this olive-grove was ' the place where He
was wont to go ' for prayer." See St. Luke xxii. 39.
For Lanier's other poems on Christ see Introduction, p.
xxxvii f.
SUNRISE
In the words of Mrs. Lanier, " Sunrise, Mr. Lanier's
latest completed poem, was written while his sun of life
seemed fairly at the setting, and the hand which first pen-
cilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to
the lips." See Introduction, p. xviii. Lanier has two
other poems on the same theme, both short : A Sunrise
Song and Between Dawn and Sunrise (entered under
Marsh Hymns).
As already pointed out {Introduction,, pp. xxxi, xlvii),
Sunrise shows in a powerful way the delicacy and the
comprehensiveness of Lanier's love for nature. True, as
I have elsewhere stated {Introduction, p. xlvi), the poem
has some serious limitations, more I think than has The
Marshes of Glynn; but, despite its shortcomings. Sunrise
is from an absolute stand-point a great poem ; while, if we
consider the circumstances under which it was produced,
it is, in the words of Professor Kent, " a world-marvel."
Aside from the numerous unapproachable snatches in
Shakespeare,' I know of nothing on the subject in English
1 Among others I may cite the following passages :
" Hark ! hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
in Cymbeline, 2, 3 ;
" But look the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill,"
in Hamlet., i» i ;
" Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops,"
in Romeo and Juliet., 3, 5 ; and
" Full many a glorious morning have I seen " etc..
Sonnet xxxiii.
Notes — Sun rise
83
literature comparable to Sunrise Mr. W. W. Story's
i^unrisc is perhaps the closest parallel, and yet it is far in-
ferior to Lanier's, as every reader of the two will admit.
If one wishes to mal<e further comparisons, he may find
sunrise poems in the following authors : Blake. Cowper,
limerson, Hood. Keats, Longfellow, Southcy, Thompson.
Willis, etc. I may add that an interesting, though super-
ficial article on The Poetry of Sunrise and Sn/isei may be
found in Chambers's Edsnburj^'k yonrmd, 22, 234, October
7. 1854.
3, 13-14. See Introduction , p. xxxii, and compare 1. 26.
39-53. See Introduction^ p. xxxiii.
4». I had made the comparison between Lanier and
St. Francis before reading Ur. Gates's essay on Lanier, and
was delighted to find my judgment confirmed by so com-
petent a critic. Dr. Gates is quite emphatic : *• Since St.
Krancis, no soul has seemed so heavily overcharged with
this feeling of brotherhood for all created things." The
Canticle of the Sun, otherwise known as The Son^ of the
Creatures, may be found in metrical form in Mrs. Oli-
phant's life of St. Francis (New York, 1870) and in prose
in Sabatier's (Scribners, New York, 1894)
54r. Lanier has an Owl against Robin.
57. Si
/::ir.-7d?"-*int
80-8.J. See Introduction, p. xliii,
86-|.'5a. See Introduction, p. xlvii. Mr. F, F. Browne
says that in lyric sweetness 11. 86-97 recall the best of
Keats and Shelley.
114-115. See Introduction, p. xliv.
\-47. Lanier has a poem entitled 7'he Bee.
134-136. See Introduction, p. xliii.
181. Compare xMrs. Easter's tribute. Lit with the Sun.
189-193. See Introduction, p. xxi, and compare Cow-
din's tribute, Hopeset and Sunrise, and the closing stanza
of Hamlin Garland's :
" While heart's blood ebbed at every breath
He passed life's head-land bleak and dun,
Flew through the western gate of Death
A "d took his place beside the sun."
1
(M-;
Iffi i
I*:
iLti
I
ir'i
p
i I
■
BIBLIOGRAPHY
If.
hi
m
ii
'
IPs '
'
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. COLLECTED PROSE WORKS
TiGER-MLlES : A Novel. i6mo, pp. v, 252. Hurd &
Houghton, New York, 1867. Out of print.
Florida : Its Scenery, Climate, and History. i2mo, pp.
336. J. ii. Lippincott & Co., I'hiladelphia, 1876.
Tub Boy's Froissart. Being Sir John Froissart's
Chronicles of Adventure, Battle, and Custom in Eng-
land, France, Spain, etc. Edited for Boys. Crown
8vo, pp. x.xviii, 422. Charles Scribner's Sons, New
York, 1878.
Thb Scienck of English Vkrstc. Crown Svo, pp.
XV, 315. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1880.
Thk Boy's King Arthur. Being Sir Thomas Malory's
History of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round
Table. Edited for Boys. Crown 8vo, pp. xlviii, 404.
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1880.
The Boy's Mabinogion, Being the Earliest Welsh
Tales of Kmg Arthur in the famous Ked Book of
Hergest. Edited for fioys. rown 8vo, pp. xxiv,
378, Charles Scribner's Sons, ew York, 1881.
The Boy's Percy, Being Old B ads of War, Adven-
ture, and Love, from Bishop Th( is Percy Reliques
of Ancient English Poetry. Editt for Boys. Crown
Svo, pp. xxxii, 442. Charles Scribner's Sons, New
York, 1882.
Thb English Novel and the Principles of its
Development. Crown 8vo, pp. 293. Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, New York, 1883.
n. COLLECTED POETICAL WORKS
Poems. Pp. 94. J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia,
1877. Contained To Charlotte Cushman (dedication),
Corn^ The Symphony, The Psalm of the West, In Ab-
sence, Acknowledgtncnt, Betrayal, Special Pleading,
88
Bibliography
To Charlotte Cushtnan, Rose-morals^ To with a
Rose.
POKMS OF Sidney Lanier, Edited by his Wife, with a
Memorial by William Hayes Ward. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1884, 252 pp., i2mo.
III. UNCOLLECTED PROSE PIECES
"Yhw^a Waterfalls: Scott's Magazine (Atl?'-'a, Ga.),
August, September, 1867.
Address before the Furlow Masonic Fkmalb
College (Ga. ), June 30, 1869 : Catalogue of the Col-
lege for 1869.
Confederate Memorial Address at Macon, Ga.,
April 26, 1870 : Macon Daily Telegraph of April 27,
1870, and reprinte J in same for April 27, 1887.
Retrospects and Prospects: Southern Magazine
(Baltimore) 8. 283-290, 446-456, March, April, 1871.
Nature-metaphors: Southern Magazine lo. 172-182,
February, 1872
San Antonio db Bexar : Southern Magazine 13. 83-99,
138-152, July, August, 1873.
Peace : Southern Magazine 15. 406-410, October, 1874.
Review of Havne's Poems: Southern Magazine, 1874.
The Ocklawaha in May : Lippimott's Magazine (Phil-
adelphia) 16. 403-413, October, 1875.
St. Augustine in April: Lippincott's Magazine 16.
537-550. November, 1875.
Sketches of India, published anonymously: Lippin-
cott's Magazine 17. 37-51, 172-183, 283-301, ^09-427,
January-April, 1876.
Defence of Centennial Cantata : The Tribune
(New York), 1876.
Musical Festival in Baltimore: 'ihe Sun (Balti-
more), May 28, 29, 30, 1878.
Criticism of Rubinstein's Ocean Symphony: The
Shu (Baltimore), January 31, 1880.
The Story of a Proverb : Lippincott's Magazine 23.
109-113, January, 1879.
Let-^er to Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, a banker of New
York, giving an account of the Laniers in Europe and
of their coming to America : privately printed, Balti-
more, April 2, 187Q, pp. 17.
A Fairy Tale for Grown People : St. Nicholas Mag-
azine, 1879.
The Orchkstr.a of To-day: Scriintr's Monthly {New
York) 19. 897-904, April, 1880.
Bibliography
89
- with a
a, with a
V York:
a, Ga.),
Frmalb
" the Col-
on, Ga.,
April 27,
r.
\/Iagazine
1. 1871.
172-182,
13- 83-99.
r, 1874.
:ine, 1874.
ine (Phil-
razine 16.
; Lippin-
, f09-427.
? Tribune
un (Balti-
5NV : The
gazine 23.
r of New
lurope and
ited, Balti-
holas Mdg-
Hth/yCSew
Thb Nbw South : Seribner's Monthly 20. 840-851.
October, 1880.
Bob : The Independent (New York) 34. 1-3, August 3, 1882.
Moral Purpose in Art: The Century Magazine (New
York) 4. 131-137, May, 1883
Two Letters to Bayard Iaylor: Taylor (M. H.)
and Scudder's Life and Letters of Bayard Toylot
(Boston, 1884), vol. ii., 677, 693-94.
The Legend ok St. Leonor, a Fragment from an Un-
finished Lecture on " The Relations of Poetry and
Science : " The Independent yj- 1627, December 17,
1885.
The Happy Soul's Address to the Dead Body,
from Shakespeare Course of Lectures : The Indepen-
dent, 1886.
A Great Man Wanted, Extract from Letter of Novem-
ber 15, 1874, to Judge L. E. Bleckley, of Georgia :
The Acorn (Towson, Md.), June, 1887; reprinted in
The Critic (New York) 7. 309, June 18, 1887.
From Bacon to Beethoven, published anonymously :
IJppincott's Magazine 41. 643-655, May, 1888.
Chaucbr and Shakespeare : The Independent 43.
1337-1338, 1371-1372, September 10 and 17, 1891.
Chaucer and Shakespeare Compared : The Inde-
pendent 43. 1401-1402, September 24, 1891.
What I Know about Flowers, a S. S. address de-
livered about 1868, but first published in The Sunday-
school limes (Philadelphia) 'i^. 739, November 21,
1891.
How to Read Chaucer: The Independent 43. 1748,
November 26, 1891.
Blood-red Flower of War, an extract from Tiger-
lilies (pp. 115-121): The Sunday News (Baltimore).
November 27, 1892.
Letters to Mr. and Mrs. Gibson Peacock, from
January 26, 1875, to June i, 1880, edited by Wm. R.
Thayer : The Atlantic Monthly (Boston) 74. 14-28,
181-193, July, August, 1894.
IV. UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Laughter in the Senate: The Round Table (New
York), 1868.
Civil Rights: The Herald i k^^nX.^, Ga.), 1874.
Songs Against Death (five stanzas, the last fragment
ary) : The Century Magazin • 10. 377, July, 1886,
One in Two : Century Magazine 12. 417, July, 1877.
■
90
Bibliography
m
r
Two IN Onb : Century Magazine 12. 417, July, 1887.
To " The White Flowek " of The English Novel,
written in 1878, but printed in 1890 by L. Prang (Bos-
ton) on an illustrated Christmas Card.
On the Receipt of a Jar of Marmalade, written
for Mrs. C. N. Hawkins in 1877, but printed in her
husband's paper. The New Castle ( Va. ) Record, April
II, 1891.
The Lord's Romance of Time, an Outline : Sunday-
school Times (Philadelphia), 1892.
To Lucik, written on St. Valentine's Day, 1880, published
in From Dixie, Richmond, Va. , 1893.
V. POEMS IN ANTHOLOGIES
Blackman, O. : see Lawrence, W. M.
Hutchinson, Ellen M. : see Stedman, E. C.
Lawrence (W. M.) and Blackman (O.): The River-
side Song Book (Boston, 1893) has Baby Charley (p. 91)
and May the Maiden (p. 97), both set to music.
Putnam, S. A. Brock: The Poetry of America (New
York, 1894) has Life and Song, Nirvana, Ballad of
Trees and the Master, and Sunrise.
Roberts, C. G. D. : Poems of Wild Life {X.ondiOXi,\Zm)
has The Revenge of Hamish (pp. 57-^2).
Sladbn, Douglas : Younger American Poets (New York,
1891) gives (pp. 131-145) Sunrise, The Marshes of
Glynn, Song of the Chattahoochee^ A Ballad of Trets
and the Master, an extract from The Symphony, and
The Crystal.
Stedman (E, C.) and Hutchinson (Ellen M.): A
Library of American Literature (New York, 1891)
gives (vol. X., pp. 145-151) The Marshes of Glynn,
Song of the Chattahoochee, The Mocking-bird^ The Re^
venge of Hamish, Night and Day, and a portrait.
VI. CRITICISMS > OF LANIER'S LIFE AND
WORKS
American Youth (Chicago): 3. 102.
Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia (New York): 1881,
p. 685 : Obituary.
' Unless the title of the criticism is given, the article treats La-
nier's life and works in general. Except in special cases no account
is made of articles in the daily papers. — For brevity's sake I cite
under this head the music composed for several of Lanier's poems.
1
1
!
Bibliography
9J
Black, G. D. : The Antiochian (Yellow Springs, O.) 2:
4. 4-6, February, 1886.
Black, G. D. : Belford's Magazine (Chicago) 6. 187-
190, January, 1891.
Blackman, O. : see Lawrence under V.
BoYKiN, Laurettb N. : Home Life of Sidney Lanier,
Atlanta, Ga. , 1889, 12 pp.
Browne, F. F. : The Dial (Chicago) 5. 244-246, January,
1885.
Browne, Wm. H. : Memorial Address before the Johns
Hopkins University, October 22, 1881, 8 pp. Private-
ly printed.
Brownb, Wm. H. : Letter at the Unveiling of a Dust of
the Poet at Macon , Ga., October 17, 1890, in 'The At-
lanta (^Ga.) Constitution of October 19, 1890.
Browne. Wm. H. : I<rom Dixie (Richmond. Va., 1893),
pp. -I-^ 51-
Buck, Dudley : Music to Lanier's Centennial Cantata.
New York : G. Schirmer, 1876.
Buck, Dudley: Sunset, music to Lanier's Evening
Song. New York : G. Schirmer, 1877.
Buckham,J. : An Account of the Hopkins Memorial Meet-
ing of February 3, 18S8, Literary ll/or Id (Boston) 19.
56-57, February 18, 1888,
Burton, R. E. : An Account of the Hopkins Memorial
Meeting of February 2, 1888, The C'itic (New York),
9. 63-64, February 11, 1888; also in Oilman's Memo-
rial of Sidney Lanier, pp. 47-50.
Burton, Richard E. : Lamer Bibliography, in Oilman's
Memorial of Sidney Lanier (Baltimore, 1888), pp. 51-
56.
Calvbrt, G. H. : The Golden Age, June 12, 1875.
Carmichael, Mary: A May Song, music to Lanier's
Song for the Jacquerie. London : Stanley, Lucas,
Weber & Co., 1889.
Ckntury Magazine (New York) : i. 475, January, 1882 :
Boy's Mabinogion.
Chamubrlain, D. H. : The New Etiglandcr (New
Haven, Conn.) 44. 227-238, March, 1885.
Coleman, C. W., Jr. : Homes of Some Southern Authors
IV., The Chautauquan (Meadville, Pa.) 8. 343-344.
Critic, Thk (New York) : 3. 3-4, January 3, 1885 : I'oems .-
9. 97, February 28, 1888 : Professor J. H. Gilmore's
I^ecture on Lanier; 9. 224, May 5, 1888; 9. 245,
May 19, 1888 ; 15. 130, March 7, 1891 ; 16. 197,
October 17, 1891 : Poems (ed. of 1891) ; 20. 95,
August 5, 1893: Professor W. D. McClintock's Lecture
OH Lanier.
•^mtm
9a
Bibliography
i
CuMMiNGS, Miss M. A. : Catholic Mirror (Baltimore),
May 7, 1892.
Dewey, T. E. : Address before the Kansas Academy of
Language and Literature^ at Baker University, Bald-
win, April 7, 1892, 34 pp.
Dial, The (Chicago) : 2. 182-3, December, 1881 : Boy's
Mabinogion ; 3. 176, December, 1882 : Boy's Percy ;
4. 40, June, 1883.
FiSKE, John : see Wilson, J. G.
Gatbs, M. E. : Sidney Lanier's Moral Earnestness, The
Critic 3. 227, May 9, 1885, as quoted from the Rut-
gers College Targum.
Gates, M. E. : Presbyterian Review (New York), 8.
669-701, October, 1887 ; also in pamphlet form ; sum-
marized in Sladen's Younger American Poets (pp.
635-644).
Gatbs, M. E. : On the Ethical Influence of Lanier, in
Oilman's Memorial, pp. 31-36.
GiLUKK, R. W. : Letter to President Oilman, in latter's
Memorial, pp. 27-29.
GiLMAN, D. C: Our Continent (Chicago). February, 1882.
GiLMAN, D. C. (ed.) : .-/ Memorial of Sidney Lanier
(Baltimore, 1888), 52 pp.
GiLMAN, D. C. : Letter at the Unveiling- of a Bust of the
Poet at Macon, Ga.^ October 17, 1890, in The Atlanta
{Ga) Constitution of October 19, 1890.
Gosse, Edmund: Questions at Issue, London, 1893, pp.
78-81.
Han KINS, V. W. : Southern Bivouac (Louisville, Ky.),
2. 760-61, May, 1887.
Harper's Magazine (New York) : 54. 617, March, 1877:
Poems (1877 ed. ); 60. ^74. February, 1880: Boy's
Froissart : 61. 796-97, October, 1880: Science of Eng-
lish Verse; 62. 315, January, 1881 : Bofs King Ar-
thur ; 64, 316, January, 1882 : Boy's Mabinogion ; 66.
316, January, 1883 ; Boy's Percy ; 67. 798-99, October,
1883 : The English Novel,
Harris. Joel Chandler: The Atlanta {Ga,) Consti-
tution of September 12, i88l.
Harris, J. C. : Letter at Unveiling of a Bust of the Poet
at Macon, Ga., October 17, 1890, The Atlanta (Ga.)
Constitution of October 19, 1890.
Hawthorne (J.) anp Lbmmon (L.) : American Liter-
ature, Boston, 1S93, pp. orjd-'jT.
Hayne, Paul H. : A Poet's Letters to a Friend, The Crit-
ic 5. 77-78, 89-90, February 13, 20, 1886.
Higginson, T. W. : The Ch<7utau<juan (Meadville, Pa.)
7. 416-418, April, 1887.
iMli
Bibliography
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Itimore),
^demy of
ty, Bald-
i: Boys
s Percy ;
less. The
the Rut-
fork), 8.
m ; sum-
octs (pp.
anier, in
n latter's
ary, 1882.
V Lanier
us 1 0/ the
e Atlanta
1893. pp.
Ic, Ky.),
•ch, 1877 ;
lo: Boy's
e of Eng-
King Ar-
ygion ; 66.
October,
.) Consti-
f the Poet
•nta (Ga.)
can Liter-
The Crit-
ville, Pa.)
HiGGlNSON, T. W. : Women and Men, Boston, 1888,
chap. 58.
Hill, Mrs. K. : Marie, music to Lanier's Song for the
yacquerie, Riga, P. Neldner, 1891.
Hill. W. B. : AMress in Presenting Bust of the Poet to
City of Macon, Ga,, The Atlanta {Ga.) Constitution o{
October 19, 1890.
HUBNBR, Chas. W. : The American, Atlanta, Ga., No-
vember 29, 1888.
Kknt, C. W. : A Study of Lanier' s Poems, in Publications
of the Modern Language Association (Baltimore) 7 : 2.
33-63. April-June, 1892.
Kirk, J. F. : A Supplement to Allibone's Dictionary of
English Literature (Philadelphia), 1891, vol, ii. , 973,
has a brief sketch of Lanier.
KiRKUS, Wm. : American Literary Churchman, October,
1881.
Lanikr, Charles : Letter at Unveiling of Poet' s Bust at
Macon,, Ga., October 17, 1890, The Atlanta {Ga.) Con-
stitution of October 19, 1890.
Lanikr, Clifford: Letter at Unveiling of Poet's Bust
at Macon, Ga., October 17, 1890, Ihe Atlanta {Ga.)
Constitutioft of October 19, 1890,
LawrbiNCK, W. M.: see under V.
Lkmmon. L. : see Hawthorne.
LiNi), W. Murdoch : Sidney Lanier's Library, The
Daily News (Baltimore). July 24, 1892.
Link, S. A. ; New England Magazine (Boston) ic. 14-19,
March, 1894.
Literary World, The (Boston) : 6. 116, January,
1876: Florida, 7, 103, December, 1876: Poems {\.v^-
pincott ed.) ; 11. 227, July 3, 1880: Science of English
Verse; ii. 441, December 4. 1880: Boys King Ar-
thur ; 12. 215, June 18, 1881 : Florida ; 12. 449, De-
cember 3, 1881 : Boy's Mabinogion ; 14. 204-205, June
30, 1883 : English Novel ; 16. 40-41, February 7, 1885 :
Poems : 16. 350-352, April 10, 1885 : Poems,
LovvKLL, James Russell: Letter to President Gilman
in 'atter's Memorial, p. 25.
Macmrchan, a. : The Varsity (Toronto), March 3, 1888.
Marble, E. : Cottage Hearth (Boston), 4. 141-142, June,
1877.
Morris. H. S. : The Poetry of S. /,., The American
(Philadelphia), No. 393, pp. 284-285, February 18,
1888.
Nation, The (New York) : 31. 310-311, October 28,
1880 : Science of English Verse ; 2,3- 216, September
■ *i#&^<V.
41-1
94
Bibliography
If
IS, 1881 ; 33 994, November 17, 1881 ; 35. 468, No-
vember 30, 1882: Boy's Percy ; 37. 38, July 12, 1883:
English Novel ; 39. 528, December 18, 1884: Poems;
46. 51-52, February 9, 1888 ; 53. 297, October 15,
1891 : Poems (1891 ed).
Newkll, a. C. : Lanier's Life at Oglethorpe College^ The
Atlanta (^Ga.) Constitution of February 27, 1894.
Nkw Englandkr (New Haven, Conn.): 39. 566, July,
1880: Science of English Verse.
Pknn, a. : S. L. on the English Novel, Century Magazine,
5- 957-958. April, 1884.
Pitts, W. A. : Wojfonl College Journal (Spartanburg, S.
C.) 4- 307 312, June, 1893.
POKT-LORK (Philacfelphia) : 2. 303, 1890 ; 3. 369, 1891.
Putnam, S. A. Brock : The Poetry of America^ New
York, 1894, has a short Sketch of Lanier,
Richardson. Charles F. : American Literature (1607-
1885), 2 vols., New York, 1889-1891 ; vol. 2. '2,2,^-'2,
242, 398.
Roberts. Chas. G. D. : St. John (iV. D.) Globe, April
25, 1885.
Roberts, Chas. G. D. (ed.) : Poems of Wild Life, Lon-
don, 1888, has a short sketch of Lanier.
Roberts, C. G. D. : Letter at Unveiling of Poet's Bust
at Macon, Ga., October 17, 1890, The Atlanta {Ga.)
Constitution of October 19, 1890.
Rutherford, Mildred : American Authors, Atlanta,
Ga., 1894, pp. 368-375.
Scott, W, J. : Quarterly Review of M. E. Church, South
(Nashville), New Series, 5. 157-171, October, 1888.
Scribner's Monthly (New York) : 20. 473-4, July,
1880 : Science of English Verse ; 21. 322, December,
i88o : Boy's King Arthur.
Semi'LK, Patty B. : Southern Bivouac (Louisville) 2.
661-7, April, 1887.
Sladen, Douglas : Some Younger American Poets /,
The Independent (New York) 42. 806, June 12, 1890.
Sladen, Douglas : Younger American Poets, New
York, 1891, pp. xxvi-xxviii, 635-655: a slightly ex-
panded form of the preceding. See, too, Gates and
Turnbull.
Sladen, Douglas: The American Rossetti, Literary
World (London), pp. 378-9, November 17, 1893.
Smyth, A. H. : Atnerican Literature, Philadelphia, 1889,
p. 132.
Spann, Minnie: Sidney Lanier's Youth, S. L.'s Man-
hood, The Indipeudent (New York) 46. 800, 821-2, June
21, 28, 1894.
IP'^
v
Bibliography
95
Spectator, The (London): 65. 828-9, December 6,
1890.
Stedman, E. C. : Letter to President Gilman, pp. 12-14
of Browne's Memorial Address.
Strdman, E. C. : The Critic (New York), i. 298, 1881
Stkdman, E. C. : Poets of America, Boston, 1885, pp
449-451.
Stedman, E. C. : Letter to President Gilman in latter's
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Stedman (E. C.) and Hutchinson (Ellbn M.): Li-
brary of American Literature (New York. 1891),
vol. xi., 542, gives brief sketches of Sidney and Clif-
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Stoddard, F. H. : Reviciv of The English Novel, New
Englander (New Haven, Conn.) 43. 97-104, January,
1884.
Tabb, J. B. : Sidney Lanier's Last Lines, The Atlanta,
(Ga.) Constitution of October 19, 1890.
Tait, John R. : Lippincott's Magazine (Phila.) 40. 723-
724, November, 1887.
Taylor, Bayard : The Tribune (New York), 1876.
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Thayer, W. R. : The Independent (New York), 1883;
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1886 : Stedman' s Poets of America.
Thayer, W. R. : The American (Phila.) December 20
1884; February 18, 1888.
Thayer, W. R. (ed.) : Letters of Sidney Lanier [to Mr.
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TOLMAN, A. H. : Lanier's Science of English Verse, in
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Travelers' Record, The (Hartford, Conn.): Oc-
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Turnbull, Mrs. Lawrknce : The Catholic Man : A
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whom the author was intimately acquainted and to
whom she was devoted.
Turnbull, Francese L. (=Mrs. Lawrence T.) : Sid-
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Urban, Francis : Music to Lanier's'^ Ballad of Trees
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*,^:M'-