An American poet; born at Macon, Ga., Feb. 3, 1842; died at Lynn, N. C., Sept. 7, 1881. He served in the Confederate Army as a private soldier; after the war studied law, and for a while practiced it at Macon; but abandoned that profession and devoted himself to music and poetry. From 1879 till his death he was lecturer on English literature in Johns Hopkins University. The poem “Corn,” one of his earliest pieces (1874), and “Clover,” “The Bee,” “The Dove, “etc., show insight into nature. His poetic works were collected and published (1884) after his death. He wrote also several works in prose, mostly pertaining to literary criticism and to mediæval history: among the former are: “The Science of English Verse’ (1880); “The English Novel and the Principles of its Development” (1883). He edited or compiled “The Boy’s Froissart” (1878); “The Boy’s King Arthur” (1880); “The Boy’s Percy” (1882).

Personal

  I write hurriedly, finding much correspondence awaiting me here, so can only repeat how much joy the evidence of a new true poet always gives me,—such a poet as I believe you to be. I am heartily glad to welcome you to the fellowship of authors, so far as I may dare to represent it; but, knowing the others, I venture to speak in their names also. When we meet, I hope to be able to show you, more satisfactorily than by these written words, the genuiness of the interest which each author always feels in all others; and perhaps I may be also able to extend your own acquaintance among those whom you have a right to know.

  For six months past, a ghastly fever has been taking possession of me every day about 12 M., and holding my head under the surface of indescribable distress for the next twenty hours, subsiding only enough each morning to let me get on my working-harness, but never intermitting. A number of tests show it to be not the hectic, so well known in consumption, and to this day it has baffled all the skill I could find in N. York, Philadelphia and here. I have myself been disposed to think it arose wholly from the bitterness of having to spend my time in making academic lectures and boy’s books—pot-boilers—all when a thousand songs are singing in my heart, that will certainly kill me, if I do not utter them soon. But I don’t think this diagnosis has found favor with my practical physicians; and meanwhile, I work day after day in such suffering as is piteous to see. I hope this does not sound like a Jeremiad. I mention these matters only in the strong rebellion against what I fear might be your thought—namely, forgetfulness of you—if you did not know the causes which keep me from sending you more frequent messages.

	Life’s fragile bonds united
	By fine-spun webs of breath,
	Scarce quivered ’neath the mystic stroke—
	The unsheathed sword of Death!
	O poet, preen thy pinions!
	Soar through Faith’s radiant pass;
	The mists of pain fade from thy soul,
	Like frost-films from a glass!
	Thy worn, white body slumbers,
	Dreamless in Death’s dark keep:—
	The drawbridge crossed, thy spirit feels
	No lethargy of sleep….
	O Music, mother of soft sounds,
	Let not thy tongue be mute!
	For he, through silver lips, evoked
	The language of the flute.
	And nature, though her voice is dumb,
	Through dew-draped blades of corn,
	Shall shed, ’mid Southern fields of grain,
	Memorial tears at morn.

  In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees. No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid of the higher language of Music to inspire others with that sense of beauty in which he constantly dwelt. “His conception of music was not reached by an analytic study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman’s reason; he felt it so, because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning.” His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned—for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and shifts of the mere technical scholarship.

  His earliest passion was for music. As a child he learned to play, almost without instruction, on every kind of instrument he could find; and while yet a boy he played the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar, and banjo, especially devoting himself to the flute in deference to his father, who feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin. For it was the violin-voice, that above all others commanded his soul. He has related that during his college days it would sometimes so exalt him in rapture, that presently he would sink from his solitary music-worship into a deep trance, thence to awake alone, on the floor of his room, sorely shaken in nerve. In after years more than one listener remarked the strange violin effects which he conquered from the flute. His devotion to music rather alarmed than pleased his friends, and while it was here that he first discovered that he possessed decided genius, he for some time shared that early notion of his parents, that it was an unworthy pursuit, and he rather repressed his taste. He did not then know by what inheritance it had come to him, nor how worthy is the art.

  He gloried in antiquarian lore and antiquarian literature. Hardly “Old Monkbarns” himself could have pored over a black-letter volume with greater enthusiasm. Especially he loved the tales of chivalry, and thus, when the opportunity came, was fully equipped as an interpreter of Froissart and “King Arthur” for the benefit of our younger generation of students. With the great Elizabethans Lanier was equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakspeare, he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly of Shakspeare’s mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier’s productions we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves more effectively—not only in the illustrations, but through the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style—than in some of his familiar epistles.

  He was so truly a beauty lover, so responsive to every upward influence, that what he admired in those of whom he wrote soon became a living part of his own character, his large generosities in admiration returning quickly to crown him. For this reason the tersest and most comprehensive characterisation of our poet, although it was an unconscious one, is to be drawn from his own words, which continually recur to me when I would make him known to others.

  From childhood the others of us felt an impression of his distinction: this may be a reflection from a light now shining, but I do not think so. It was a distinct feeling that here was not only an elder but an original personality…. His imperishable work is done in seven years. He planned enough, in addition to that which he wrought, to require seventeen or twenty-seven. As she still lives, it may not be delicate to more than speak of her, who from the trothplight of 1867 has been a perfect help-meet, and who since the dark September day of 1881, when he died, has kept alight the sacred flame upon the hearth-stone of his memory: four sons have been nurtured and educated in the best tradition of his teaching and of his name,—a fourfold chaplet worthy of any woman’s wearing.

  Here is one whose beauty of personality is no whit inferior to the loftiness and worth of his message. He was a spotless, sunny-souled, hard-working, divinely gifted man, who had exalted ideas both of art and of life…. The story of his personality and work, though pathetic, is one of the most interesting and inspiring in the biographical annals of men of letters.

	The Southwind brought a voice; was it of bird?
	Or faint-blown reed? or string that quivered long?
	A haunting voice that woke into a song
	Sweet as a child’s low laugh, or lover’s word.
	We listened idly till it grew and stirred
	With throbbing chords of joy, of love, of wrong;
	A mighty music, resonant and strong;
	Our hearts beat higher for that voice far-heard.
	The Southwind brought a shadow, purple-dim,
	It swept across the warm smile of the sun;
	A sudden shiver passed on field and wave;
	The grasses grieved along the river’s brim.
	We knew the voice was silent, the song done;
	We knew the shadow smote across a grave.

  Lanier fought a battle with death (technically, consumption) to which Keats’s classic consumption was child’s play. It is so easy to fight anything, even consumption, if you have nothing else to do; but if you have a home to keep going as well, and only a pen to keep it going with—well, you look upon John Keats as one of the sybarites of immortality. Fortunately, Lanier had a flute, too, and thereby hangs much of his history, as well as the explanation of his temperament and gift.

General

  Is a spirited story of Southern life, [“Tiger Lillies”] beginning just before the war, and closing with the war. The earlier scenes are among the mountains of Tennessee; later shifting with the Southern army to Virginia; and having an echo or two of European adventure. The author disclaims making the bloody sensational his style; and yet we have a little murder and some pretty melodramatic touches…. The story is entertaining, and the style lively. The latter is paragraphical and exclamationary; and in a remote way—in its mingling pedantry and raillery, grotesquely together sometimes—it reminds the reader, remotely and just a little, of the “Sketch-Book of Meister Karl.” Italian, French and German words and phrases abound throughout the work.

  Because I believe that Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide this slight memorial…. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of his gifts was their complete symmetry. It is hard to tell what register of perception, or sensibility or wit, or will was lacking. The constructive and the critical faculties, the imaginative and the practical, balanced each other. His wit and humour played upon the soberer background of his more recognized qualities…. But how short was his span, and how slender his opportunity! From the time he was of age he waged a constant, courageous, hopeless fight against adverse circumstance for room to live and write. Much very dear, and sweet, and most sympathetic helpfulness he met in the city of his adoption, and from friends elsewhere, but he could not command the time and leisure which might have lengthened his life and given him opportunity to write the music and the verse with which his soul was teeming. Yet short as was his literary life, and hindered though it were, its fruits will fill a large space in the garnering of the poetic art of our country.

  It is sad to think of the fate of this supremely-striving, richly-gifted man; sad that such forces as his should have been so little conserved—that an age so rich in the material things for the want of which he perished, should be so blindly prodigal of that in which it is so beggarly poor, genius. Saddest of all is it to think of what he might have done, and did not do. These poems—fragments finished at rare intervals as strength and opportunity conspired—beautiful as many of them are, show unmistakably that they do not represent their author’s highest ideals or best capacity. They are rather the preliminary trying of the strings and testing of the notes of the poetic orchestra whose full harmony he never found opportunity to sound. Yet how easily might that opportunity, for which his whole life was spent in striving, have been afforded him. If in his brief career there is so rich a gain to American letters, how great may be the loss that he died so soon.

  To an age assailed by the dangerous doctrines of the fleshy school in poetry, and by that unhealthy “æstheticism” and that debauching “realism” which see in vice and uncleanness only new fields for the artist’s powers of description, and no call for the artist’s divine powers of denunciation—to save young men into whose ears is dinned the maxim, “art for art’s sake only,” “a moral purpose ruins art,” Lanier came, noble-souled as Milton in youthful consciousness of power, yet humble before the august conception of a moral purity higher than he could hope to utter or attain, discerning with the true poet’s insight the “beauty of holiness” and the “holiness of beauty.” Had he lived and died in England, how he would have been embalmed in living odes, his sepulchre how perpetually draped with insignia of national appreciation! He is ours. He was an American to the centre of his great, loving heart. Shall we cherish his memory any the less lovingly because his works are the first-fruits of a reunited people—the richest contribution to our national fame in letters yet made by our brothers of the South?

	That I of him should have this thing to say,
	Lads, he will pipe no more.
	And who, forsooth, could pipe as sweet as he?
	Oh, lads, lads, lads, no more, no more!
	The whole long year from white May to white May
	Of his true music now will emptied be.
	Oh, lads, lads, lads! At sunset as we lay,
	Deep in the river rushes, he and we,
	Such daring notes would come
	From that brown reed of his, till yellow day
	Died out the west we would not but keep dumb.

  Lanier’s death was a loss to American literature, relatively almost equal to that which England sustained in the death of Keats. With a matchless gift of cadence, intensest humanity and sincerity, rich creative imagination, and intellectual powers of the highest order, he was advancing, I believe, to the chief place in American song, when death stayed him. As it is, he will always be among poets a stimulating force.

  Inborn delicacy of hearing and long training fitted Lanier for the task of investigating English verse. Quietly disregarding the learned rubbish that had accumulated, he studied our verse as a set of present phenomena of the world of sound. He listened and listened to the very thing itself, the sound-groups concerning which he wished to learn. He gathered his facts carefully, he verified and arranged them, until the great laws which underlie the phenomena stood out clear and unmistakable. These laws he then set forth in language which is as severely accurate as if he had never penned a line of poetry, as if all flights of imagination were utterly distasteful to him.

  His were a larger mind and a stronger hand than Timrod’s or even Hayne’s, yet his was a fatal fault: he lacked that spontaneity which is the chief pleasure in the verse of Hayne and Timrod. In the midst of the products of a genius that certainly at times seemed large, and that was bold to the extent of eccentricity, are the too-conspicuous signs of mere intellectual experiment and metrical or verbal extravaganza. Lanier theorizes in verse; the practice-hand seeks to strike chords that can only come from the impassioned and self-forgetful singer of nature and the soul. His analytical and exhaustive musical studies—applied to literature in “The Science of English Verse”—greatly harmed his creative work.

  What are really the characteristics of this amazing and unparalleled poetry of Lanier? Reading it again, and with every possible inclination to be pleased, I find a painful effort, a strain and rage, the most prominent qualities in everything he wrote. Never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza, always forcing the note, always concealing his barrenness and tameness by grotesque violence of image and preposterous storm of sound, Lanier appears to me to be as conclusively not a poet of genius as any ambitious man who ever lived, labored, and failed.

  Lanier was indubitably a lyrical poet of quite exceptional faculty, though affectation and strained effect spoilt much of his verse; but here we have to do with him simply as a sonneteer. Why he wrote sonnets at all is a mystery, for he had no inevitable bias that way; on the contrary, his mannerisms became more and more obvious and distracting. Yet his sonnets have many admirers, and undoubtedly even when most obviously “manipulated” have still a certain quality of saving grace. For this reason I have represented him by several examples, though personally I admit that their lack of rhythmic strength is a vital drawback to enjoyment. “The Harlequin Dreams,” the series entitled “In Absence,” and the two comprised in “Acknowledgment,” are his best; in the latter there is an exuberance, an exaggeration of address which is strongly suggestive of the diction of the lesser Elizabethans. “Laus Mariae” is accepted by many as his best sonnet. Yet, interesting as it is in some respects, one cannot but wonder at the critical blindness of those who called Lanier the American Keats.

  Sidney Lanier endeavored to express the soul of music in words, and prosecuted the study of poetic technique with all the zeal and more than the success of Poe.

  It is natural to mention first the name of Sidney Lanier, for his personality, if it be true that for a man to be a great poet he must also be a great personality. In Lanier, the beautiful character, the high, unrelaxed purpose shine out. In his work the conscientious workman and the artist revelling in the exercise of his art are never lost. Indeed sometimes, as in that poem of “Sunrise,” written under the same sad circumstances as Raphael’s “Transfiguration” was painted, he steps from conscientious to conscious, artistic to artificial. But his contribution to American poetry, and indeed to all poetry, was great. For he asked himself what was the true Ars Poetica, and he endeavoured to write in accordance with the answer evolved. He seems to me parallel to Dante Rossetti. Each cherished not only poetry, but a sister art. And as Rossetti’s poems betray the painter, Lanier’s betray the musician. Each had a pathetic loftiness of purpose. Each had original ideas as to form. Each felt the hand of death. Each had a singularly ennobling and vivifying effect on his fellows. Each was the founder of a school, some of whom anatomise, and some of whom imitate his art…. Lanier differs from the other dead poets included in this book in that he was not only a poet but the founder of a school of poetry.

  Sidney Lanier, in nervous crises, would seem to hear rich music. It was an inherited gift. Thus equipped with rhythmical sense beyond that of other poets, he turned to poetry as to the supreme art. Now, the finer and more complex the gift, the longer exercise is needful for its full mastery. He strove to make poetry do what painting has done better, and to make it do what only music hitherto has done. If he could have lived three lives, he would have adjusted the relations of these arts as far as possible to his one satisfaction. I regard his work, striking as it is, as merely tentative from his own point of view. It was as if a discoverer should sail far enough to meet the floating rockweed, the strayed birds, the changed skies, that betoken land ahead; should even catch a breath of fragrance wafted from outlying isles, and then find his bark sinking in the waves before he could have sight of the promised continent.

	The dewdrop holds the heaven above,
	Wherein a lark, unseen,
	Outpours a rhapsody of love
	That fills the space between.
	My heart a dewdrop is, and thou,
	Dawn-spirit, far away,
	Fillest the void between us now
	With an immortal lay.

  Among the American poets of the younger generation who have passed away during the last thirty years, no one deserves higher encomium than Lanier…. There is something about the verse of Lanier—defective as his performance is,—for it must be acknowledged that he was not always equal in clearness and literary judgment,—that inspires respect from every lover of genius. Even where he was not perfect, he showed, as in “Corn,” that he had grasped firmly the distinction in poetics between the small and the great. Besides this rare attainment, or gift, whichever it was, Lanier, even in early work, had reached a power of imagination that may be compared not unfavorably with that of Longfellow between his thirty-third and thirty-seventh years; in the minor matters of verbal imagination and onomatopœia Lanier was at times greatly Longfellow’s superior. Lanier’s merits as a poet are numerous and considerable. A large nature like his could not express itself trivially or in narrow limits. He has done well in the treatment of love, philosophy, mysticism, socialism, in the ballad, and technically in melody and harmony of rhythm.

  Sidney Lanier, then, though he reminds us here and there of Emerson, of Browning, and of Swinburne, essayed to give artistic form to his own thoughts and feelings, to sing his own song. But either sufficient time was not allowed, or fortune did not permit him to arrive at that individuality by which the great poets are instantly recognized. Limited, then, as I believe he is, in regard to simplicity, to spontaneity, to individuality, to passion, and to perfection, he cannot be called “indisputably a great poet,” though he does possess decided originality and a real poetic endowment.

  A poet of rare promise, whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to coordinate them. His “Science of English Verse,” 1880, was a most suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that theory of their relation which he was working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, like “The Mocking Bird” and the “Song of the Chattahoochee,” are the most characteristically southern poetry that has been written in America.

  In technique he was akin to Tennyson; in love of beauty and lyric sweetness, to Keats and Shelley; in love of nature, to Wordsworth; and in spirituality, to Ruskin, the gist of whose teaching is that we are souls temporarily having bodies; to Milton, “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 remembrance.

  May we not say of Burns’s Songs, as did Carlyle in his day, “the best that Britain has yet produced?” And yet, I would like to commend to the reader, just here, a modern poet of our land, who, for heart-music and fine poetic feeling is well-nigh unmatched.

  Lanier’s theory of verse is in accord with Poe’s. Beauty and music are poetry’s all in all.

“Music is Love in search of a word,”

and lyricism is hardly more articulate. But Lanier longed for the completest intellectual equipment for his work. Poe, he said, “did not know enough.” The Baltimore flute-player was a born musician, walking in an enveloping cloud of harmonies, having only to turn aside from the noises of the world and listen to become aware of an unceasing “holy song.” He purposed the creation of great symphonies written in a new musical notation as eagerly as he planned for the creation of great poems framed in accordance with new laws of verse. What with his intricate endeavor to bring his two arts into close technical relation, and his thirst to compass all knowledge and acquire all skill, he put away the day of actual performance even farther than the struggle for bread had already thrust it. The most liberal span of life would have been too short for Sidney Lanier, and the life that he wrested from disease and death was but a splendid fragment. Yet his poems as they stand, in their swift surprises of beauty, their secrets of sweet sound, their “Faith that smiles immortally,” rank close upon the best achievements of American song.

  Sixteen years have elapsed since Lanier’s taking-off; and he is now seen more clearly every day to be the most important native singer the Southern United States has produced, and one of the most distinctive and lovely of American singers wherever born. Enthusiastic admirers and followers he has always attracted to him; now the general opinion begins to swing round to what seemed to many, a little time ago, the extravagant encomium of partiality and prejudice…. Had Lanier lived longer, had he had a freer opportunity, doubtless his literary bequest would have been richer and more completely expressive of himself. But as it is, in quality and in accomplishment Sidney Lanier takes his place as an American poet of distinction. He is one of those rare illustrations of the union, in a son of genius, of high character and artistic production in harmony therewith; a spectacle feeding the heart with tender thoughts and pure ideals:—

	“His song was only living aloud,
	His work, a singing with his hand.”

  It was into his “Science of English Verse” that he was to pour his whole enthusiasm, and it was this, in connection with his own poems, that was to prove his monument. How large its circulation has been, I do not know; but the condition of the copy before me—belonging to Harvard College Library—is a sufficient proof that it has had and still holds a powerful attraction for young students. By the record of dates at the end of the copy, I find that it was taken out once in 1880, five times in 1881, twice in 1882, four times in 1883, seven times in 1884, six times in 1885, and nineteen times in 1886, being afterwards put upon the list of books to be kept only a fortnight, and being out, the librarian tells me, literally all the time. Any author might be proud to find his book so appreciated by students six years after its first appearance. This is no place for analyzing its theory, even were my technical knowledge of music sufficient to do it justice. To me it seems ingenious, suggestive, and overstrained, but it is easy to believe that to one who takes it on that middle ground where Lanier dwelt, half way between verse and music, it might seem conclusive and even become a textbook in art.

  These letters not only admit us into the fellowship of a poet, but they also disclose to us a man whose life was, in Milton’s phrase, “a true poem.” Here is nothing to extenuate, nothing to blot: the poet and the man are one. My purpose in editing has, accordingly, been to retain whatever reveals aught, however slight, of the man, in order that the portrait of Lanier’s personality, unconsciously drawn by himself, should be as complete as possible; and what ever does not refer to this will at least illustrate the conditions by which an embodied Ideal, a Poet, so recently found himself beset in this world of ours. I know not where to look for a series of letters which, in bulk equally small, relate so humanly and beautifully the story of so precious a life.

  Is second only to Poe among Southern poets. His versification sometimes falls into excessive intricacy and mere caprice, and his thought occasionally fades away into inarticulate dreamery. But these errors are only the defects of his virtues. A man of the finest sensitiveness without effeminacy, and a skilled musician, he has produced dreamy, floating, mist-like, musical effects that are new in English verse; and his feeling for nature, especially for wood and marsh life as seen in parts of the South, is thoroughly modern in its union of exact observation with imaginative subtlety. Lanier had also a keen intellect, as appears from his original and suggestive books on versification and the novel. Had he lived to develop his gifts fully, he might have come to be numbered with the foremost American poets; as it is he stands only a little lower and in a secure place of his own.

  There are two geniuses who hover over the charming city of Baltimore, slumbering all rosy red beneath what is almost a Southern sun: the one more celebrated among foreigners than in his own country, the other almost absolutely unknown in Europe. Their names: Edgar Allan Poe and Sidney Lanier, the Ahriman and the Ormuzd of the place; the demon of perversity and the angel of light; the former carried away by morbid passions that conducted him to an ignominious end, the latter faithful to the purest ideal in his life as in his work; both marked by fate for the victims of a frightful poverty; both doomed to die young, at almost the same age, after having suffered from a hopeless malady. In different degrees, with their contrasts and analogies, these two poets are the glory of the South, which cannot boast of a literature so rich as the North…. Sidney Lanier attains often to the height of the great American poets, and, like Walt Whitman, he is much more the poet in the absolute sense of vision, divination, and invention, than are some stars which are reputed to be of first rank. The difference is that their genius burned with a fixed and unrestrained brilliance, while his gave only intermittent light. At the moment when he flies highest, one might say, an arrow suddenly arrests his movement and causes him to fall wounded. It is, indeed, just like the disease which attacked him. One knows what a struggle it fought against the power of his spirit, and nothing is so pathetic as this fall of Icarus. But there remains a diamond shower of beautiful verses, of images grandiose and gracious, of happy expressions which compose the most exquisite of anthologies.

  An all too-curtailed series of “Hymns of the Marshes,” which Lanier had intended to make one big ambitious poem. There are four “hymns” in all, but only two are of real importance, namely, “Sunrise” and the “Marshes of Glynn.” In fact, had he written all his other poems, and missed writing these (striking, suggestive, and fine-lined as those other poems often are), he could hardly have been said to succeed in his high poetic ambition—as by those two poems he must be allowed to succeed. In the other poems you see many of the qualities, perhaps all the qualities, which strike you in the “Hymns”—the impassioned observation of nature, the Donne-like “metaphysical” fancy, the religious and somewhat mystic elevation of feeling, expressed often in terms of a deep imaginative understanding of modern scientific conceptions; in fact, you find all save the important quality of that ecstasy which in the “Hymns” fuses all into one splendid flame of adoration upon the altar of the visible universe. The ecstasy of modern man as he stands and beholds the sunrise or the coming of the stars, or any such superb, elemental glory, has, perhaps, never been so keenly translated into verse.

  His rare and beautiful temperament, which breathed itself out in melodious lines, gives him a link in the eclectic chain of American poets; and the recent bloom of French song, spanning the Atlantic with its lotus tendril to seek nurture in a foreign soil, has, in its rich redolence, the fleeting perfume of both Poe and Lanier. Lanier’s claim as an American poet is certainly a just one; and our failure to recognize it speaks loudly either for our lack of poetic appreciation or our failure to give him his true proportion in every study of American literature…. To insist upon the study of Lanier as an American poet might leave one open to the charge of literary chauvinism, which, I fancy, might become as deadly a sin as its political fellow-sprite; and yet I think a strong plea should be made for the patronage and study of our native poets, whose standards of taste, in mood and form, have been made through the masters. Longfellow, Aldrich, Poe and Lanier are qualified eminently for this purpose. Through the rare grace and scope of their technique and the beauty and truth of their expressed thought they are entitled to the name of poet, whether its definition be comprehensive or limited.

  A phenomenon like Lanier is a grateful indication that the olden vigor and multiform artistic energy of the race are still potentially existent and may display that titanic force in diverse spheres which marked the spacious times of great Elizabeth, as well as the preceding era which saw the matured splendor of the Italian Renaissance. If Lanier had lived under more genial auspices—if his entire life had not been an unresting struggle against the pillar of fire in the form of war and the pillar of cloud as coming over him in the guise of poverty he might have achieved an eminence that would have placed him, ranging with his peers, among the supreme masters in the history of musical interpretation.

  No life in our annals gives so profound an impression of rare genius never adequately revealed. There is relatively little, even in Lanier’s small volume of verse, which can be of general interest. Perhaps such music as that of “Chattahoochee,” compared with Tennyson’s brook, will indicate that Lanier, had he lived, might have rivaled Swinburne in the harmonic and rhythmic effects of verse. “The Marshes of Glynn,” we are told, can never be forgotten by a reader who knows also the actual sounds and lights of a Southern swamp. “How Love sought for Hell” is probably the clearest utterance of his lofty ethical convictions. He felt that he had, waiting for utterance, the noble truths which can alone justify the most melodious forms.