Seven Pines, Malvern Hill, and others. The following year his younger brother, Clifford, joined him, and both served as privates (though promotion was offered to each at different times, and to Sidney Lanier three times), in order not to be separated from each other. They were transferred to the Signal Service in 1862, and in 1863 their company was mounted and served in Virginia and North Carolina. Finally they were appointed signal officers on blockade-runners, and thus necessarily separated. Sidney Lanier was captured, with his vessel, and imprisoned for five months at Point Lookout. In February, 1865, he was released, and returned home to Georgia on foot, with his flute, from which he had never been separated. His strength was seriously impaired, and though he recovered from a dangerous illness of six weeks, the beginning of consumption, from which his mother had just died, was already upon him. The rest of his life was a struggle against the disease.

He was still only twenty-three years old, and had not found his vocation in life, though strong musical and literary ambitions were already awake in him. But he was led to think that music was not a serious career, not worth devoting his life to. While working as clerk in a hotel, he took up and completed in three weeks of April, 1867, his novel, Tiger Lilies (begun at Burwell's Bay in 1863, and continued in 1865), and in May took the story to New York to be published. It is a picture of the war, hastily drawn, and of course somewhat crude. It expresses strongly, however, the horror of war which had constantly grown in him during the progress of that struggle which he would not abandon until it was ended. He describes war as that strange, terrible flower of which the most wonderful specimen yet produced was grown by two wealthy planters of North America.' It is supposed by some,' he goes on (the passage is quoted in Dr. Ward's Memorial), that the seed of this American specimen (now dead) yet remains in the land; 'but as for this author (who, with many friends, suffered from the unhealthy odors of the plant), he could find it in his heart to wish fervently that this seed, if there be verily any, might perish in the germ, utterly out of sight and life and memory, and out of the remote hope of resurrection, forever and ever, no matter in whose granary they are cherished!' The novel was published, but had little success. He returned to the South, and taught school for a year. In 1867 he was married to Miss Mary Day, of Macon. For five years following, he studied and practised law with his father.

During this time he had written but little in verse, yet some of that little was of exquisite quality. The first poems we have are those of 1865, 'The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson' and 'The Tournament,' the second of which he used with some alterations in his Psalm of the West,' eleven years later. The lyric Night and Day' belongs to 1866, and in 1868 the Jacquerie' was planned and partly written. In 1868 he wrote also a lyric, 'Life and Song,' the last two lines of which have been often quoted in speaking of his life and of the poetry which was as yet hardly begun :

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

There was little written in the following years, until 1874, except three dialect poems of Georgia life.

He could not remain devoted to the law, however. He felt more and more that his life was to be brief, and that he must do something in art, which is lasting.

'Were it not for some considerations which make such a proposition seem absurd in the highest degree,' he wrote to his wife early in 1873, 'I would think that I am shortly to die, and that my spirit hath been singing its swan-song before dissolution. All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody.' He determined to devote himself for what was left of his life to music and literature. He tried New York, but finally settled in Baltimore, in December of this year, 1873, having obtained an engagement there as first flute in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra. He wrote to his father, who had protested against his purpose as unwise: 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 unacquainted with literary people and literary ways, I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and of 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?' His father felt the force of this appeal, and generously helped Lanier, so far as he could, to carry out his ambitions.

At Baltimore he found what he had craved for, the opportunity to hear good music, and access to extensive libraries. In the comparative freedom and exhilaration of this new life were written the first poems really characteristic of his mature work, among them the beautiful tributes to Mrs. Lanier, My Springs,' 'In Absence,' Acknowledgment,' and 'Laus Mariae.' It was in the summer of 1874, in August, that he wrote his first poem which attracted atttention, Corn.' This poem opens with stanzas almost as beautiful as anything in Lanier's work, describing the full richness of summer in the South. As a whole, however, it is not entirely successful. The symphonic structure is not sustained to the end, and much of the last part of the poem is given to a description of the effect on Southern farmers of cotton speculation, and especially of borrowing money at ruinous rates to plant cotton instead of corn. That subject was quite in place in Lanier's dialect poems, 'Jones's Private Argyment,' and 'Thar's more in the man than thar is in the land,' but here, in a poem of the quality of Corn,' it jars, and in both substance and expression is quite out of harmony with the rest of the poem. Corn,' though it is interesting historically as having won for Lanier his first recognition when it appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for February, 1875, and also for its attempt to express fitly in poetry the beauty of waving fields of our chief American grain, must, in final critical judgment, be accounted a failure. This is the less to be regretted because Lanier immediately after succeeded, with The Symphony,' in the chief things which he had failed to do in Corn.' In The Symphony,' published only four months later in the same magazine, he created a poem of real harmonic and symphonic structure throughout, and of far greater musical beauty than he had even attempted in Corn;' and he achieved the amazing tour de force of making real poetry out of the money question. A little later, in a brief lyric, The Waving of the Corn,' he expresses the full beauty of the cornfield.

'The Symphony' won him the friendship of Bayard Taylor, - a friendship which grew as the two men came to know each other better, and which is recorded in the letters that passed between them. His letters to another firm friend, Mr. Gibson Peacock, are also preserved, and are of great interest. He was devoted to a serious study of his two arts, and especially of the relations between them. Often he was compelled to interrupt his work either to go in search of health to Florida or Pennsylvania or the mountains of North Carolina, or to do hack writing for a mere living. But he persisted, with help and encouragement from his father and brother, from his friends, and most of all from his wife. To her he wrote: ""Que mon nom soit flétri, que la France soit libre!" quoth Danton; which is to say, interpreted by my environment: Let my name perish the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.' He was chosen in 1876, at the instance of Bayard Taylor, to write the words of the Centennial Cantata, for which the music was composed by Dudley Buck. In this year he wrote also the beautiful Evening Song,' possibly his finest lyric; the poem 'Clover,' which ranks between 'Corn' and 'The Symphony,' and has something of the qualities of both; The Waving of the Corn,' just spoken of; and our finest Centennial poem (not forgetting Lowell's and Whitman's), the Psalm of the West.'

Meanwhile he was lecturing for schools and for private classes, writing descriptive articles in prose for Lippincott's Magazine, making a book on Florida for a railroad company (published by the Lippincotts in 1876), and cheerfully doing whatever he could to earn himself a living and win some leisure for original writing. In 1877 was published the

first collection of his Poems, and this year was the one most productive of new pieces, though of brief ones. Such a condensed bit of lyric as The Stirrup-Cup,' however, is worth many a long poem. To this year belong also the Song of the Chattahoochee' (one of his most popular lyrics, though perhaps not ultimately to be counted among the few of his very best), two of his best brief nature poems, Tampa Robins' and 'From the Flats' (the last is bound to haunt forever all true lovers of the hills), The Mocking-Bird,' ' The Bee,' 'Florida Sunday,' and the poems To Wagner' and 'To Beethoven.'

His two best ballads, The Revenge of Hamish' and 'How Love looked for Hell,' belong to 1878-79. The first seems to me unsurpassed in narrative technique. Objectivity can no farther go. It is a masterpiece of absolute detachment, yet of wonderful vividness. The second is also remarkable for the way in which it clothes abstractions with life, and makes vivid the vague idea that where Love comes, there Hell cannot be. These, each unique in its kind, and, belonging to the same year, his chief masterpiece in still another kind which is peculiarly his own, being a new creation, The Marshes of Glynn,' show the many possibilities of that talent which was not to reach its full development.

Bayard Taylor died in December, 1878, and Lanier wrote the poem 'To Bayard Taylor,' with its beautiful picture of the Elysium of the poets, its touches of Elizabethan phrasing, and, toward the end, its strong, condensed expression of the hard conditions and the struggle which were bearing heavily upon Lanier himself, but from which he was soon to escape into that open sun-lit land of the last two stanzas.

He had work still to do, however. Early in 1879 he was appointed Lecturer on English Literature in the Johns Hopkins University. This brought him the happy certainty of a fixed though small income. For his courses of 1879-80 and 1880-81 he prepared the lectures which, in revised form, now constitute his two most important prose volumes, The Science of English Verse and The English Norel and its Development. He made an engagement with the Scribners to complete a series of books for boys, of which four were published, two after his death: The Boy's Froissart (1878), The Boy's King Arthur (1880), The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), and The Boy's Percy (1882). In the winter of 1880-81 he was barely able to get through with twelve lectures at the University. The poem 'Sunrise' was written with a fever temperature of 104, when, says Mrs. Lanier, the hand which first pencilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips.' A last attempt to prolong his life was made by trying tent life in the mountains of North Carolina, but it was unsuccessful, and he died September 7, 1881.

Though younger by almost a generation than our chief elder poets, Lanier seems to be taking his rank almost without question among them. He did not complete his work. To his poet friend, Paul H. Hayne, he wrote: How I long to sing a thousand songs that oppress me, unsung, is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings bread gives me no time.' When he died, his talent was growing. Unlike Poe, if he had lived he would probably have given us greater poems than he did. It is therefore hard to say what would have proved really characteristic of him had he completed any large mass of work. As it is, he has given us some beautiful and haunting lyrics, sometimes with touches of strange fancies like those in Night and Day' and the Ballad of Trees and the Master;' he has written two of our finest ballads, both unique in kind; in the Psalm of the West' he has written a poem of America that for range and beauty and historical completeness, and for the sweep of the whole from its superb opening up to just near the close, where it fails a little, deserves to stand beside or even above Lowell's Commemoration Ode' and Whitman's Thou mother with thy equal brood.' And finally, there is one thing which, even in the small amount of his work, we may call distinctively characteristic, the way of writing found in two poems so different in substance as The Symphony' and "The Marshes of Glynn.' Whatever turn I have for art,' he wrote to Paul H. Hayne, 'is purely musical, poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes, ... The very deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry.' Something of this music-passion has woven itself into his poetry. His theory that English verse has for its essential basis not accent, but strict

musical quantity, is almost certainly a mistaken one. But the book he wrote to prove this mistaken theory is by far the most suggestive and inspiring that has ever dealt with the technique of verse. And in his own work he has written poetry more rich in music than we had before. He has learned all that there was to be learned from his predecessors, among them Swinburne, and then he has found for himself new melodies, and has taught something of them to the poets of a younger generation,— notably Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey.