Haughty this song, its words and scope,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Evolution- the cumulative growths and
generations.

Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued,

Wandering, peering, dallying with allwar, peace, day and night absorbing, Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,

I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.

I sing of life, yet mind me well of death: To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years — Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.

Now for my last let me look back a moment;

The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,

Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;

Delightful! - now separation-Good-bye my Fancy.

Yet let me not be too hasty,

Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended into one; Then if we die we die together (yes, we 'll remain one),

If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,

May-be we 'll be better off and blither, and learn something,

May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning so now finally, Good-bye- and hail! my Fancy.

DEATH'S VALLEY

1891.

To accompany a picture; by request. The Valley of the Shadow of Death,' from the painting by George

Inness.

NAY, do not dream, designer dark, Thou hast portray'd or hit thy theme entire;

I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it, Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too.

For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,

After dread suffering-have seen their lives pass off with smiles;

And I have watch'd the death-hours of the old; and seen the infant die;

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;

And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath'd my every breath

Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

And out of these and thee,

I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee, Nor gloom's ravines, nor bleak, nor dark for I do not fear thee,

Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),

Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass,

And the low hum of living breeze — and in the midst God's beautiful eternal right hand,

Thee, holiest minister of Heaven - thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,

Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call'd life,

Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.

1896. (1897.)

NIGHT AND DAY

THE innocent, sweet Day is dead.
Dark Night hath slain her in her bed.
O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!
- Put out the light, said he.

A sweeter light than ever rayed
From star of heaven or eye of maid
Has vanished in the unknown Shade.

- She 's dead, she 's dead, said he.

Now, in a wild, sad after-mood
The tawny Night sits still to brood
Upon the dawn-time when he wooed.
— I would she lived, said he.

O' the ears was cropped, o' the tail was nicked,

(All.) Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.
The hound into his kennel crept;
He rarely wept, he never slept.

1 One of Lanier's early plans was for a long poem in heroic couplets, with lyric interludes, on the insurrection of the French peasantry in the fourteenth century. 'Although,' says Mrs. Lanier, "The Jacquerie" remained a fragment for thirteen years, Mr. Lanier's interest in the subject never abated. Far on in this interval he is found planning for leisure to work out in romance the story of that savage insurrection of the French peasantry, which the Chronicles of Froissart had impressed upon his boyish imagination.' 'It was the first time,' says Lanier himself, in a letter of November 15, 1874, that the big hungers of the People appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance.' Five chapters of the story, and three lyrics, were completed. See the Poems, pp. 191-214.

Not larger than two eyes, they lie
Beneath the many-changing sky
And mirror all of life and time,
-Serene and dainty pantomime.

Shot through with lights of stars and dawns,
And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns, 10
Thus heaven and earth together vie
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,

In darkness bounden, feebly grope,

20

We're all for love,' the violins said.1
'Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale ?
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? 10
Ay, canst thou buy a single sigh
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
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.

20

"Each day, all day" (these poor folks say), "In the same old year-long, drear-long

ments and re-distilled them into the clear liquid of that wondrous eleventh - Love God utterly, and thy neighbor as thyself-so I think the time will come when music, rightly developed to its now-little-foreseen grandeur, will be found to be a later revelation of all gospels in one. (LANIER, in a letter of March 12, 1875. The Letters of Sidney Lanier, p. 113.)

1 Music is utterly unconscious of aught but Love. (LANIER, in a letter of October, 1866. The Letters of Sidney Lanier, p. 66.)