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.

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.

kicked,

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

(AU.) 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.

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

way,

30

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? Swinehood hath no remedy

Say many men, and hasten by,

Clamping the nose and blinking the eye. 40
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 No:

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.)

And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say Go!

There's plenty that can, if you can't: we know.

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 sometime see How piteous-false the poor decree That trade no more than trade must be ! Does business mean, Die, you · - live, I? Then "Trade is trade" but sings a lie: 'Tis only war grown miserly.

50

60

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