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SIDNEY LANIER

[The poems from Lanier are printed by the kind permission of Mrs. Sidney Lanier, and of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, the authorized publishers of Lanier's Works.]

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(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 heroic couplets, with lyric interludes, on the insurre tion of the French peasantry in the fourteenth centur

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..

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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,

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'O TRADE! O Trade! would thou wert dead!

The Time needs heart-'t is tired of head:

1 I have so many fair dreams and hopes about music in these days. It is a gospel whereof the people are in great need, As Christ gathered up the ten command

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

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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.

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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

70

We pass to silent pain that sits abrood
Back in our heart's great dark and solitude,
So sank the strings to gentle throbbing
Of long chords change-marked with sob-
bing

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 of the strings' song-flow Died to a level with each level bow

And made a great chord tranquil-surfaced

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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 120
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,
And briery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins;
For every long-armed woman-vine
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;
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
Wherewith the jay hints tragedies;

130

140

150

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-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
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;
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.

160

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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 neighbor said,
Then first the bounds of neighborhood out-
spread

Beyond all confines of old ethnic dread. 180 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;

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