Though the allusions to "Othello" are far-fetched, and though the last verse evidently breaks down, the first three have an unmistakably yric touch. Lanier's lyric quality, as well as his self-imposed limitations, appear more clearly in a later work, which is becoming his most celebrated: "The Marshes of Glynn." Here his poetical impulse is expressed in a musical form which he might have called symphonic. He is no longer writing a song; he is working out a complicated motive, in a manner so entirely his own that the first thirty-six lines, as irregular in form as those of Timrod's "Cotton Boll," and more irregular in length, compose one intricate, incomprehensible sentence. The closing passage, easier to understand, possesses quite as much symphonic fervour. He has been gazing out over the marshes and trying to phrase the limitless emotion which arises as he contemplates a trackless plain where land and sea interfuse. Then the tide begins to rise, and he goes on thus: "Lo, out of his plenty the sea Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be : Look how the grace of the sea doth go About and about through the intricate channels that flow Here and there, Everywhere, Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes And the marsh is meshed with a million veins That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow Farewell, my lord Sun! The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; Passes, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; And the sea and the marsh are one. "How still the plains of the waters be! The tide is at his highest height: "And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep Roll in on the souls of men, But who will reveal to our waking ken The forms that swim and the shapes that creep Under the waters of sleep? And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn." Now this inarticulate verse is of a quality which can never be popular, and perhaps indeed is so eccentric that one should be prudent in choosing adjectives to praise it. The more you read the "Marshes of Glynn," however, and the more, indeed, you read any of Lanier's poetry, the more certain you feel that he was among the truest men of letters whom our country has produced. Genuine in impulse, fervid in temper, impressed but not overwhelmed by the sad and tragic conditions of his life, and sincerely moved to write in words which he constantly and ardently strove to make beautiful, he exhibits lyric power hardly to be found in any other American. All this, however, seems hardly national. Some little time ago we touched on the fact that one of his most effective narrative poems, the "Revenge of Hamish," deals with an episode purely Scotch. His first novel, the "Tiger Lily,” to be sure, which has survived only in name, dealt with an American subject. His books for boys, however, produced by an impulse something like Longfellow's, were meant to make the brave and romantic traditions of Europe familiar to American youth; his "Science of English Verse," his "Lectures on the English Novel," and the volumes of posthumous essays which have appeared in later years, all dealt with general æsthetic subjects. Lanier's earthly career was wholly American, and almost wholly Southern; the emotional temper with which he was filled must have been quickened by experience in our own country. The things with which he chose to deal, however, might have come to him anywhere. The very fact which keeps him permanently from popularity is perhaps this lack of local perception, as distinguished from a temper which could not help being of local origin. So if Lanier's work tells us anything about Southern literature, it only tells us, a little more surely than that of Dr. Ticknor, or of Hayne, or of Timrod, how the tragic convulsion of our Civil War waked in the South a kind of passion which America had hardly exhibited before. Cursory as this glance at our Southern literature has been, it probably comprehends all that has been produced in the South by men no longer living. Reviewing it, we are compelled to say that our Southern regions have as yet produced little if any more significant literature than the North had produced before 1832. Since the Civil War the social and economic condition of the South has been too disturbed for anything like final expression. As yet, then, the South presents little to vary the general outlines of literature in America. The few Southern poets, however, who have phrased the emotion aroused by the Civil War which swept their earlier civilisation out of existence, reveal a lyric fervour hardly yet equalled in the North. As one thinks, then, of Dr. Ticknor, of Hayne, of Timrod, and of Lanier, one begins to wonder whether they may not perhaps forerun a spirit which shall give beauty and power to the American letters of the future. IV THE WEST WHEN the father of Fenimore Cooper took his family to Central New York, a little more than a century ago, Central New York was still a Western wilderness. Amid the numerous conventions of Cooper's Leather-Stocking stories, then, there emerge many traces of actual experience which show what our Western country used to be. In this aspect, the conclusion of the Leather-Stocking stories is significant. The pioneer hero starts alone for a wilderness more Western still, pressed by the inconvenient growth of population in the regions where he has passed his mature life. The types of Western immigrants thus suggested are those most frequently kept in mind by tradition; and probably the most admirable Western settlers were on the one hand such people as the elder Cooper, who went to establish in a previously unbroken country new and grander fortunes, and, on the other hand, such personages as Fenimore Cooper idealised in his most popular hero. These latter, of whom perhaps the most familiar in traditional memory is Daniel Boone, were people adventurously impatient of conventions, who betook themselves with constantly fresh restlessness to places where, in virtue of solitude, they could live as independently as they chose. In this type, however, as the very popularity it achieved with European revolutionists would show, there was something more like reversion than development. Far enough from the ideal primitive man of the French Revolution, they tended in virtues and in vices alike rather back towards primitive manhood than forward towards maturer society. As we have already seen in various ways, national inexperience, which marks all American history until well into the present century, had tended to retard the variation of our native character from the original type of seventeenth-century England. Such complete relaxation of social experience as was involved in the temper and conduct of the pioneers tended to throw them back toward the kind of human nature which had vanished from the old world with the middle ages. Something of the kind, indeed, is apparent even in remote districts of New England. In many parts of the West, it was once frequent enough to be characteristic. Another kind of Western settler has been less generally remarked. Among the New York Literati preserved from oblivion by Poe was Mrs. Kirkland, who happened about 1840 to pass three or four years in Michigan, then a sparsely settled Western region. Between 1839 and 1846, she published three books dealing with her Western experiences: “A New Home," "Forest Life," and "Western Clearings." In themselves little more than such good-humoured sketches as any clever, well-bred woman might write in correspondence, these books vividly show how the West once appeared to a cultivated Eastern observer. One fact which she treats as a matter of course is historically suggestive. When the country where the scene of her stories is laid began to get tamed, the more shiftless settlers were apt to avoid the increasing strenuousness of life by moving as much farther West as they could beg, borrow, or steal means to go. These personages typify an element of Western society which has been there from the beginning. That vast new region of ours has been partly settled, no doubt, by such admirable energy as is typified by the elder Cooper or Mrs. Kirkland herself. It has been partly settled, too, by the primitive, vigorous restlessness of the better sort of pioneers. Along with these admirably constructive types of character, however, there has mingled from the beginning a destructive type, which went West because it could |