Hindu friend I have; and the propriety of the term, as well as the true character of Bhima Gandharva and the insubstantial nature of all adventures recorded as happening to him and myself, is to be fully explained in the end of the last article. I hit upon this expedient, after much tribulation and meditation, in order at once to be able to make something like a narrative that should avoid an arid encyclopedic treatment, and to be perfectly truthful. The only plan was to make it a pure jeu d'esprit, and in writing the second paper I have found it of great advantage.1 This year, 1876, again makes a notable division in Lanier's work. A change that had been gradually going on seems accentuated by a severe illness at Philadelphia, from which he barely recovered sufficiently to leave for Tampa in December, his physician "pronouncing death unless a warm climate was speedily reached." Lanier himself recognized the truth of the warning. The beginning of the change may be dimly suggested in "Clover;" it is nearly complete in "Evening Song," of which Lanier writes that "it has smitten Mr. R. Shelton McKenzie under the fifth rib," and which, set to music by Dudley Buck as "Sunset," Taylor calls superb; and it is fully seen in the beautiful poems written during his three months' convalescence at Tampa. These are: "From the Flats," "The Mocking Bird," "Tampa Robins," "A Florida Sunday," and The Bee," while "The Stirrup Cup," of the same date, is an echo of his illness. 66 One other poem was written at Tampa, "Under the Cedarcroft Chestnuts," which Lanier said was "written with a very full heart. I wanted to say all manner of fair things about you, but I was so intensely afraid of appearing to plaster you, that I finally squeezed all into one line, 'In soul and stature larger than thy kind."" In the same letter' Lanier makes the following criticism on his "Beethoven," written the preceding year, which again marks the above mentioned change and explains why his work shows such a steady improvement: I have just seen the "Beethoven" in the Galaxy. On seeing the poem in print, I find it faulty: there's too much matter in it; it is like read 1 Letter to Mr. Gibson Peacock, December 16, 1875, p. 22. 2 March 4, 1877: "Letters," p. 188. ing the dictionary; the meanings presently become confused, not because of any lack of distinctness in each one, but simply because of the numerous and differing specifications of ideas. The other poems of this year are: "The Song of the Chattahoochee," "To Richard Wagner," "A Florida Ghost" (the last of the dialect pieces, the "Baptist Revival Hymn and First Sight of an Alabama River Steamboat" appearing in the two preceding years), "The Dove," and "The Hard Times in Elfland." Of the last he writes: "I indulged in a hemorrhage immediately after reaching home, which kept me out of the combat for ten days. I then plunged in and brought captive forth a long Christmas poem for Every Saturday, an ambitious young weekly of Baltimore." From the draft of "The Dove" inclosed in a later letter1 we get an opportunity of seeing the improvement wrought in the poem before it was finally published. The summer of 1877 was spent at Chadd's Ford, Pa. In November Lanier, with his family, removed to Baltimore, and after a brief experience in a flat settled permanently, barring one or two changes of location, to housekeeping. His delight in thus having a home of his own is humorously and withal pathetically expressed in letters written on the same day to his two friends, which are too long to be given here. The following years were the fullest, and doubtless the happiest, of Lanier's life. With his salary as first flute, with his magazine writing, with lectures to private classes, and sometimes with aid from relatives and friends, or a loan (always repaid) from Mr. Peacock, he managed to meet his daily expenses, though he found that he "could not make his daily bread by poetry alone." In 1879, on his birthday, he received an appointment as Lecturer on English Literature at Johns Hopkins University for the ensuing year-a position he had been hoping for ever since President Gilman first broached the subject in 1876. 1 To Mr. Gibson Peacock, August 7, 1877: "Letters," p. 44. 2 January 6, 1878: to Mr. Gibson Peacock, "Letters," p. 49; to Mr. Bayard Taylor, Letters," p. 205. The result of this appointment, the two series of lectures published as the "Science of English Verse" and "The English Novel," the latter of which was delivered when his fatal illness, already begun, made it well-nigh impossible, makes us grudge the delay. The important poems dating from these years are: "The Harlequin of Dreams," "The Revenge of Hamish," "The Marshes of Glynn," "Remonstrance," "The Crystals," "How Love Looked for Hell," "Individuality," and "A Ballad of Trees and the Master." These go far into the depths of life, and also give us some insight into Lanier's religion, which was so much truer and more beautiful than any creed, a pantheism that did not exclude the personality of God and the responsibility of man, both expressed in the lines: And I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered.1 But none are more touching, and one had almost said more beautiful, than the outline for a poem with which the "Letters" begin: Are ye so sharp set for the center of the earth, are ye so hungry for the center of things, O rains and springs and rivers of the mountains? Towards the center of the earth, towards the very middle of things ye will fall, ye will run, the Center will draw ye, Gravity will drive you and draw you in one; But the Center ye will not reach, ye will come as near as the plains, watering them in coming so near, and ye will come as near as the bottom of the Ocean, seeing and working many marvels as ye come so near; But the Center of Things ye will not reach, O my rivers and rains and springs of the mountains. Provision is made that ye shall not; ye would be merged, ye could not re turn. Nor shall my soul be merged in God, though tending, though tending. His soul was surely and swiftly tending toward God. Under what conditions he was now working may be seen from his last letter to Hayne: I have been wishing to write you a long time, and have thought several letters to you. But I could never tell you the extremity of illness, of pov 1 From "A Florida Sunday." 2 November 19, 1880: "Letters," p. 243. erty, and of unceasing work, in which I spent the last three years; and you would need only once to see the weariness with which I crawl to bed after a long day's work—and often a long night's work at the heel of it, and Sundays just as well as other days-in order to find in your heart a full warrant for my silence. It seems incredible that I have printed such an unchristian quantity of matter—all, too, tolerably successful—and earned so little money; and the wife and the four boys, who are so lovely that I would not think a palace good enough for them if I had it, make one's earnings seem less. But in spite of these pitiful conditions it must have been an unusual despondency that spoke in the letter. For that Lanier was not always unhappy, and how he was wont to bear his trials, is shown in his poem "Opposition," written at this time: Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain no more, for these, O heart, As rhymes direct the rage of art. The dark hath many dear avails; The dark distils divinest dews; The dark is rich with nightingales, With dreams, and with the heavenly muse. Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain thou not, O heart; for these To uses, arts, and charities. Various expedients were vainly tried to find relief, and meanwhile Lanier went on unfalteringly with his work. At last, in the hope of at least a painless death, camp life in North Carolina was tried. There, after long lingering, and when all but his wife were absent-and would he not have wished it so?-the end came. Lanier's last completed poem, written at a fever temperature of 104°, with eager haste lest it should not be finished, when the hands that penciled the lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips and he was trembling on the brink of the great beyond to which he was so soon to cross over, was "Sunrise.' Is there not something significant in this? A study of his latest poems shows that to him his death was indeed a sunrise. And was it not, not only to the man, but also to the poet? W. P. WOOLF. AN AGNOSTIC POET." IN speaking of a classical tradition in English poetry, which finds its fountain head in Milton, one must premise that he uses the term with a full understanding of its relativity—that he means by it a relatively classic strain in a body of essentially romantic poetry. A century after Milton the same fine note, of Hellenic quality that distinguishes it from the Gallic or Latin classicism of Dryden and Pope, was struck again by Thomas Gray, and has never since ceased to sound. This quality may perhaps be best described by the terms restraint and verbal inerrancy-an ethical spirit and a faculty for putting the right word unfailingly in the right place-both derived from contact with the Greek and Latin classics. A famous example of both is the immortal Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which in perfect language and an appropriately solemn measure marries the sentiment of evening melancholy to a meditation on death. In Wordsworth, half a century after, Gray's pensive melancholy has become a mental difficulty; it is well known that Wordsworth composed his great "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" in order to argue himself into a firmer belief in life beyond the grave. Uncertainty in regard to it was ever a besetting difficulty with him, as he tenderly and beautifully put it, in the stanza of the “Elegy," in his lines to his wife: O dearer far than light and life are dear, 66 Full oft our human foresight I deplore; Trembling, through my unworthiness, with fear That friends, by death disjoined, may meet no more! Misgivings, hard to vanquish or control, Mix with the day, and cross the hour of rest; While all the future, for thy purer soul, With "sober certainties" of love is blest. That Wordsworth, for all his realistic programme, could strike the classic note full and clear is witnessed to by his 1The Collected Poems of William Watson. John Lane: New York and London. 1899. |