first collection of his Poems, and this year was the one most productive of new pieces, though of brief ones. Such a condensed bit of lyric as The Stirrup-Cup,' however, is worth many a long poem. To this year belong also the 'Song of the Chattahoochee' (one of his most popular lyrics, though perhaps not ultimately to be counted among the few of his very best), two of his best brief nature poems, Tampa Robins' and 'From the Flats' (the last is bound to haunt forever all true lovers of the hills), The Mocking-Bird,' 'The Bee,' 'Florida Sunday,' and the poems To Wagner' and 'To Beethoven.' His two best ballads, The Revenge of Hamish' and 'How Love looked for Hell,' belong to 1878-79. The first seems to me unsurpassed in narrative technique. Objectivity can no farther go. It is a masterpiece of absolute detachment, yet of wonderful vividness. The second is also remarkable for the way in which it clothes abstractions with life, and makes vivid the vague idea that where Love comes, there Hell cannot be. These, each unique in its kind, and, belonging to the same year, his chief masterpiece in still another kind which is peculiarly his own, being a new creation, The Marshes of Glynn,' show the many possibilities of that talent which was not to reach its full development. Bayard Taylor died in December, 1878, and Lanier wrote the poem 'To Bayard Taylor,' with its beautiful picture of the Elysium of the poets, its touches of Elizabethan phrasing, and, toward the end, its strong, condensed expression of the hard conditions and the struggle which were bearing heavily upon Lanier himself, but from which he was soon to escape into that open sun-lit land of the last two stanzas. He had work still to do, however. Early in 1879 he was appointed Lecturer on English Literature in the Johns Hopkins University. This brought him the happy certainty of a fixed though small income. For his courses of 1879-80 and 1880-81 he prepared the lectures which, in revised form, now constitute his two most important prose volumes, The Science of English Verse and The English Norel and its Development. He made an engagement with the Scribners to complete a series of books for boys, of which four were published, two after his death: The Boy's Froissart (1878), The Boy's King Arthur (1880), The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), and The Boy's Percy (1882). In the winter of 1880-81 he was barely able to get through with twelve lectures at the University. The poem Sunrise' was written with a fever temperature of 104, when, says Mrs. Lanier, the hand which first pencilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips.' A last attempt to prolong his life was made by trying tent life in the mountains of North Carolina, but it was unsuccessful, and he died September 7, 1881. Though younger by almost a generation than our chief elder poets, Lanier seems to be taking his rank almost without question among them. He did not complete his work. To his poet friend, Paul H. Hayne, he wrote: How I long to sing a thousand songs that oppress me, unsung, - is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings bread gives me no time.' When he died, his talent was growing. Unlike Poe, if he had lived he would probably have given us greater poems than he did. It is therefore hard to say what would have proved really characteristic of him had he completed any large mass of work. As it is, he has given us some beautiful and haunting lyrics, sometimes with touches of strange fancies like those in Night and Day' and the Ballad of Trees and the Master;' he has written two of our finest ballads, both unique in kind; in the Psalm of the West' he has written a poem of America that for range and beauty and historical completeness, and for the sweep of the whole from its superb opening up to just near the close, where it fails a little, deserves to stand beside or even above Lowell's Commemoration Ode' and Whitman's 'Thou mother with thy equal brood.' And finally, there is one thing which, even in the small amount of his work, we may call distinctively characteristic, the way of writing found in two poems so different in substance as 'The Symphony' and "The Marshes of Glynn.' 'Whatever turn I have for art,' he wrote to Paul H. Hayne, 'is purely musical, poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes. ... The very deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry.' Something of this music-passion has woven itself into his poetry. His theory that English verse has for its essential basis not accent, but strict musical quantity, is almost certainly a mistaken one. But the book he wrote to prove this mistaken theory is by far the most suggestive and inspiring that has ever dealt with the technique of verse. And in his own work he has written poetry more rich in music than we had before. He has learned all that there was to be learned from his predecessors, among them Swinburne, and then he has found for himself new melodies, and has taught something of them to the poets of a younger generation, — notably Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. |