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continuous effort and left him in the end to carry on a losing fight against poverty and consumption. The death of a child added to the bitterness of his last desolate years. He died in 1867. His poems, numbering about eighty in all, were gathered and published in 1873, with a memoir by his friend Hayne, and there was a re-issue-a memorial edition-in 1899. Timrod was a more serious and spontaneous singer than Hayne, and somewhat less finished, though still of a fine artistic Katie is an exquisite little idyl, with pictures like paintings on porcelain. Better known and more distinctly southern is The Cotton Boll, a poem veritably aglow with the dazzling sunshine that lies over the snowy cotton fields, and sounding, in its deeper passages, a note of prayerful patriotism half Miltonic in fervor. His poems written in war time, few, but strong, passionate, and sincere, mark him as the real laureate of the Confederacy. Carolina and Ethnogenesis ('the birth of a nation') are the utterances of a noble and fiery heart. Yet the word "peace" was always on his lips, and there is scarcely a poem that does not end with a peaceful vision or prayer, which makes the tragedy of his life one of the inscrutable ironies of fate.

1842-1881.

Sidney Lanier, who began his work just about the time of Timrod's premature death, is the foremost singer that the South has given us since Poe; some critics, indeed, notably Sidney Lanier, Mr. Stedman, have been disposed to put him almost on a level with our great poets. His life, also, was broken and brief. Born at Macon, Georgia, of Huguenot and Scotch ancestry, he was graduated from a Georgia college at the age of eighteen, and in the year following, on the outbreak of the war, enlisted in the Confederate army. He was in the battle of Seven Pines and in the Seven Days' Battle about Richmond, and spent five months in captivity in Point Lookout prison. Some of his war experiences went into

his first book, Tiger Lilies, a hastily written novel published in 1867. After the war, with little but a brave wife and a brave heart, he began his fifteen years' struggle with consumption. When his health permitted, he taught, or played the flute in an orchestra at Baltimore. So passionately fond of music was he that he could scarcely decide between that and poetry in his choice of a profession, though the needs of his life were such as to leave little to the preferences of his taste. He did some irregular literary work of whatever nature came to hand. Through the influence of Bayard Taylor, whose acquaintance he had made and who was one of the first to appreciate his powers, he was brought into public notice by being chosen to write the Cantata for the opening of the Centennial Exposition in 1876. In 1879 he was appointed a lecturer on English literature at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and his prospects for leisure and a competence were at last brightening. Two years later he died.

Lanier's prose includes, besides the youthful novel already mentioned, some working over of old chronicles and legends for juvenile readers-The Boy's Froissart, The Boy's King Arthur, etc.,—and two series of university lectures, The Science of English Verse, and The English Novel. The latter are valuable as stimulative pieces of criticism, but Lanier's prose would not alone make good his literary claims. These rest upon his poetry, of which a volume was published in 1876, and a complete volume posthumously. The bulk of it is not much greater than Timrod's, but it is in every way larger in conception and more finished in form. Lanier had definite and positive views of the relation of art to life-it might almost be said that to him art was life. He invested it with the sacredness of religion, and everywhere through his verse may be seen an exaltation of the creative gift and a protest against the commercialism and materialism, the greed and insincerity,

that seemed to him to be the curses of our modern civilization and to put poetry, music, and all the means of æsthetic and spiritual enjoyment beyond our reach. These views, however, are not didactically set forth. On the contrary, there is little American verse more refined and airily imaginative than Lanier's, and none, except Poe's, more melodious. His poems are gospels even more in their form than in their substance. The Symphony is not only a glorification of art; it is itself a glorified example of art, in which the violins and the flute and the clarionet are made to speak almost in their own tones, complaining of the deadly blight of Trade, and singing the praises of the music-master, unselfish Love. Corn is the hymn of the higher life of culture. The Ballad of the Trees and the Master and The Marshes of Glynn are religion set to music.

Lanier was a constant experimenter, and though he was permitted to accomplish little, he essayed much. The Revenge of Hamish, in which he went outside of America for a subject, as Timrod did in Katie, is a narrative poem in long swinging lines a powerful, almost tear-compelling ballad. The Psalm of the West is an ambitious song of the New World and the American Republic, from the voyage of Columbus to the reunion of North and South. There are several good poems in the negro dialect; and there are some exquisite lyrics, of which perhaps the best are The Song of the Chattahoochee and Evening Song. But the incomplete Hymns of the Marshes, upon which he worked feverishly almost to the hour of his death, indubitably reveal the poet at his highest and best. The pictures of the live oaks with their "little green leaves," of the glimmering marsh, "a limpid labyrinth of dreams," of the rising sun and the flooding sea, are all drawn by the hand of a master. It must be admitted, too, that even after Poe and Tennyson and Swinburne he has wrested new melodies

from words.

Yet we are often made to feel that in applying so cunningly his theories of "tone-color" and harmony he has been led too far from spontaneity and has substituted artificial conceits for the fresh imagery of inspiration. In his devotion to the two arts of music and verse, he has lost sight of the boundaries of each, and has tried to secure, with language, effects which should be attempted with music only. In spite, however, of partial and perhaps inevitable failure, we shall long remember him for his high ideals, for the religious and even heroic consecration of his life to art under most discouraging conditions, and for the undeniable beauty of much that he left behind.

CHAPTER IX

PROSE AND POETRY IN THE WEST

Literature in the West-between the Ohio River, let us say. and the Pacific Ocean-has not followed the same course of development as in the South. It scarcely made a beginning until well after the Civil War; perhaps no book published in this region before 1867 is worth recording to-day. Moreover, it is different in character. Prose and poetry have from the outset existed side by side, with a perceptible leaning toward prose as the more natural form of expression. The prose which we shall find supplanting the poetry of the South is still in a measure poetic; the poetry of the West often tends to employ the free and homely idioms of prose. The western literature in its entirety is a novel product, quite without traditions, as new as the surroundings and the society which it reflects. That which Walt Whitman expressly stood for-sheer democracy, the levelling of class distinctions and the uncompromising assertion of the individual—finds here a natural emphasis. College men are very decidedly in the minority. Farming, mining, lumbering, trapping, scouting, at the highest journalism and local law or politics, furnished the education of the western pioneer. Many a western "man of letters" has ploughed corn, "punched" cattle, sluiced gold, or travelled about the country with a pedler's cart. Men of culture from the East found their way to the West, but not in sufficient numbers to change materially the character of its early literature. Prestige was from the first disregarded, culture often held in scorn. It is manifest that a literature of this type

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