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remained until the breaking out of the civil war. loyal son of the South, with an inherited military taste, although of a delicate constitution, he enlisted in one of the first battalions that marched to the front. Faithful and gallant service he rendered as a private soldier, passing through a number of hard battles and performing duty on the signal corps. Finally he was assigned to a blockade runner. Soon his vessel was captured, and for five weary months he was a prisoner at Point Lookout. It was while enduring the privations of army life that he began to observe the invasion of that fatal foe, consumption, against which he battled so valiantly for fifteen disheartening years, and to which at last he was compelled to surrender.

However, his early manhood was not all misfortune and storm. Providence smiled graciously upon him in his friendships and loves. Joyous and bright was December 19, 1867, when he and Miss Mary Day were united in holy wedlock. If ever matrimonial matches are made in heaven, this one was. In the real essentials of beautiful domestic life-love, loyalty, honor, congenial companionship, mutual helpfulness-there was no want. How all must rejoice in the immaculate home life of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and others of stainless name. To this radiant company belongs Sidney Lanier. His appreciation of her who had unbounded faith in him is partially expressed in "My Springs:'

Her confidence and devotion were an unfailing inspiration. The part she played in their long tragedy was no less pathetic than that of her manly and heroic husband. In her record of his translation she says: "We are left alone [August 29, 1881] with one another. On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of

our summer, yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of God." From that hour to this Mrs. Lanier's energies have been consecrated to the rearing of their sons* and to the honoring the memory of him whose writings have enriched our "literature of power" by putting these into permanent form.

In order to fully appreciate this royal seer it should be remembered that most of his best work was performed in the intervals between severe sieges of illness and prostrating hemorrhages from the lungs. Much of his time was consumed in journeying from place to place in search of relief from this crushing burden. During his last winter-too feeble to raise food to his lips, and with a fever temperature of one hundred and four degrees-he dictated his last and by some regarded his greatest poem, "Sunrise." A little later he recovered sufficiently to deliver twelve lectures at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, on "The English Novel and the Principles of its Development." Some of these lectures he penned; but he grew so weak that he was obliged to dictate the remainder to his wife, much of the time not being able to speak above a whisper, and being compelled to sit while delivering the lectures. It is said that "those who heard him listened with a sort of fascinated terror, as in doubt whether the hoarded breath would suffice to the end of the hour." It is no less surprising than creditable that a man constantly so near the grave should have accomplished so much.

His first literary venture was a novel, published in 1867 under the title Tiger Lilies, delineating his experience in and abhorrence of war. His own brother pronounces it "crude and boyish." And yet it contains intimations and foregleams of rare poetic power. During his life occasional poems from his pen were published in various leading periodicals. In 1875 he wrote a bright little book entitled Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History. Among his choicest delights was fellowship with Bayard Taylor, Charlotte Cushman, and other congenial spirits in the realm of art. It was upon the sug

A personal letter, dated August 2, 1899, from Mrs. Lanier, informs the writer that the four sons, ranging in age from nineteen to thirty-one, are "living true and earnest lives." All have inherited their father's tastes.

gestion and advice of Mr. Taylor that this southern poet was chosen to compose the "Centennial Cantata," which was set to music by Dudley Buck and rendered by a large chorus, with Thomas's Orchestra, at the Exposition in 1876. This brought the young author into new notice, and added to his growing fame. His Science of English Verse is an original analysis of the technical structure and ground-principles of versification. Rhythm is the governing law in poetry, as in music. To American youth he has rendered a much-valued service in the "Boy's Library of Legend and Chivalry "-four books translated and edited by Mr. Lanier, entitled Boy's Froissart, Boy's King Arthur, Boy's Mabinogion, and Boy's Percy. Here, as elsewhere, he appeals to all that is noblest in life and aims to elevate and refine his readers.

He would awaken in every boy the knightly spirit which determines "to speak the very truth; to perform a promise to the uttermost; to reverence all women; to maintain right and honesty ; to help the weak; to treat high and low with courtesy; to be constant to one love; to be fair to his bitter foe; to despise luxury; to preserve simplicity, modesty, and gentleness in heart and bearing." In such a pure, sweet, exhilarating atmosphere as all his writings create nothing mean and coarse and unwholesome can find any attraction. A volume of poems edited by his wife, with a memorial by William Hayes Ward, contains all his verses regarded as worthy of preservation. Next to this in permanent and high value the writer would place his great work on The English Novel: a Study in the Development of Personality. Herein the true philosopher appears, with his keen insight into enduring reality. Most intensely interesting and inspiring is his discussion of the marvelous growth of personality from Eschylus to George Eliot. In this unquestioned unfolding and enlarging is the sure test of human progress. Man is immensely larger to-day in knowledge, accuracy, and sweep of thought, in conscious sovereignty over natural forces, in a sense of kinship with the universe and its immanent as well as transcendent Ruler. Quite recently three new volumes of his work have been issued: Music and Poetry: Essays upon Some Aspects and Interrelations of the Two Arts; Retrospects and Pros

pects: Descriptive and Historical Essays; also, Letters of Sidney Lanier. In these we catch many sweet strains of the music which his life-harp constantly sent forth.

Not until 1879, only two years previous to his decease, did he ever have a stated yearly salary since his marriage. On his birthday of that year he received notice of his appointment as Lecturer on English Literature at Johns Hopkins. It was no insignificant compliment to receive this recognition from a university of such high rank. A tablet in that hall of learning marks the esteem in which he was held. In order of development Mr. Lanier was first a musician, then a poet. When a child he learned easily to play upon every kind of instrument he could find. But the flute became his favorite. For five seasons he played first flute in the celebrated Peabody Symphony Orchestra at Baltimore.

Thus far we have endeavored chiefly to give some impression of Mr. Lanier's life and work as viewed from without. That we may understand him more deeply let us look at the hidden man of the heart as he reveals himself in his own language. For he was very frank and transparent, seemingly so conscious of power and purity that he had no qualities he desired to conceal. Early he became a member of the Presbyterian Church. But in mature years he felt the emptiness of all merely conventional formulæ. Nonessentials dropped to their proper plane. His growing, expanding soul grasped realities. Whatever was vital in creed his soul clung to tenaciously. His ethical sense and spiritual vision were clear and vigorous. While yet in school he wrote in his notebook, "The point which I wish to settle is merely by what method shall I ascertain what I am fit for as preliminary to ascertaining God's will with reference to me." He was considerably perplexed in finding music so distinctly his natural bent, and says, “I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which it seems to me I might do." Later, he did not doubt his call to a literary career, any more than St. Paul doubted his call to preach the Gospel. He entered upon his lifework with all that sense of sacredness which attaches to genuine consecration. His father, seeing how hard the son

struggled for a precarious living, urged him to come home and share the profits of his law business. But the man with a high vocation could not bear the thought of slaying duty and ambition with such a stroke. To his father he wrote, in 1873:

Think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways-I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?

After this the father wisely yielded, and ceased importuning his brave son to turn aside from his rightly chosen path.

Again he wrote to his wife from Texas, whither he had gone in search of physical renewal:

Were it not for some circumstances which make such a proposition seem absurd in the highest degree, I would think that. I am shortly to die, and that my spirit hath been singing its swan song before dissolution. All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody. The very inner spirit and essence of all wind songs, bird songs, passion songs, folk songs, country songs, sex songs, soul songs, and body songs hath blown upon me in quick gusts, like the breath of passion, and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody.

It was no ordinary soul that experienced these great, spontaneous surgings of innermost forces. Once more he wrote his "dearer self:"

So many great ideas for art are born to me each day, I am swept away into the land of All-Delights by their strenuous sweet whirlwind. And I find within myself such entire yet humble confidence of possessing every single element of power to carry them all out, save the little, paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us clothed and fed in the meantime. I do not understand this. . . . Of course I have my keen sorrows, momentarily more keen than I would like anyone to know; but I thank God that in a knowledge of him and myself which cometh to me daily in fresh revelations, I have a steadfast firmament of blue in which all clouds soon dissolve.