dreads the operation, and puts it off from day to day. Sloth is so pleasant, though it take the guise of modern commercial restlessness, which keeps only the lower activities in nervous agitation, and leaves all the higher to drowse unused! To them the Poet speaks; them the Ideal will permeate at last; the new truth, the added beauty, will be acknowledged, and the tardily grateful world will build monuments or dedicate shrines to its ethereal benefactor.

Meanwhile, the Poet must live, at least long enough to deliver his message. His wares are indeed without price, but he must exchange them for food and raiment, or die. Yet how many measures of corn will the world give for a sheaf of his sonnets, how many yards of cloth for his odes? It has not yet learned that it needs them; it does not set on them even the value that it sets on quaintnesses and curiosities. So it usually happens that the Poet's gifts are free gifts, which the great, practical, dollar-jingling world can no more pay for than for rainbows or sta beams or the inexhaustible benefits of sunshine.

Milton came to it with his Paradise Lost, and it gave him the price of a yearling heifer in return; Dante it paid nothing. The Poet must drudge, therefore, in the world's way, his winged feet must blister in the common treadmill, ere he can earn his scant supply of bread and apparel. Hampered by poverty, burdened by neglect, he may be; but these are not all the obstacles Fate bids a man overcome before he proves himself worthy of the hallowed title of Poet: ill health, too, may weigh him down, — ill health, which means the constant struggle of the physical to bind and silence the spiritual.

The record of our American poets is remarkably free from these tragic elements. Of the New England band, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Bryant, whatever their early conflict with poverty and a slighting world, and whatever their transient infirmities, all lived to a ripe and honored age, and

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heard the grandchildren of the contemporaries of their youth call them master. Of the others, Poe died, the victim of his wayward passions, before he had done his work, but not before his talents had been recognized; Whitman, though ill requited in money, enjoyed for a quarter of a century a revenue of notoriety which compensated him, so peculiarly greedy of applause, for what else he lacked; but Sidney Lanier, the youngest in the brotherhood of our poets, suffered the accumulated ills of poverty, neglect, disease, and premature death. His experience proved that in our time, as in the past, the world is slow to appreciate its best.

Nearly twenty years have elapsed since the publication of Corn, the poem which revealed to a few the presence of a new poet; it is more than a dozen years since Sidney Lanier died, under the pines of North Carolina: yet, because he was a true poet, we are coming to pay heed to him; acquaintance with his works makes us wish to know more about his life, and the stray fragments which have hitherto been given lead us back to find new meanings in his works. I foresee that erelong his right to rank among the few genuine poets of America will not be questioned; that he is the most significant figure in our literature since the Civil War is a conclusion likely to be accepted when his work and his personality are fairly understood. My purpose is not, however, to write a eulogy nor a critical estimate: it is my privilege to introduce a series of letters in which Lanier tells his own story, and which furnishes the public, for the first time, with intimate glimpses of him during the most important years of his life. To whatever rank in literature critics may finally assign him matters little to us; the weighty fact now is that his worth, both as poet and man, is undeniable, and that therefore it behooves us to learn more about him, in whom we shall behold again the rare spectacle of an embodied Ideal in its passage through an unresponsive world.

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Ga., February 3, 1842. The Laniers were French Huguenots, who took refuge in England in Elizabeth's time, and attained, at her court and that of the Stuarts, to distinction in music and painting. The founder of the American branch came to Richmond, Va., in 1716. Lanier's mother, Mary Anderson, was of Scotch descent. So far as heredity counted, therefore, he had behind him, on both sides, pious ancestors, and it may not be too fanciful to suppose that he drew from those far-off, art-loving Huguenot forerunners the beginnings of his own exquisite sensibility to art. Of this sensibility he early showed signs, music especially having a wonderful power over him. At fourteen he entered Oglethorpe College, where he got such education as was to be obtained at a small Southern seminary before the Rebellion. Graduating with highest honors in 1860, he accepted a tutorship, but in the following year, at the outbreak of the war, he enlisted in the first regiment of Georgia Volunteers, and served till 1864, when, being in command of a blockade runner, he was taken prisoner and confined at Point Lookout. In February, 1865, he was exchanged, and made his way on foot back to Macon, where he broke down with the first serious premonitions of consumption. The exposures in the army, the rigor of his imprisonment, he had passed the winter months at Point Lookout with only summer clothes to wear, - had weakened his constitution, and a tendency to consumption, inherited from his mother, warned him thus early that to live he must struggle.

Upon his recovery he was employed as a clerk at Montgomery, Ala., and in 1867 he published, in New York, Tiger Lilies, a novel into which he wove some of his war experiences, and which better deserves to be unearthed than do many of the firstfruits of genius. That same year he married Miss Mary Day, of Macon. Thenceforth, through all his

wanderings he was blessed with the companionship of one who firmly believed in his powers, and who cheered alike his years of disappointment and of illness. Doubly precarious was his existence: his ill health prevented him from pursuing any occupation long, and his straitened means forced him to accept uncongenial employments, if only he might thereby earn bread. We find him teaching school at Prattville, Ala., and then for several years, at his father's urgent request, practicing law at Macon, till in 1872 the condition of his lungs drove him to San Antonio, Texas, in search of a climate in which he might safely live. In the following spring, however, he returned to Georgia, and in December, 1873, he went to Baltimore, where he was engaged to play the first flute in the Peabody Orchestra.

These are but the externals of his early life: to know how, amid such vicissitudes, his genius had developed we should need to have recourse to his diary and letters to his family, and to other material that will some day be the basis of an adequate biography. But we know already enough to say that his flowering as a poet was neither sudden nor casual. From his youth up, Music and Poetry had been equally his mistresses, and for a long time there was doubt as to which would predominate. As a boy, he could play almost any instrument, and he has recorded how, after improvising on the violin, he would be rapt into an ecstasy which left his whole frame trembling with the exhaustion of too tense delight. In the army, his flute had been his constant companion, and it had endeared him to his captors at Point Lookout. Yet all this while he had felt the growing compulsion of poetry within him; he had planned a drama, and occasionally written verses. Neither sickness nor drudgery could long turn him from the deepest craving of his spirit. Conscious of his powers, he yet had, what is perhaps the rarest talent in men

of his temperament, the talent of waiting. The mission of poet, as he conceived it, transcends all others; he knew that the innate poetic faculty would not suffice for its fulfillment unless it were reinforced by character and by knowledge. So he refrained from miniature utterance. "Day by day," he wrote to his wife in February, 1870, "from my snow and my sunshine, a thousand vital elements rill through my soul. Day by day, the secret deep forces gather, which will presently display themselves in bending leaf and waxy petal, and in useful fruit and grain." Again, from Texas, he wrote: "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, soulsongs, 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."

Conscious of his powers, therefore, he had nevertheless patience to await their ripening. Feeling that the highest mission had been entrusted to him, he seems to have said to himself, like Milton: "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy."

To break away from the law against his father's advice, and to seek support from his art among strangers, required resolution which only his loyalty to art could justify. In Baltimore his flute brought him a bare maintenance, and left him leisure for study and for poetry. He felt that the time had come when he VOL. LXXIV. NO. 441. 2

might open his lips. A long poem, Corn, took shape, and he hoped to find in New York an editor who would publish it; but a visit to that city only served to teach him the "wooden-headedness" of many persons who were leaders there in literary matters. Yet he was not discouraged, nor did the rebuff sour him. "I remember," he writes, "that it has always been so; that the new man has always to work his way over these Alps of stupidity, much as that ancient general crossed the actual Alps, splitting the rocks with vinegar and fire, that is, by bitterness and suffering. D. V., I will split them. . . . The more I am thrown against these people here, and the more reverses I suffer at their hands, the more confident I am of beating them finally. I do not mean, by beating,' that I am in opposition to them, or that I hate them, or feel aggrieved with them; no, they know no better, and they act up to their light with wonderful energy and consistency. I only mean that I am sure of being able, some day, to teach them better things and nobler modes of thought and conduct."

...

A few months later, in Lippincott's Magazine for February, 1875, Corn was published. Read after twenty years have proved its staying powers, we do not wonder that here and there a discerning reader at once recognized the merits of that poem; for in it we plainly see Lanier's credentials from the Muse. Nevertheless, recognition came slowly, but it came from persons whose opinion confirmed his unflinching yet unpresumptuous belief in his poetic mission. First among these was Mr. Gibson Peacock, the friend to whom the following series of letters was written. Mr. Peacock was the editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, a newspaper in which, under his direction, literary and artistic matters were treated seriously at a time when it was rare for Philadelphia journals so to treat them. In these days he would be called an editor of the old

school, since he had had a college education, had read widely the best English literature, was familiar with the modern languages, had traveled far in this country and in Europe, and had cultivated himself not less in music and in dramatic criticism than in books. Having read Corn in Lippincott's, he wrote an enthusiastic notice of it in the Evening Bulletin; and this notice speedily brought him a letter from Lanier, the first in this collection, and ere many weeks they met. From their meeting ripened a friendship strong and honorable on both sides, as these letters will show. Though Mr. Peacock was a man of extreme reserve, and the elder by twenty years, yet neither age nor reserve hindered his affectionate interest from manifesting itself to Lanier, who, in turn, rejoiced at finding a friend who was also competent to criticise and to suggest.

Through Mr. Peacock, Lanier became acquainted with Charlotte Cushman, with Bayard Taylor, and with many another of the appreciators of art and literature who in those days frequented the little parlors in Walnut Street. How inspiring and helpful this intercourse was to Lanier we may guess when we remember that until now, though past thirty, he had been seeking health and a livelihood in places which, stricken by the havoc of conquest, had little time or means for culture. Amid hostile conditions he had cherished his Ideal, and now he found, what every genuine soul craves, friendship and appreciation. There was no danger of his becoming spoiled; the sympathy he received was far removed from flattery. To Miss Cushman he was especially drawn, — as were all who had the privilege of knowing well that generous and brave spirit, - and to Mrs. Peacock, whose voice of wonderful range and beauty, and whose sympathetic nature, made her doubly attractive to him. He could now feel that though fame still lingered, and though the daily struggle for existence must be

met, there was a little circle of friends whose commendation he could trust, and upon whose affection, liberal and sincere, he could at all times rely. At the Peacocks' he more than once found shelter in distress. There, during the Centennial year, he was tenderly nursed through an illness which brought him very near the grave; there, his visits were always welcome.

Lanier's letters to Mr. Peacock tell so fully his plans and wanderings between 1875 and 1880 that it is unnecessary to add biographic details here. During those years there was no other correspondent to whom he so freely wrote out of his heart. These letters not only admit us into the fellowship of a poet, but they also disclose to us a man whose life was, in Milton's phrase, "a true poem." Here is nothing to extenuate, nothing to blot: the poet and the man are one. My purpose in editing has, accordingly, been to retain whatever reveals aught, however slight, of the man, in order that the portrait of Lanier's personality, unconsciously drawn by himself, should be as complete as possible; and whatever does not refer to this will at least illustrate the conditions by which an embodied Ideal, a Poet, so recently found himself beset in this world of ours. I know not where to look for a series of letters which, in bulk equally small, relate so humanly and beautifully the story of so precious a life.

display themselves in this critique. I thank you for it, as for a poet's criticism upon a poet.

Permit me to say that I am particularly touched by the courageous independence of your review. In the very short time that I have been in the hands of the critics, nothing has amazed me more than the timid solicitudes with which they rarefy in one line any enthusiasm they may have condensed in another, a process curiously analogous to those irregular condensations and rarefactions of aim which physicists have shown to be the conditions for producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics have seemed if I may change the figure-to be forever conciliating the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes. From these you separate yourself toto cœlo: and I am thoroughly sure that your method is not only far more worthy the dignity of the critical office, but also far more helpful to the young artist, by its bold sweeping-away of those sorrowful uncertain mists that arise at times out of the waste bitterness of poverty and obscurity.

-Perhaps here is more feeling than is quite delicate in a communication to one not an old personal friend: but I do not hesitate upon propriety, if only I may convey to you some idea of the admiration with which I regard your manly position in my behalf, and of the earnestness with which I shall always consider myself

Your obliged and faithful friend,
SIDNEY LANIER.

March 2nd, 1875. DEAR MR. PEACOCK: I write a line to say that business will probably call me to Philadelphia in a day or two, and that I particularly desire to go with you and Mrs. Peacock to Theodore Thomas' Symphony Concert on Friday night. If you have no other engagement for that evening, pray set it apart graciously for me: who am already tingling with the

anticipated double delight of yourselves and of music.

Many thanks for the Bulletin containing the Sonnet. I am gratified that you should have thought the little poem worth republishing. I have not now time to say more than that I am always Your friend,

SIDNEY LANIER.

March 24th, 1875.

A thousand thanks for your kind and very thoughtful letter. I should have gone to Philadelphia in acceptance of your invitation to meet Miss Cushman, although much tied by engagements here, and in ill condition of health to go anywhere, had I not expected to meet her here in April. Your announcement of her illness gives me sincere concern, and I will be thankful to you if you will keep me posted as to her progress in recovery. I wrote her a short time ago, to care of her bankers in New York: but fear she has been too ill to read my letter.

I have the delightful anticipation of seeing you again, for a day or two, erelong but cannot tell whether it will be in two or three weeks. My plans depend on the movements of others; and as soon as they become more definite you shall know them.

Pray tell your good Mrs. Peacock that I am much better, and, though in daily fight against severe pain, am hard at work. About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it The Symphony: I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit.

Did you see Mr. [Bayard] Taylor? Tell me about him. I cannot tell you