what problems engaged his attention and how were they solved? A careful investigation will show, I believe, that, despite the brevity of his life and its consuming cares, Lanier studied the chief questions of our age, and that in his poems he has offered us noteworthy solutions.

What, for instance, is more characteristic of our age than its tendency to agnosticism? I pass by the manifestations of this spirit in the world of religion, of which so much has been heard, and give an illustration or two from the field of history and politics. Picturesque Pocahontas, we are told, is no more to be believed in; moreover, the Pilgrim Fathers did not land at Plymouth Rock, nor did Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Which way we turn there is a big interrogationpoint, often not for information but for negation. Of the good resulting from the inquisitive spirit, we all know; of the baneful influence of inquisitiveness that has become a mere intellectual pastime. or amateurish agnosticism, we likewise have some knowledge; but the evil side of this tendency has seldom been put more forcibly, I think, than in this stanza from Lanier's Acknowledgment:

"

O Age that half believ'st thou half believ'st,

Half doubt'st the substance of thine own half doubt,
And, half perceiving that thou half perceiv'st,
Stand'st at thy temple door, heart in, head out!
Lo! while thy heart's within, helping the choir,
Without, thine eyes range up and down the time,
Blinking at o'er-bright Science, smit with desire
To see and not to see. Hence, crime on crime.
Yea, if the Christ (called thine) now paced yon street,
Thy halfness hot with his rebuke would swell;

Legions of scribes would rise and run and beat
His fair intolerable Wholeness twice to hell." 1

More hurtful than agnosticism, because affecting larger masses of people, is the rapid growth of the mercantile spirit during the present century, especially in America. This evil the poet saw most clearly and felt most keenly, as every one may learn by reading The Symphony, his great poem in which the speakers are the various musical instruments. The violins begin :

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart-'tis tired of head."

Then all the stringed instruments join with the violins in giving the wail of the poor, who "stand wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand:

"We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
We sieve mine-meshes under the hills,

And thieve much gold from the Devil's bank tills,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills ?—

The beasts, they hunger, and eat, and die ;
And so do we, and the world's a sty;

Hush, fellow-swine: why nuzzle and cry?
Swinehood hath no remedy

Say many men, and hasten by,

Clamping the nose and blinking the eye.
But who said once, in the lordly tone,

Man shall not live by bread alone

But all that cometh from the throne?

Hath God said so?

But Trade saith No:

And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say Go:

There's plenty that can, if you can't: we know.

1 Acknowledgment, l. 1-12.

The Symphony, II. 1-2.

Move out, if you think you're underpaid.
The poor are prolific; we're not afraid;
Trade is Trade.'

"Thereat this passionate protesting
Meekly changed, and softened till
It sank to sad requesting

And suggesting sadder still:

'And oh, if men might some time see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be !
Does business mean, Die, you-live, 1?
Trade is trade" but sings a lie :
'Tis only war grown miserly.

Then

If business is battle, name it so.' 1

Of even wider sweep than mercantilism is the spirit of intolerance; for, while the diffusion of knowledge and of grace has in a measure repressed this spirit, it lacks much of being subdued. I do not wonder that Lanier "fled in tears from men's ungodly quarrel about God," and that, in his poem entitled Remonstrance, he denounces intolerance with all the vehemence of a prophet of old.

But Lanier had an eye for life's beauties as well as its ills. To him music was one of earth's chief blessings. Of his early passion for the violin and his substitution of the flute therefor, we have already learned. According to competent critics he was possibly the greatest flute-player in the world, a fact all the more interesting when we remember that, as he himself tells us, he never had a teacher. With such a talent for music the poet has naturally 1 The Symphony, 11. 31-61.

2 See Ward's Memorial, pp. xx, xxxi.

3 Hayne's (P. H.) A Poet's Letters to a Friend.

strewn his pages with fine tributes thereto. In Tiger-lilies, for instance, he tells us that, while explorers say that they have found some nations that had no god, he knows of none that had no music, and then sums up the matter in this sentence: "Music means harmony; harmony means love; and love means-God!" ! Even more explicit is this declaration in a letter of May, 1873, to Hayne: "I don't know that I've told you that whatever turn I may have for art is purely musical; poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes. I could play passably on several instruments before I could write legibly, and since then the very deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry." We have already seen incidentally that in his Symphony the speakers are musical instruments; and it is in this poem that occurs his felicitous definition,

"2

"Music is love in search of a word." 3

In To Beethoven he describes the effect of music upon himself:

"I know not how, I care not why,
Thy music brings this broil at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies.

1 Tiger-lilies, p. 32.

"Hayne's A Poet's Letters to a Friend. After settling in Baltimore Lanier devoted more time to poetry than to music, as we may see from this sentence to Judge Bleckley, in his letter of March 20, 1876: "As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket." 3 The Symphony, 1. 368.

"Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,
And tunes the task each day begins

By the last trumpet-note of Time." 1

It was this profound knowledge of music, of course, that enabled Lanier to write his work on The Science of English Verse, and gave him a technical skill in versification akin to that of Tennyson.

2

6

8

Like most great poets of modern times, Lanier was a sincere lover of nature. And it seems to me that with him this love was as all-embracing as with Wordsworth. Lanier found beauty in the waving corn and the clover; in the mocking-bird, the robin, and the dove; in the hickory,' the dog-. wood," and the live-oak; in the murmuring leaves and the chattering streams; 10 in the old red hills " and the sea; 1 in the clouds," sunrise,14 and sunset; and even in the marshes,1 which "burst into bloom' for this worshiper. Again, Lanier's love of nature was no less insistent than Wordsworth's. remember the latter's oft-quoted lines:

15

We all

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears;

1 To Beethoven, 11. 61-68.

See The Waving of the Corn and Corn.

• 17

See Clover.

* See The Mocking-Bird and To Our Mocking-Bird.

5 See Tampa Robins.

See From the Flats, last stanza.

8 See Sunrise.

6 See The Dove.

• See Sunrise and Corn.

10 See The Song of the Chattahoochee and Sunrise.

11 See Corn.

12 See Sunrise and At Sunset.

13 See Individuality. 14 See Sunrise, etc. 15 See At Sunset. 16 See The Marshes of Glynn, and read Barbe's tribute to Lanier, cited in the Bibliography.

17 Intimations of Immortality, 11. 202-203.