leagues of liberty." The factory window is but a barred prison look-out, from which they can gaze upon God's own sweet world of freedom, which they cannot enjoy. Sunrises and sunsets come and go, but never for these, obscured as they are in their prison house of trade. "They weave in the mills, they heave in the kilns"-and give their bodily strength to the fabric of their hands, while hunger bites at their souls. No such picture of the poor has been drawn in all modern poetry.

"And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say, 'Go,'
There's plenty that can, if you can't; we know-:
Move out if you think you are underpaid.

The poor are prolific; we are not afraid;
Trade is trade."

Somewhere I heard the story of a man who owned a great mill, which was the industrial wonder of the community. He lived in a far city and rarely visited this great money machine, which his manager operated with a view of paying the largest dividends and holding his own place. On one of his rare visits a delayed train landed the owner near his mill, unannounced, at four o'clock on a cold winter morning. As he walked toward the mill office, a long line of hungry men, women and children hurried by to the day's toil. By the roadside he found a little girl, barely ten, weeping from sheer cold, weak, and barely clad. She told him her story-how she worked fourteen hours a day, of the insufficient food, the poor, cold home and the scant clothes she wore.

The man had a child of her age at home, and somehow he saw her face in this hungry little waif. He took the little orphan in his arms, placed her in a home of comfort and provided for her future. Then he called his partners together and directed reforms, which made every employee happy and contented. He had caught the spirit of the lines:

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead
The time needs heart, 'tis tired of head-
'We are all for love,' the violins said."

That was the spirit for which the master was pleading in behalf of the poor, and one would think he was living in a later age, for there is much in this part of "The Symphony"

which is really prophetic. It must be recalled that the poem was written in 1875, but it would better suit the time one-third of a century later.

In this great production Lanier uses the tones of the violin, flute, clarionet and "all the mightier strings assembling" to plead in behalf of love in the souls of men against all forms of oppression and modern sin. These bewail the fate of the unfortunate, of the oppressed, the misled, the misdirected, and, in developing this appeal, the cleverness of the poet's art is brought into play. So obsessed of love for his fellow-men was the Master that he even pleads in their behalf, making some excuses for human frailty, for

"Man's love ascends

To finer and diviner ends

Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends."

And further on in still pleading for the good there is in every human soul, the flute tone says:

"When and why,

Man's tender pain, man's inward cry

When he doth gaze on earth and sky?"

Then this flute note saying, "I hold full powers from nature manifold," pleads by all the shy, sweet things which grow and live and love in the out-of-the-way places; forming one of the strongest passages in any poem ever written.

"I speak from all shaped blooms and leaves,
Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes
And briery mazes, bounding lanes:

From marsh-plants thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins;

For every long-armed woman vine

That round a piteous tree doth twine."

Passing over other lines of beauty equal to those just quoted, lines that smell of the swamp and the wildwood, the flute note continues:

"All modesties of mountain fawns
That leap to covert from wild lawns,

So nature calls, through all her system wide,

'Give me thy love, O man, so long denied.'"

After reaching this climax, the poem settles down to a saner, though no less vigorous arguing of the question, carrying out:

“And oh! if men might sometime see

How piteous false the poor decree

That trade no more than trade must be"-:

And then follow these wailing lines:

Alas! for the poor to have some part

In yon sweet living lands of art

Makes problem not for head but heart."

Then, as if swayed by an overwhelming love and pity for man and his faults, the flute note fain would make excuse— "For much time is run and man hath changed his ways" since

"The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder brain,

Chilled nature's streams till man's warm heat was fain
Never to lave its love in them again."

In this treatment of his theme the master reaches, perhaps, the loftiest pinnacle of his art as a poet. The whole is handled in such a tender and delicate way that one stands abashed at the artistic beauty of the picture and, more than that, at the sublime tenderness woven into its changing colors. Here Sidney Lanier is at his zenith. His subject is well chosen and no wonder as to the results. Always a musician, always an artist, always a poet, what else would we expect from the master? His theme-a pleading for more love in the souls of men, more love for nature and especially more love for those who are the unfortunates of earth-the poor-enables the master, through his flute-note messenger, to reach the sublimest heights of song.

I know a place where a cherry tree and a sun-dial stand,

close together, on a broad lawn. Nearby is a white stone bench where a man used to sit in the April twilight and look up at the stars. This man had spent the better half of his life as a slave to trade. He had worshipped money. Nothing but the ring of coin seemed to interest him. Wealth came and gave him a sufficiency, but with it came failing health and the man had to pause and take stock of the small balance of life that was left him.

He looked at life as he had lived it. He knew the pace and was sensible enough to know the price he had to pay for the manner in which he had lived.

So this man, facing the loss of health, felt the old longing for nature come back to him. He bought a few acres of land, built a house, planted a hedge and all manner of flowering things, including the cherry tree.

After two years in this new life, he was sitting in the April twilight, looking up at the stars. These two years had changed his whole life. He was now like a child, restored in health, buoyant, full of hope-back again with mother mature. The old love of trade had slipped away, and, as he sat there under the starlight of the April sky, he said:

"Good-bye, my wasted years! no more ye will return to me and no more shall I return to you. I was a prodigal! I went into a far country and wasted the best the Master had given me. I was a spendthrift and lost sight of all that is best in life. Dear, dead years, I shall return to you no more."

And as the man sat there in the gloaming, with peace in his soul and a love for nature and his fellow men expanding his whole being into something better, he reminded me of one who had read Lanier's "Symphony," caught its spirit and lived according to its broad, catholic teaching.

Following the lines of the poem, the voice of the clarionet now takes up the song in behalf of woman whom trade and greed have debauched with the tinkle and glitter of gold. Always pleading for the righting of wrong, this part of the master's work is of peculiar interest and beauty. Into it he has poured the deep fervor of his intense feeling and while this is in a minor tone, yet every word cuts clean to the heart because of its truth, for

"Like as a lady sings while yet

Her eyes with salty tears are wet,"

So this voice bemoans our modern wrongs which allow traffic in eyes, in lips, and in hearts. In the treatment of this subject, Lanier's craftsmanship lifts itself to great heights. To many this is the climax of the poem and certainly the master argues with a power and a pathos which never fail to impress even the most careless reader and move him to rebellion against a custom which will permit traffic in human souls.

"O purchased lips that kiss with pain!

O cheeks coin-spotted with smirch and stain!

O trafficked hearts that break in twain !"

Sidney Lanier's religion enters largely into the composition of "The Symphony," although this is concealed by the artistic workmanship of the poet. In his later years he developed a repugnance to the sectarianism of the churches, on account of the close lines which one church organization drew against the other. With the little creeds, the petty disputes, the tightly drawn ritual lines, he had no sympathy. His was that broad faith which saw God in every flower's upturned face and found a church beneath every sheltering tree. And so the master pleads, through all the beautiful lines of his wonderful poem, for that larger soul in every being which would lift the unfortunates out of their depression and make the world better through much needed reforms.

And yet after all, it is the old, old story of life which the poem tells in its summing up,-the story of life for a thousand years and more. Up through the ages wrong has ever waged its war against right, sin against virtue, and the strong have oppressed the weak. The master recognizes that the theme is gray with the tangle of many years-as old as Time itself; and so the magic of his genius brings forth the old harpers, sitting on the high sea-dunes, who, at his bidding, chant these lines:

"Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss
The sea of all doth lash and toss,
One wave forward and one across."