fore the holidays — and should be given in January and February, instead of the course mentioned in my note to you this morning. I may add that if some other gentleman would offer courses on the Greek and Latin satirists, we might make a cyclus of it. 435 NORTH CALVERT STREET, Saturday evening. Faithfully yours, Lanier's public lectures were largely attended. What has been said of the Peabody lectures applies to the University lectures. Of the effect produced by him in his smaller University classes, one of his students writes: "I think that it was in the winter of 187980 that I heard that Mr. Lanier was to conduct a class in English Literature at the Johns Hopkins University, where I was then a Fellow. My field of work was Esthetics and the History of Art, and as I was eagerly searching for chances to broaden and deepen my ideas, I enrolled myself in the class. We were not many, and I have no recollection of individuals in the group. Neither can I distinctly recall either the topics taken up or the method followed, except that most of the hours consisted of extended readings by Mr. Lanier with all sorts of interjected remarks, often setting aside the reading altogether. That the course was a real source of intellectual profit to me I cannot doubt, but not in the form of definite information or systemized opinion. The benefit lay in a subtle expansion of the power of appreciation and an undefinable exaltation of the instincts of taste that I have since learned were more precious than any precise increments of cold knowledge. "What I do remember vividly is the fact that often, almost regularly, I used to wait for Mr. Lanier after the class (which was held in the evening) and walk home with him a mile or so, sometimes walking up and down for a long time. On these occasions we doubtless talked of all manner of things. I was only a student trying to find himself' in reference to the vast areas of thought. I was eager for sympathy and for inspiration. My life-work was still unchosen, but I was conscious of an intense drawing toward artistic topics not much with the creative impulse of the artist, but rather with the analytic and rational desire of the student. I was beginning to have a profound sense of the interrelations of the fine arts with each other and of all of them with the movement of history. I wanted a chance to talk out what I was thinking and to get new lights and promptings. So in our slow strolls homeward I presume that I often babbled freely of my studies in architecture and music, and my inconsequent remarks often led Mr. Lanier to speak somewhat freely, too, of his speculations and fancies. I now recall with wonder how he put me on such a footing of equality that I often quite forgot the difference in age and experience between us and almost felt him to be a companion student. I now see that this was the sign of two notable traits, the extreme native Southern courtesy that clothed him always in all his dealings with every one, and the essential youthfulness of his mind when moving among his favorite subjects. His was surely one of the finest of sympathies, delicate, sensitive, elastic, vital to the highest degree, the like of which is all too rare among men, though hardly described by the term feminine.' In it breathed a genuine capacity for love in the most noble sense, for he was ready to identify himself with the interests of another, to etherealize and dignify what he thought he saw in them, and thus absolutely to transform them by the alchemy of his touch. And, the more I think of it, the more I recognize that his soul was incapable of aging. ... This absolute freshness of heart and spirit seems to me to have been one of the highest notes of Mr. Lanier's genius. Here he was clearly allied to many a more famous poet or painter or musician." 1 1 Letter to the author from Professor Waldo S. Pratt, now of Hartford Theological Seminary. Among American poets Lanier has the same place with regard to the teaching of English that Lowell and Longfellow have in the study of modern languages. There were, to be sure, some greater English scholars in this country during the seventies than Lanier was, just as there were more scientific students of modern languages in the time of Longfellow and Lowell. Professors Child of Harvard, Lounsbury of Yale, March of Lafayette, Corson of Cornell, and Price of Randolph-Macon College-afterwards of Columbia University have a commanding place in the development of English teaching which has become such a marked feature of educational progress since, say, 1870. Throughout schools and colleges and universities English is now firmly established as perhaps the most important branch of study. It is to the credit of Lanier that before much had been done in this direction he saw the great need of such work. Indeed, as early as 1868, while examining the catalogue of a Southern university, he jotted down in his note-book a suggestion that the most serious defect in the curriculum was the lack of any English training. It is true that there had been from time immemorial chairs of belles lettres in institutions of learning, but the department had rather to do with things in general. Even where English was studied there was a tendency to use manuals of literature rather than the works of authors themselves; and there is now a tendency to use literature as the basis for philological work. Lanier's ideas strike one as singularly balanced and sane, suggesting a compromise between the warring camps of recent years. By reason of Lanier's sympathy with the ideals of the University, and his influence over some few students, he has a permanent place in the history of Johns Hopkins. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote to President Gilman: "It is a fine thing that such an institution as your University should have its shrines - and among them that of its own poet, in a certain sense canonized, and with his most ideal memory a lasting part of its associations." The University has, indeed, kept the fame and the personality of Lanier fresh in its memory. As one enters McCoy Hall and notices the lifesize portraits of the first president and the first members of the faculty, he misses the face of Lanier; but on entering Donavan Hall, just at the end of the main hallway, he finds himself in a room dedicated to the highest uses of poetry. There are pictures of men who have delivered lectures on the Percy Turnbull and Donavan foundations, manuscript letters of distinguished American poets and critics, and the bust of Lanier, whose spirit seems to dominate the sur |