just before the war. In reply to Mr. Stephens's appeal that the South should support Mr. Buchanan for the presidency, Mr. Dawson thus argued upon the stump: "My friends, we once had the great Whig party, and in this State Mr. Stephens was its great leader. The Whig party has gone to Hades. We now have the great Democratic party, and in this State Mr. Stephens is its great leader. If he only leads the Democratic party where he led the Whig party I shall be perfectly satisfied." T CHAPTER LII. Georgia's Poems and Poets. O depreciate the ennobling influence of true poetry is worse than the sheerest of cynicism; it is actu ally the acme of boorishness. The arts are all ennobling; and poetry is the queen-mother of the arts. If to music belongs the voice of harmony, upon poetry, which bears the symbols of thought, must be conferred both the regal lips and the coronated brow. And since poetry is song lifted into articulate utterance it will merely heighten the meaning without disturbing the meter to make the Bard of Avon sing: "The man that hath no poetry in himself, Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sounds, The man who sneers at the language of the Muses as the language of the measles, intended for graduating essays and love-sick compositions, advertises his preference for bandits as congenial associates and outlaws himself from the society of the world's gentlest and truest aristocrats. He may wear the linen of Leeds and the broadcloth of Brussels, but he can not by any stretch of courtesy be classed among the gentle Greeks; and he is only an uncouth barbarian who has never sighted the cloud-rests of Olympus. True poetry is the mother-tongue of the world's master souls; the medium of exchange through which the landmarks of the ages deal in ideas; the language in which Chaucer sings to Tennyson-in which Virgil harps to Milton-in which Homer calls to Horace. It ignores all national distinctions; breaks down all barriers between continents and centuries; reconciles all Babel discords into Pentecostal harmonies; and summons all humanity into one vast sky-roofed concert-hall in which only master minstrels are engaged to sing. Is the ear dull or the mind stupid that the busy worldling can actually breathe the very air in which these heavenly harmonies are floating and yet be sordidly intent only upon the vaporings of discordant sounds which issue from the brazen lungs of Babylon? Is it any tribute to the ethereal spirit which is supposed to ennoble the common clay that instead of reaching for diamonds in the air he prefers to grovel with worms in the dust? The absence of the higher faculty which enshrines the instinct of worship for the Beautiful is more to be pitied than the dull insensibility which, lacking the physical powers of perception, skirts heedlessly the field of roses or breathes unconsciously the balm of violets. Physical losses are ofttimes abundantly recompensed by spiritual compensations. The man who is physically blind may still feast with an inner sight upon the ideal landscapes of the imagination. The man who is physically deaf may nevertheless be gifted with an inner ear whose sense is rapturously and delicately tuned to the subtlest whisperings of celestial music. But the man who having eyes sees not and the man who having ears hears not, the Beautiful, is an unnatural mon ster with whom decent Barabbas tan not associate and beside whom even Caliban himself shines like an opal. This little curtain-lecture is intended only for those in whom the suffocating air of the marshes has not yet stifled the instinct which holds the seed-hope of better things and for whom there are still some beckoning charms in the crystal ozone and magic elixir of the mountains. It is utterly and idly useless to lecture those who have long since lost whatever appendages they may have once had for soaring with the skylark, and who have now left only stomach-muscles for crawling with the caterpillar. The elimination of pure and wholesome sentiment from the gross realities of life is one of the worst of all the chips of human depravity which have drifted down from the garden of Eden. Yet even some of the very elect-salt of the earth seem to be destitute of this saving grace; and if they ever speak fluently the musical language of the higher plateaus of life the power of speech will have to be reconferred in the mystical process of the great change. Georgia's master-minstrel, in the strictly technical sense, was Sidney Lanier. The suffrages of the world's best literary critics have conferred upon him the degree preeminent. He was not, and will never be, like Whittier or Longfellow, the people's poet; but, like Lowell, he is steadily becoming from year to year what implies an appreciation much more critical; the poet's poet. Scholars are now beginning to study his verses like newly-discovered gold-bearing ores; and in the great universities of Europe his little volumes of song have been introduced as text-books into the crowded curriculums. Fame often loiters along the roadside, but when she does so it frequently appears that she has only been trimming her lamp. Too complex both in thought and in structure to become instant or universal favorites, the tunes of this rare singer do not lend themselves readily to popular pipings; but they charm the ear of the critical lover of poetry, just as the sublime symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven charm the senses of the critical lover of music. They may not offensively be characterized as poetic oratorios. the chair t only gher Sidney Lanier defined and established the true relationship between poetry and music by delving underneath the song-waves into the hidden labyrinths and finding the common parentage of both in the old ancestral home of harmony; and while an occupant more he of English in Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore he demonstrated this discovery in an extraordinary volume on the scientific basis of English verse. He no understood the rules of prosody but he excelled in hi mathematics and he understood the basic principles wh govern musical vibrations, being able to compute by c. culus almost any problem in harmonics. He knew th arithmetic of poetry before he shed his knickerbocker Moreover, he mastered French, German and Spanish. H was, therefore, musician, poet, mathematician and linguist. To this may also be added law; for he was an apt pupil of Mr. Blackstone. aich al he Vast as were the accomplishments of this extraordinary man he suffered arena-tortures of ill health during the greater part of his adult life and hardly knew what it was to enjoy exemption from bodily complaints. Such physical infirmities in one whose soul was fairly brimming S. |