no doubts about the "tall young Adam of the West": "At heart let no one fear for thee: Thy Past sings ever Freedom's song, Thy Future's voice sounds wondrous free." The Jacquerie, too, which was in his mind, waiting a chance to be written, for most of his working life, enthralled him because it dealt with "the first time that the big hungers of the People appear in our modern civilization." The most poignant note of the "Symphony" is his cry for the poor: "Wedged by the pressure of Trade's hand That pressure tightens evermore:" He was a passionate democrat. His ideal of democracy was simply that of Jesus Christ-the inevitable result of loving one's neighbor as one's self. He says, in a fervent passage, rejecting mere bigness as an object of pride: "A republic is the government of the spirit; a republic depends upon the self control of each member; you cannot make a republic out of muscles, and prairies, and Rocky Mountains; republics are made of the spirit." He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. His extraordinary sensitiveness to the delicate, halfhidden beauties of nature was never troubled for fear that all he could learn about trees, flowers, microscopic life, or meteorology might lessen the mystery or charm. Every fact of nature, of science, of art was vital to him, was food for poetry, was building material for the palace of Truth which he conceived as the only adequate aim of the poet. For some thousands of years the sun has been "rising" in poets' pictures of dawn; but in Lanier's "Sunrise," "The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing." Surely there is but an increase of majesty in this adoption of one of the first facts of science. And the other stanzas in the same poem, hailing the sun as "Workman Heat" "Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet And be mixed in the death-cold oneness" are almost unique in poetry in their use of the knowledge of energy and matter which modern scientists have built up. Over and over he sang the responsibility of the artist for his work, his belief that more, not less, should be demanded of the genius than of the ordinary man. And while he delighted in vigorous, red-blooded life, he not only upheld in all his work an ideal of cleanness and absolute purity as the most manly of qualities, but he lived his doctrine as few men have lived it. And finally, everything he wrote is transfused with a belief in the best of man's nature. "Every man is as good as his best," was one of his favorite sayings. Everywhere there is humor, bravery, mag nanimity, knightliness, hope, faith, love. For he saw God in everything—or where he could not see, he trusted. His vision of the end of humanity was ever that of "the Catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness, and purity out of stain." SELECTIONS FROM SIDNEY LANIER POEMS THE TOURNAMENT JOUST FIRST I BRIGHT shone the lists, blue bent the skies, II Flourished the trumpets: entered Heart, III Heart's palfrey caracoled gayly round, Heart tra-li-ra'd merrily; 5 10 But Brain sat still, with never a sound, IV Heart's helmet-crest bore favors three 1 |