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school, rules that taught us to count poet, and maintained that he cared

syllables on Our fingers. It was
Lanier who substituted the musical
notation. Anyone who reads The
Science of English Verse must get from
it a better understanding of versifica-
tion, and take more pleasure in it."
She went on
on to speak of the in-
teresting and instructive way in which
Lanier treats rhythm, showing it to
be a cosmical or fundamental principle,
according to which all regular succes-
sions of sounds in nature seem to re-
solve themselves into groups.

She called my attention to the inter-
esting point made by Lanier, when he
shows the function of the "rest" in
poetry. For he shows that there is a
"rest
in poetry as in music, and that

it has the same office.

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even less for the external aspects of nature than did Shelley or Keats. Το him it was what Goethe calls, "the living garment of God." Shelley desired things to be especially beautiful or grand, like the Alps at sunrise, but Lanier found satisfying beauty in great and typical things. He was inspired by nature in any typical form. It did not require an unusually beautiful sunrise or sunset to inspire his enthusiasm and reverence. He was more like Wordsworth. He had local touches, but he did not depend on them to create an interest. His Song of the Chattahoochee might have been the song of any stream.

My report of this conversation is very inadequate. I cannot give half the points or any of the brilliancy and glow of the speaker; but her words left me fully satisfied that she had found in Sidney Lanier an inexhaustible source of literary pleasure and instruction.

I will

"What critics have called poetic license,'" I still use her words, "Lanier proves to be in many cases correct verse, which can be scanned by the application of his musical notation. This is true of several of Shakespeare's sonnets and of the verses of Shelley, And in this she is far from standing Coleridge, Swinburne, and Tennyson. alone. Lanier is recognized by EngPope, the great example of the stilted lish critics as our Wordsworth, and in poetry, never loses a syllable. He would have thought it' a lame foot' that lacked one. He is the most formal of what might be called The School of Formal Poets.' Lanier holds that to do a thing instinctively and unconsciously, without understanding the principles of it, is to lose it. Froebel taught this. To understand the principle on which work is based, is to free the worker, whether teacher or poet, and leave him room to know that his work is artistic and scientific." One little thing she had never seen noticed by his critics or admirers, she said, is a certain original structure of verse which is just as distinctly a formal structure as that of the sonnet. She had found no other poem like it. It had thirteen lines and the rhythm changed twice. It is instanced in A Song of the Future. She held Lanier's passion for nature to be different from that of any other

our Keats, and is constantly growing
more dear to American hearts.
not compare him with Longfellow, be-
cause that poet was an interesting
story-teller, and the story is what
appeals to popular taste. Longfellow
will ever remain the more popular poet,
because he was master of the graphic
art. Yet Lanier had the deeper poetic
instinct. I will not compare Lanier
with Lowell, because that poet was
master of ethics, where Lanier was
tenderly religious and benignant. A
western paper has called him "the
poet of the benign." His verse is—
"Pure with the sense of the passing of saints
through the wood,".

while Lowell's is a battering ram of
moral purpose. Here again Lanier
is the poet and Lowell the preacher.
Lowell, like Longfellow and Whittier,
excelled in the image-making faculty
and will always be more attractive to

THE GENIUS OF SIDNEY LANIER.

I I

the popular eye. Lanier's verse will nizing their artists to English periodbe felt by the contemplative rather than seen by the student of poetic pictures. He is like Bryant in his quality of feeling. But he is more a part of the nature he interprets than is Bryant; his verse is nature's own self

icals? Some of our critics are still slow to acknowledge Lanier's genius, which we should cherish as a sacred gift. The Spectator was one of the earliest, if not the first, to assign to Lanier his rightful place among the artists of

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expression. As he sang of corn, so America; indeed, it places him first,

may we sing of him:

"As poets should,

Thou hast built up thy hardihood
With universal food,

Drawn in select proportions fair
From honest mould and vagabond air;
From darkness of the dreadful night
And joyful light."

"Why is it, dear friend," writes another to me, "that our people so often leave the delightful task of recog

saying that he is our greatest poet of passion and that there is no easily assignable limit to his genius. It says further that he was the finest writer of English that has lived in the last thirty years, and when I noticed the date of the paper I found that it was since the publication of In Memoriam. I regret this withholding of appreciation from the hearts that are most sensitive to the touch of their fellow

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"The far-off divine event

To which the whole creation moves.'

"Lanier is eminently the prophet of the laboring people, and with all the intensity of an artist's soul he suffers in their denials and longs for a higher destiny for the poor.

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

If business is battle, name it so;
War-crimes less will shame it so.
Alas, for the poor to have some part
In yon sweet living lands of art.

“Then, with the prophetic eye of
genius, he looks away across the dark
wastes of their lives and catches the
first faint gleams of their morning.

"I dare avouch my faith is bright

That God doth right and God hath might,
Nor time hath changed His hair to white
Nor His dear love to spite.'

"Such is the teaching of The Symphony. Its exposition of the trade problem of our country reminds one of the picture in Pilgrim's Progress of the man with the muck-rake. In this poem Lanier shows how all that is beautiful in life is in danger of being sacrificed to the commercial spirit of the people. Still there is no bitterness touching the Law that governs all things, but, with a faith in the final triumph of good which we rarely find except in Browning's philosophy, he teaches that love will at last solve all the problems of life and bring all its discords into harmony."

One of the finest acknowledgments of Lanier's mission I find in a letter from a Chicago student. "Lanier has always seemed to me to be in a way the successor to Wordsworth and Shelley as the interpreter of nature in

terms of spirit. The last words of
Plotinus are said to have been,
I am
striving to bring the God which is
within, into harmony with the God
which is in the universe.' It is what
modern philosophy is still trying to
do; and the best poets of our day
have given expression to the feelings
of this unity of all life which I think
is the most valuable thing in the
literature of this century. Philosophy
is trying to explain or find a formula
for what Wordsworth found to be
a fact of experience. All great art
is the prophetic or ideal reconciler,
and I think these three poets are the
reconcilers in this particular direction.
Lanier is valuable in a unique way.
His reputation, like that of Shelley
and Wordsworth, will be slowly won.
People in general like a romantic and
sentimental or pathetic description or
a stirring moral affirmation; but
thousands of readers never have had
the problem of nature and spirit pre-
sented to them, so that much, and
really the best, of Lanier, has been so
far a blank to them." I am always
pleased when I find among students
the recognition of the genius which

"Holds, with keen, yet loving eyes,

Art's realm from Cleverness apart."

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GEORGE WESTFELDT, THE FRIEND OF LANIER.

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tinguished hearer, "Mrs. Lanier is Mrs. Lanier carries the poetic atmosthoroughly attuned to her work. She is perfectly consecrated to the office of transmission, and obtrudes nothing of self, yet makes a wholly unconscious revelation of devotion, faith, and enthusiasm, herself no less poetic than the poems she reads."

phere, the ideal way of looking at
things, the uplift of great association
and rare good-breeding not
"teased
by small mixt social claims," wher-
ever she goes. No poet's wife ever
nursed his muse so jealously, or after
his death went on living his life out for
him so faithfully. The genius of Sid-
ney Lanier finds a secure, a charming,
an intelligent continuance in his wife's

It is an especial privilege of Mrs.
Lanier's readings that one hears what
cannot otherwise be reached, the
letters of the poet to his wife. They interpretation of him.
seem to me superior to Shelley's.

Mary E. Burt.

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GEORGE WESTFELDT, THE FRIEND OF LANIER.

F THE friendship between Sidney Lanier and Mr. George Westfeldt a few words could relate the outward facts, and the feeling is in tone with the environment of life's closing scenes: almost too sacred for any formal statement from a surviving hand.

One might easily be incredulous of such knitting of soul to soul upon such slender intercourse as befell in Mr. Lanier's drawing towards Mr. Westfeldt. I place it thus, because I am not sure that the maturer, calmer man, with life so honorably and endearingly fulfilled, did perceive immediately what he was to the eager and passion

ate younger heart of the poet that flung to him with instantaneous recognition in their first meeting. He did welcome this love with the large hospitality of a princely and gentle nature, and reverenced it duly; but in his self-reliance and self-unconsciousness he might not have thought of claiming it.

Very near the earthly end, while waiting in Asheville, North Carolina, for the furniture of our camp on Richmond Hill, we chanced to meet Mr. and Mrs. Westfeldt, who were friends of my parents and whom I had not met for twenty years. Our unhappy

MR. GEORGE WESTFELDT.

The first interview that evening lasted barely a halfhour, Mr. Westfeldt firmly resisting the appeal for longer time, as he perceived the invalid's condition. Yet when he had closed the door my husband, leaning by the mantelpiece with drooping head, raised his deep eyes to mine, saying wistfully: "I have been searching all my life for the father of my spirit and I have only found him now!"

This large recognitionsuch as perhaps only poets make-held the fine spiritual friendship that came too late for much outward manifestation.

Mr. Westfeldt was a Swedish gentleman who came to America when a mere lad and entered commercial affairs in Mobile, residing later in New Orleans, New York, and different European cities. It was his lofty record, during a long life involved in successful business interests, continually to have fulfilled Lanier's aspiration: to have

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war led them to a prolonged residence Sidney
in Europe for the peacefuller educa- proved,
tion of their children, and a few years.
later they had made a noble home—
for noble souls-overlooking the great
valley of the French Broad and its and ever to do what
encircling mountains, several miles.
south of Asheville. They were on
their homeward way from a drive to a
neighboring county and they rested for
the night at our hotel, and so found us.

"How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be!"

"Love alone can do "

"To follow Time's dying melodies through
And never to lose the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true."

Mary Day Lanier.

TIME AND LIFE.

RELENTLESS time sweeps on; it cannot stay.
The centuries fall like leaves in autumn's blast
Upon the dying earth-and hide the past.
But in the clay all undiminished lies
God's recreative strength that never dies.

Silas McChesney Piper.

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