ume, covering only ninety-four pages, and published by the Lippincotts in 1877, "but they strike the whole range of his ambition." Other writings during this period were a series of papers on India for Lippincott's Magazine, in which to avoid arid encyclopedic treatment and give naturalness to the adventures and descriptions, he called to his aid a delightful imaginary Hindoo friend and his book on "Florida," published in 1876 by the Lippincott's, which cost him much travel, fatigue, and labor. In a letter to Paul H. Hayne he writes: “After working day and night for the last three months on the materials I had previously collected, I have just finished the book. . . . This production is a sort of spiritualized guidebook. . . . I have had to labor from ten to fourteen hours a day, and the confinement to the desk brought on my old hemorrhages a month ago, which quite threatened for a time to

suspend my work forever on this side the river." And yet this "potboiler," written under such conditions, is thoroughly characteristic of the author-cheerful, scientific, imaginative, full of delightful information, going out of the way to say a kind thing or quote a charming poem of a brother Southern poet, though it is melancholy reading when we call to mind a sentence in a letter written a little earlier to another friend: "My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen."

His personal appearance at this time was striking, and fixed itself in the memory. "The name of Sidney Lanier," says Mr. E. C. Stedman, "brings him clearly to recollection as I saw him more than once in the study of our lamented

Deucalion-the host so buoyant and sympathetic-the Southerner, nervous and eager, with dark hair and silken beard, features delicately molded, pallid complexion, and hands of the slender, white, artistic type." In a letter to the writer October 9, 1896, Mrs. Lanier says: "The profile portrait in the volume of Complete Poems'-taken from photograph of January, 1874-quite misrepresents his physique; for it suggests a man heavy built about the shoulders-the effect of a doublebreasted coat of extraordinary thickness and other heaviest clothing—all worn to guard him from the rigor of the first Northern winter; while the attitude (inclining backward), in combination with this bulk of clothing, results in the wider discrepancy of an impression of portliness -the very opposite of his build and movement. A bow that is a-spring, a flying Mercury, more ethereal than John of Bologna's, with slen

der, yet uplifted chest-these rather convey the spirit of his earthly tenement. This profile, though it withholds the eye-brilliant and penetrating, yet tender-gives finely the expressive nostril, the brow, the ear, the fall of the silken-textured hair. More than any other it discloses to me the spiritual man, as the likeness taken at fifteen speaks the very spirit of the boy—that is, the original ambrotype and the direct. photographic copies. No engraving of this face has approached suc

During the next two or three years Lanier was disappointed in various efforts to get permanent employment. In the summer and fall of 1876 he entertained the hope of filling "a sort of nondescript chair of Poetry and Music" in Johns Hopkins University, which was all the more tantalizing because of the President's evident inclination to make the offer. Next we hear of a

faint wish that Mr. Hayes would appoint him to a consulship in the south of France. Then his kinsmen and friends made a determined effort to secure him a place in one of the departments in Washington; but September 27, 1877, he writes to Mr. Peacock: "There does not appear the least hope of success here. Three months ago the order was given by Secretary Sherman that I should have the first vacancy; but the appointment clerk, who received the order, is a singular person, and I am told that there are rings within rings in the department to such an extent that vacancies are filled by petty chiefs of division without ever being reported at all to the proper officers." November 3 he writes again: "I have set on foot another attempt to get a place in the Johns Hopkins University; I also have a prospect of employment as an assistant at the Peabody Library here; and there is still a possibility of a