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 Sidney Lanier finds a secure, a charming, an intelligent continuance in his wife's interpretation of him.

The foundation of Lanier's superb equipment, it would seem, was music. This was his supreme naturegift, his earliest passion, his abiding love. Music echoes through his books; music dominates his theories of poetry. "The imagery' of music-notes' and 'tones' and 'melodies' and 'harmonies' and 'tonecolors' is his natural language." Nor does he in the least misread himself when in 1873 he writes to a friend: "Whatever turn I may have for art is purely musical, poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes." He lived in a concord of sweet sounds. A little fragment headed “The beauty of holiness: the holiness of beauty," left among his papers,

gives a unique revelation of how essentially musical was his nature: "A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along the background of my spirit. If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the thoughts which occupy the front of the stage, the dramatis personæ of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear. The following letter, written to his wife from New York August 15, 1870, will perhaps give a faint conception of the joy of his soul while listening to the finest music:

Flutes and horns and violins, celestial sighs and breaths slow-drawn, penetrated with that heavenly woe which the deep heart knoweth when it findeth not room in the world for its too great love, and is worn with fasting for the beloved; fine purity fiercely attacked by palpitating fascinations, and bracing herself and struggling and fighting therewith, till what is maidenly in a man is become all

grimy and sweat-beaded like a warrior. Dear Love, shot by some small arrow and in pain with the wound thereof; divine lamentations, far-off blowings of great winds, flutterings of tree and flower leaves, and air troubled with wing beats of birds or spirits; floatings hither and thither of strange incenses and odors and essences; warm floods of sunlight, cool gleams of moonlight, faint enchantments of twilight, delirious dances, noble marches, processional chants, hymns of joy and of grief-ah [all these came to me] last night, in the first chair next to Thomas's Orchestra.

All this is clearly recognized in the beautiful tribute to his musical genius given by Asger Hamerik, his director for six years in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Balti

more:

To him as a child in his cradle music was given, the heavenly gift to feel and to express himself in tones, His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world. It was indeed irresistible that he should turn with

those poetical feelings which transcend language to the penetrating gentleness of the flute, or the infinite passion of the violin; for there was an agreement, a spiritual correspondence between his nature and theirs, so that they mutually absorbed and expressed each other. In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry, they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees. No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid of the higher language of music to inspire others with that sense of beauty in which he constantly dwelt. His conception of music was not reached by an analytic study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman's reason he felt it so because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning. His playing appealed alike to the musically learned

and to the unlearned, for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art. I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody Symphony concert in 1878-his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius!

In rare conjunction with this exquisite musical nature was the philosophic and scientific mind. Lanier, too, followed Solomon's direction, "Get learning, get understanding," recognizing that the road lay "through application, study, and thought." And he also belonged, as we have seen, to the modern world of scholarly research and scientific inquiry. He was, moreover, an inventor, a lover of the natural