The following short abstract taken from Prof. Charles W. Kent's excellent "Study of Lanier's Poems" will give a fair conception of his method:

Lanier in the "Science of English Versification," after discussing the four possible sound-relations, duration, intensity, pitch, and tone-color, shows that only three exact coördinations are possiblenamely, duration, pitch, and tone-color, or their effects, rhythm, time, and color. He then points out that music and verse differ only in the means by which the coordination of rhythm, time, and tonecolor are made-namely, in the case of music by musical sounds, and in the case of verse by spoken words. Rhythm is then discussed, the principle of accent as the basis of rhythm is discarded, and time is postulated and defended as the essential basis. This established, the quantity of a syllable, the grouping of sounds into bars as units of measure, and the broader grouping by phrases, by lines or meters, by stanzas and by poems, are treated fully. The phrase grouping may be effected in various ways-for instance, by logical pause, by alliteration, by logical accent, etc.

The essential difference of Lanier's theory from that generally received is this: that rhythm in verse is precisely the same as rhythm in music, and that rhythm in music consists of exact time relations among sounds and silences. Hence the office of accent cannot begin until rhythm is established, and then its office is limited simply to grouping into bars. But both bars and accent are unessential to verse. Rhythmic pronunciation and logical accents must not be confounded. Using the musical notation, the author shows that bars contain a given number of notes of a fixed length. In making out the proper number of units of time, absence of time must be supplied by pauses of definite length. The bar may contain any number of units of time in theory, but practically, rhythm containing three units or three rhythm, and rhythm containing four units or four rhythm, are the ones occurring, and of these the three rhythm is by far the most popular in English.

Greater freedom, it is intended, should hereby be given to poetry, so that there may be no other limitations than the capacity of the human ear to comprehend or coör

dinate the grouping of the sounds. "There is certainly nothing more interesting in Lanier's book," says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "than when he shows that just as a Southern negro will improvise on the banjo daring variations, such as would, if Haydn employed them, be called high art; so Shakespeare often employed the simplest devices of sound, such as are familiar in nursery songs, and produced effects which are lyrically indistinguishable from those of Mother Goose." After calling attention, then, to the prevalence and universal tacit recognition of tune in ordinary speech, Lanier adds:

Once we get a fair command of all these subtle resources of speech-tunes, once we have trained our ears to recognize and appreciate them properly, once we have learned to use them in combination with the larger rhythm, which are easily within the compass of our English tongue, what strides may we not take toward that goal, of the complete expres

sion of all the complex needs or hopes or despairs of modern life, which ever glitters through the clouds of commonplace before the eyes of the fervent artist!

But with Lanier there was no intention of allowing this liberty to go back into formlessness again. One of his latest utterances on this subject emphasizes his position. "Once for all remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it, remembering the relations of science as the knowledge of forms, of art as the creator of beautiful forms, of religion as the aspiration toward unknown forms and the unknown form-giver, let us abandon this unworthy attitude toward form, toward science, toward technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor." Lanier died too young to give perfect expression to his scientific theories in beautiful poetic creations, though it must be granted that he was making marvelous progress toward the last. This is all the more necessary to keep in

mind since Mr. Stedman has said that "Lanier's difficulties were explained by the very traits which made his genius unique. His musical faculty was compulsive. It inclined him to override Lessing's law of the distinctions of art and to essay in language feats that only the gamut can render possible."

In a recent letter, October 9, 1896, Mrs. Lanier says: "As Mr. Lanier's very first book has long been out of print, so for three years has been his latest one, The English Novel,' but under more hopeful conditions of recovery. Under that title were published the twelve lectures delivered in 1881 at Johns Hopkins University, a course named by the lecturer, From Eschylus to George Eliot, the Development of Personality.' The book-title has not conveyed the purpose of the lectures, for the novel was chosen only as the literary form in which the development of personality could best be