of this terrible science, it seems to me that we find-as to the substance of poetry-a steadily increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and the sovereign fact of man's personality, while as to the form of the poetry we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and richer

yields.' There was no fear in his mind that science would ever find out the Almighty unto perfection or uncloak the mysteries of the universe. Yet, as with all serious, reflecting souls, when some of the latter obtruded their ghastly presence into the forefront of his observation, the former at times seemed to be far away, as the following unpublished fragment discloses: "In

the lily, the sunset, the mountain, and the rosy hues of all life it is easy to trace God. But it is in the dust that goes up from the unending battle of things that we lose him. Forever through the ferocities of storms, the malice of the never - glutted oceans, the savagery of human wars, the inexorable barbarities of accident, of earthquake, and mysterious disease one hears the voice of man crying: 'Where art thou, my dear Lord and Master?'"

In the quiet hours of meditation and of love the answer came to Lanier, as it comes to all those

Godly hearts, that, grails of gold,
Still the blood of faith do hold.

"I have a boy whose eyes are as blue as your Aëthra's," he writes to Paul H. Hayne. "Every day when my work is done I take him in my strong arms and lift him up and pore in his face. The intense repose, penetrated somehow with a thrilling mystery of potential activ

ity which dwells in his large, open eye, teaches me new things. I say to myself: Where are the strong arms in which I, too, might lay me and repose, and yet be full of the fire of life?' And always through the twilight come answers from the other world: 'Master! Master! there is one-Christ; in his arms we rest!""

But his highest joy and deepest satisfaction in contemplating the "Crystal Christ" were attained through art. He was neither the agnostic nor the religionist. "The Church is too hot," he says in an unpublished fragment—"The Beauty of Holiness: the Holiness of Beauty”—“ and Nothing is too cold. I find my proper temperature in art. Art offers to me a method of adoring the sweet Master, Jesus Christ, without the straitness of a creed which confines my genuflections and without the vacuity of doubt which numbs them. An unspeak

able gain has come to me in simply turning a certain phrase the other way. The beauty of holiness becomes a new and wonderful saying to me when I figure it to myself in reverse as the holiness of beauty. This is like opening a window of dark-stained glass and letting in a flood of white light. I thus keep upon the walls of my soul a church wall rubric which has been somewhat clouded by the expiring breaths of creeds dying their natural deaths. For in art there is no doubt. My heart beat all last night without my supervision, for I was asleep. My heart did not doubt a throb. I left it beating when I slept; I found it beating when I awoke. It is thus with art it beats in my sleep. A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit."

In his soul, however, artistic beau

ty and moral beauty are twin stars that give a single light. "Let any sculptor," he says in this book, "hew out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fullness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor-unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose-may as well give over his marble for paving Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work. For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty

stones.