twilight of dawn"-evidently having himself in mind-Lanier answers: "Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated. The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masking in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society." Lanier has no patience with Whitman's standard of "democracy." "As near as I can make it out," he writes, " Whitman's

argument seems to be that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God." Over against Whitman's "roughs" he sets "George Washington, that beautiful, broad, tranquil spirit," “our courtly and philosophic Thomas Jefferson," "the Adamses and Benjamin Franklin," "William Cullen Bryant (that surely unrugged and graceful figure who was so often called the finest American gentleman) and Lowell and Longfellow;" and in contrast with Whitman's "rude muscle," "brawn" and "sinew of the Western backwoodsman " as the ideal of strength, he presents this exquisite picture: "I know— and count it among the privileges of my life that I do-a woman who has spent her whole life in bed for twenty years past, confined by a curious form of spinal disease, which prevents locomotion, and which, in

spite of constant pain and disturbance, leaves the system long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the mercy of all those tyrannical small needs which become so large under such circumstances; every meal must be brought to her, a drink of water must be handed; and she is not rich to command service. Withal her nature is of the brightest and most energetic sort. Yet surrounded by these unspeakable pettinesses, inclosed in this cage of contradictions, the woman has made herself the center of an adoring circle of the brightest people; her room is called Sunnyside;' when brawny men are tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest physical health are sick of life they go to her for the curative virtue of her smiles. Now this woman has not so much rude muscle in her whole body as Whitman's man has in his little finger; she is so fragile that long ago some one

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called her White Flower,' and by this name she is much known; it costs her as much labor to press a friend's hand as it costs Whitman's rough to fell a tree; regarded from the point of view of brawn and sinew, she is simply absurd; yet to the eye of my spirit there is more manfulness in one moment of her loving and self-sacrificing existence than in an eon of muscle-growth and sinew-breeding; and hers is the manfulness which is the only solution of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness of which only can a republic be built. A republic is the government of the spirit; a republic depends upon the self-control of each member; you cannot make a republic out of muscles and prairies and Rocky Mountains; republics are made of the spirit."

A mere glance at Sidney Lanier's prose serves to show that he was "a man of genius with a rare gift for the happy word." But our

chief interest in him arises from his determination to "be in life and utterance a great poet." His life was a beautiful and inspiring poem. Was he also as a worker in the sphere of imagination and in the realm of beauty the artist-in conception and in expression the poet? Were his scientific attainments and philosophic power used to enhance and ennoble his poetic gifts, or to mar and embarrass them? Did he possess the supreme gift? For the genuine lover of poetry is firmly persuaded that no profundity, no learning can give beauty to verses that lack the divine fire. No poet in the last forty years has so puzzled the critics. Superficial as well as essential resemblances have been abundantly suggested. Lanier has been likened in moral earnestness and loftiness of purpose to Milton, in intellectuality to Emerson, in spirituality to Ruskin, in love of nature to Wordsworth, in taste, sensibility, and ex