quisite sense of beauty to Shelley and Keats, in technique to Tennyson, in the astonishing manipulation of his meter and cadence and involution to Swinburne. But these comparisons, especially in their cumulative effect, are deceptive and misleading, though they serve to show, coming as they do from so many sources, that he is an original and individual singer with many rare and attractive qualities.

In

In his "Poems" three stages of development are discernible. the earlier portion of his life, before 1874, music seems to have satisfied his deepest longings and highest aspirations, and in music his genius found easiest and most natural expression. As poetry was only a tangent into which he shot sometimes, there is a perceptible intellectual effort, as of one singing from the head and not out of the heart, which resulted in rigid, if not labored, movement and over

wrought fancy. There is, at any rate, a lack of that ease and spontaneity which was his musical birthright, and which belongs to the poets who lisp in numbers. Of this earlier period three poems rise distinctly above all his other effortstwo songs for "The Jacquerie," that of the hound and the "Betrayal," and "The Ship of Earth," though there are beautiful stanzas here and there in others, two in "Life and Song" being specially fine. In the first song, an allegory intended to represent the essence of the French revolutionary spirit growing out of the desperate misery and the brute force of medieval times, though the art is more plastic than in most of his earlier verse, the fancy is plainly constrained:

The hound was cuffed, the hound was kicked,

O'the ears was cropped, o' the tail was nicked,

Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.

The hound into his kennel crept;

He rarely wept, he never slept.
His mouth he always open kept,
Licking his bitter wound,
The hound,

U-lu-lo, howled the hound.

A star upon his kennel shone

That showed the hound a meat-bare bone. O hungry was the hound!

The hound had but a churlish wit.

He seized the bone, he crunched, he bit. "An thou wert Master, I had slit

Thy throat with a huge wound."
Quo' hound,

O, angry was the hound.

The star in castle-window shone,
The Master lay abed, alone.

O ho, why not? quo' hound.
He leapt, he seized the throat, he tore
The Master, head from neck, to floor,
And rolled the head i' the kennel door,
And fled and salved his wound.
Good hound!

U-lu-lo, howled the hound.

In the "Betrayal" he is freer, more natural, and his fancy is less violent-more chastened, as befits the theme. In simplicity, directness, reserved force it is strong, though somehow it lacks the melody

and pathos, as well as that human touch which goes straight to the heart in "The Bridge of Sighs."

The sun has kissed the violet sea,
And burned the violet to a rose.

O sea! would thou not better be

Mere violet still? Who knows? who
knows?

Well hides the violet in the wood:
The dead leaf wrinkles her a hood,
And winter's ill is violet's good;
But the bold glory of the rose,
It quickly comes and quickly goes-
Red petals whirling in white snows,
Ah me!

The sun has burnt the rose-red sea:
The rose is turned to ashes gray.
O sea, O sea, mightst thou but be

The violet thou hast been to-day!
The sun is brave, the sun is bright,
The sun is lord of love and light;
But after him it cometh night.
Dim anguish of the lonesome dark!—
Once a girl's body, stiff and stark,
Was laid in a tomb without a mark,

Ah me!

"The Ship of Earth" is perhaps not so perfect as either of the songs; it may give evidence of the straining

ambition of youth; and yet it is the most powerful description of a young man's terror of life, in the "storm and stress" period, I remember to have seen. It suggests two strong and rugged poets, Whitman and Browning, though Lanier's was a masterful nature, too, for all its purity and love of beauty :

Thou Ship of Earth, with Death, and Birth, and Life, and Sex aboard, And fires of Desires burning hotly in the hold,

I fear thee, O! I fear thee, for I hear the tongue and sword

At battle on the deck, and the wild mutineers are bold!

The dewdrop morn may fall from off the petal of the sky,

But all the deck is wet with blood and

stains the crystal red.

A pilot, God, a pilot! for the helm is left

awry,

And the best sailors in the Ship lie there among the dead!

But Lanier's was a strong and affluent nature, only less richly en