BOOKS.

SIDNEY LANIER.*

THE best poetry of the United States has always seemed to-

us more remarkable for refinement and fancy than for either passion or power. We are not, of course, speaking of the humorous poetry, which is a class by itself, and is in every respect sufficiently unique and original, but of the serious poetry, the poetry which deals directly with the deepest life.

No one can saytha' t Hiawatha is a poem of high passion, or that Mr. Lowell's finest poems, outside the region of humour, are poems of high passion. Sidney Lanier may claim to have been such a poet, though he was only thirty-nine when he died, and had to struggle with poverty all the years of his life, so that even in the twenty or so years of his mature

powers, a great deal of effort had to be devoted to the hard work of keeping the wolf from the door. He was the first, too, of notable Southern poets. He was born at Macon, in Georgia?, and fought on the Southern side in the Civil War of 1861-65. He had received a scrambling sort of College education, but his opportunities of culture were so meagre, that we can hardly understand where he got that delicacy of culture and that real love of learning which distinguished him almost as much as his vigorous imagination and depth of passion. There was nothing of the Massachusetts chill and fastidiousness about him, and occasionally, no doubt, his prose sounds to English ears a little stilted, though chiefly in the fashion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in other words, because he insists too much on the poet's right to be a little unnatural, or even to other ears affected, so long as his novelties of expression sound true to himself, and not because he is anxious to "whip creation," as the Yankees say, by straining to surpass anything that has been said before. For example, the following, from his descrip- tion of "the true democrat," sounds to our ears decidedly stilted, and it -would have repelled us, even as Walt Whitman repels us, if we had found very much of it, or any strain like it in his

poetry:- " My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure, the democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle hell ; he shall play ball with the earth ; and albeit his stature may be no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods of California ; his height shall be the height of great resolution, and love, and faith, and beauty, and knowledge, and subtle meditation; his head shall be forever among the stars."

But there was too much of the true critic in Lanier to admit of much tall-talk. He did not habitually aim at playing "ball with the earth," or " handling hell." He was a modest as well as an imaginative poet, and could see the absurd side of the stilted imagination of Walt Whitman, as well as any culti- vated Englishman. What could he have said of Whitman

better than this P-

" Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed fi•om the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle—is what Whitman

• Poems by &dim/ Lanier. Edited by his Wife. With a Memorial by William Hayes Ward. New York : Charles Soribner's Sons._ feeds our souls with." "As near as I can make it out, 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."

He is not quite so happy in his criticism on Swinbtune " He invited me to eat, the service was silver and gold, but no food -therein save pepper and salt ;" for no one can say of Atalanta in Calydon, or even of Bothwell, that there is nothing in it but condiment. And, on the other hand, the service is by no means always of silver and gold, for the Swin- burne verbiage is often so oppressive that the alloy presses itself on the attention a great deal more than the precious metal. But here is an exquisite criticism on William Morris : " He caught a. crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile." But Lanier's critical faculty, which was large, was not so considerable as his poetical faculty. Take the following, from a poem to his Wife, to show how genuine and individual was the imagination that entered into his .expression of feeling :- " 0 Love, 0 Wife, thine eyes are they, —My springs from out whose shining gray Issue the sweet celestial streams That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams.

Oval and large and passion-pure And gray and wise and honour-sure ; Soft as a dying violet-breath Yet calmly unafraid of death ;

Thronged, like two dove-cotes of gray doves, With wife's and mother's and poor-folk's loves, And home-loves and high glory-loves And science-loves and story-loves, And loves for all that God and man In art and nature make or plan, And lady-loves for spidery lace And broideries and supple grace And diamonds and the whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound, And loves for God and God's bare truth, And loves for Magdalen and Ruth, Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete— Being heavenly sweet and earthly-sweet, —I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns, 'Us then ye shine !"

No doubt there is here and there in the poem a hint of the desire to say in a striking way what would best have been said in a subdued way ; and again we cannot say that we like at all the— "high glory-loves

And science-loves and story-loves."

But nothing can be more perfect than— "the whole sweet round

Of littles that large life compound ;"

and the touch of wonder in the last two lines of the poem is as simple and exquisite as any touch of tendetness in our literature.

Take again, as a specimen of that fancy which is really more than fancy,—true imagination disguising itself as fancy, -the very fine sonnet on " The Harlequin of Dreams : "- " Swift, through some trap mine eyes have never found, Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep, Thou, giant Harlequin of Dreams, dost leap Upon my spirit's stage. Then Sight and Sound,

Then Space and Time, then Language, Mete and Bound, And all familiar Forms that firmly keep Man's reason in the road, change faces, peep Betwixt the legs and mock the daily round.

Yet thou cant more than mock : sometimes my tears At midnight break through bounden lids—a sign Thou halt a heart : and oft thy little leaven Of dream-taught wisdom works me bettered years. In one night, witch, saint, trickster, fool divine, I think thou'rt Jester at the Court of Heaven !"

There seems to us no easily assignable limit to the genius of the man who wrote that. The first part of the sonnet is as powerful as anything we know of the kind; but the conclusion, of it takes us into a higher region of imagination altogether, and paints the " harlequin of dreams " as the minister of God. Here is a younger and a much less perfect poem, which may be said to have something in it of the straining ambition of youth, and yet, for a young man's effort to describe his terror of life, in the " Sturm and Drang " period of his growth, how powerful it is!— "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, 0 ! 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 ! "

The poem which follows it, " How Love Looked for Hell," and, we may add, did not find it, may be set off against this. It is too long to quote, and we may add that its tendency is a little too much in the mood of the modern sentimentalism ; yet it is a thoroughly original poem, quaint indeed, but quaint with a simplicity of its own, and not with that affected quaint- ness which Lanier now and then puts on. That we have in Lather an original poet,—one more original, we think, than the United States has ever yet produced, more original than any poet whom England has produced during the last thirty years at least,—we feel no sort of doubt. Mr. William Hayes Ward, who has prefixed an interesting Memorial, speaks of the first poem in the volume, " Sunrise," as the finest it contains. Of that we are not sure, but it is certainly a very noble poem of its kind, a picture of sunrise over the salt-marshes near the sea, of remarkable brilliance and fascination. It is a little ambitions. It seems to stand on tip-toe here and there with its desire to express the inexpressible. Still, no one but a poet, and a poet of true genius, could, we think, have written this on the coming of dawn:— "Oh, what if a sound should be made !

Oh, what if a bound should be laid

To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring,— To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silenee the string !

I fear me, I fear me you dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'er.blown in a dream,— Yon dome of too tenuous tissues of space and of night, Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light, Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem But a bubble that broke in a dream, If a bound of degree to this grace be laid, Or a sound or a motion made.

But no : it is made : list ! somewhere,—mystery, where ? In the leaves ? in the air ?

In my heart ? is a motion made : 'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade.

In the leaves 'tie palpable : low multitudinous stirring Upwinds through the woods ; the little ones, softly conferring, Have settled my lord 's to be looked for ; so ; they are still ; But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill,— And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river,—

And look where a passionate shiver Expectant is bending the blades

Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades,— And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting, Are beating The dark overhead as my heart beats,—and steady and free Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea— (Run home, little streams, With your lapfulls of stars and dreams),— And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak, For list, down the inshore curve of the creek How merrily flutters the sail,— And lo, in the East ! Will the East unveil ?

The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed A flush : 'tie dead ; 'tis alive : 'tis dead, ere the West Was aware of it : nay, 'tie abiding, 'tie unwithdrawn : Have a rare, sweet Heaven ! 'Tie Dawn.

Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is up- rolled : To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold

Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea :

The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee, The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee

That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea."

Let us add that Lather has plenty of humour. Amongst what he called the " Dialect Poems," there are several brim-full of it,—as, for example, the first of the series, which be calls

" A Florida Ghpst." Lanier died so early that he did not really show us more than the bud of his genius ; but if be had lived ten years longer, he would, we believe, have ranked high among English poets, and probably above every American poet of the past. As it is, we think there is more of genius in this volume than in all Poe's poems, or all Longfellow's, or all Lowell's (the humorous poems excepted) ; and the poetry is, we think, of the kind that gains on us with familiarity, instead of losing ground.