N SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881) SUSTAINED Power of description, De Quincey's "Pains of Opium" is the only essay in the English language which can be rightly classed with "On the Ocklawaha in May," by Sidney Lanier, while, as might be expected, the melody of Lanier's prose is greatly superior to that of De Quincey's. Almost wholly neglected during his lifetime, Lanier was recognized after his death as one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. He wrote little, but of that little nothing can be spared. His "Hymns of the Marshes have been pronounced by his English admirers the greatest poems ever written in America; and if we take purity and sublimity as the standard by which to judge the essential element of great poetry, we need not hesitate to conclude that they are unequaled in the English verse of the nineteenth century. They show a greater intensity than Browning's and a higher lyrical faculty than Tennyson's. Lanier is not Longfellow's equal in breadth; and a life of suffering made him so intensive and introspective that, while distinctly superior to Longfellow in poetic quality, he is greatly his inferior in that most important quality by which the poet who has a message to deliver to mankind succeeds in making it intelligible to the largest possible number of people. Lanier's poetry has been growing steadily in favor with the decrease of sectional prejudices, but as a prose writer he is scarcely known at all. The prose essay by which he is best known is an examination of the fundamental principles of English verse. While it is of interest chiefly to specialists, it is a most extraordinary production. In it Lanier, who was a highly trained musician with an exquisite ear for melody, was carried by his sense of music to a realization of the fundamental principle which governs the melody of Homer and other great classical poets who practiced the Homeric mode. This may be called a coincidence, as Lanier had made no special study of classical verse, and as far as appears was unaware of the fundamental identity of principle governing the music of English verse, and that of the classical poets. But if a coincidence, it is one of governing law - not of chance. Lanier's own verse approximates the melody of the great classical poets, especially of the Horatian lyric and the Virgilian hexameter, to an extent that can never be realized except through the closest scientific comparison. It is scientifically accurate to say that he illustrates classical modes better than any other poet of the nineteenth century, and classical melody better than any other of the century except Burns. The ear for melody which governs his verse controls every inflection of the wonderful prose of his "On the Ocklawaha in May." Whether he is in jest or earnest, whether he is listening to a deck hand's whistling, or looking at the stars, the simple unforced, thoroughly natural prose in which he expresses his own unconscious sublimity, rises and falls with the free swing of a tune played by a master of the violin expressing his own deepest feelings and highest thoughts in his music. The essay is one of a series on Florida scenery contributed by Lanier to Lippincott's Magazine in 1875. It was afterwards used with others by Florida railroads to advertise the State, and those who read it aloud in his cadences will not need to be told that neither before nor since has any State had such an advertisement. There is no pretense of fine writing or "word painting " about it. The effort which becomes evident in the highest reaches of De Quincey's descriptive writing is nowhere apparent. The reader can hardly avoid the fear that Lanier will break down before the close and lapse into the bathos which so often punishes vigorous American attempts at eloquence; but Lanier is not more vigorous in his attempt than he would be in playing the flute or the violin, and whether he is gay or sad, sublime, or witty, he goes through to the end as easily, as unostentatiously, as naturally, as if the music of his language were really that of the instruments on which he learned "the whole art of composition. " He was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3d, 1842. His father, Robert S. Lanier, was a lawyer of ability and standing; and the family. had sufficient means to educate Sidney at Oglethorpe College, where he graduated in 1860. At the age of nineteen he enlisted in the Confederate Army and served until captured near the close of the war, contracting, as a result of hardship and exposure, the disease of the lungs of which, after years of suffering, he died at Lynn, North Carolina, September 7th, 1881. From 1868 to 1872 he studied and practiced law at Macon. In 1873 he removed to Baltimore where he supported himself by playing the flute at concerts, and afterwards (18791881) as lecturer on English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. His poems, edited by his wife, were first collected and published in 1884. They have not yet attained general circulation, and they probably will not until they can be reproduced in popular editions. no one who reads them at all is ever likely to forget them. In such verses as "Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! VII-157 Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain,». we have a suggestion more nearly adequate than can be found in any other modern poet of the free melody of classical verse, and with it a sublimity of thought which no classical poet ever attained. Lanier's life was one of infinite pathos, and he set it to immortal music. W. V. B. ON THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY The little OR a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. Ocklawaha steamboat Marion a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back had started from Pilatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o'clock of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made the twenty-five miles up the St. John's to where the Ocklawaha flows into that stream nearly opposite Welaka. Just before entering the mouth of the river, our little gopher boat scrambled alongside a long raft of pine logs which had been brought in separate sections down the Ocklawaha, and took off the lumbermen to carry them back up the stream for another descent, while this raft was being towed by a tug to Jacksonville. That man who is now stepping from the wet logs to the bow guards of the Marion,- how can he ever cut down a tree? He is a slim, melancholy native, and there is not bone enough in his whole body to make the left leg of a good English coal heaver; moreover, he does not seem to have the least suspicion that a man needs grooming. He is disheveled and wry-trussed to the last degree; his poor weasel jaws nearly touch their inner sides as they suck at the acrid ashes in his dreadful pipe; and there is no single filament of either his hair or his beard that does not look sourly and at wild angles upon its neighbors' filament. His eyes are viscidly unquiet; his nose is merely dreariness come to a point; the corners of his mouth are pendulous with that sort of suffering which involves no particular heroism, such as gnats, or waiting for the corn bread to get done, or being out of tobacco; and his- But, poor devil! I withdraw all that has been said; he has a right to look disheveled and sorrowful; for listen: "Well, sir," he says, with a dilute smile, as he wearily leans his arm against the low deck and settles himself so, though there are a dozen vacant chairs in reach, "ef we didn' have ther sentermentalest rain right thar on them logs last night, I'll be dadbusted!" He had been in it all night. I fell to speculating on his word "sentermental," wondering by what vague associations with the idea of "centre" -e. g., a centre shot, perhaps, as a shot which beats all other shots - he had arrived at such a form of expletive, or, rather, intensive. But not long, for presently we rounded the raft, abandoned the broad and garish highway of the St. John's and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha, the sweetest water lane in the world-a lane which runs for a hundred miles of pure delight betwixt hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and palms and magnolias and mosses and manifold vine growths; a lane clean to travel along, for there is never a speck of dust in it, save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and the lilies; a lane which is as if a typical woods ramble had taken shape, and as if God had turned into water and trees the recollection of some meditative stroll through the lonely seclusions of his own soul. As we advanced up the stream our wee craft seemed to emit her steam in more leisurely whiffs, as one puffs one's cigar in a contemplative walk through the forest. Dick, the pole man,-a man of marvelous fine function when we shall presently come to the short narrow curves,-lay asleep on the guards, in great peril of rolling into the river over the three inches that intervened between his length and the edge; the people of the boat moved not, spoke not; the white crane, the curlew, the limpkin, the heron, the water turkey were scarcely disturbed in their several vocations as we passed, and seemed quickly to persuade. themselves, after each momentary excitement of our gliding by, that we were really, after all, no monster, but only a mere day. dream of a monster. The stream, which in its broader stretches reflected the sky so perfectly that it seemed a ribbon of heaven, bound in lovely doublings upon the breast of the land, now began to narrow; the blue of heaven disappeared, and the green of the overleaning trees assumed its place. The lucent current 521719/ lost all semblance of water. It was simply a distillation of manyshaded foliages, smoothly sweeping along beneath us. It was green trees fluent. One felt that a subtle amalgamation and mutual give and take had been effected between the natures of water and of leaves. A certain sense of pellucidness seemed to breathe coolly out of the woods on either side of us, while the glassy dream of a forest over which we sailed appeared to send up exhalations of balms and stimulant pungencies and odors. "Look at that snake in the water!" said a gentleman as we sat on deck with the engineer, just come up from his watch. The engineer smiled. "Sir, it is a water turkey," he said gently. The water turkey is the most preposterous bird within the range of ornithology. He is not a bird; he is a Neck, with such subordinate rights, members, appurtenances, and hereditaments thereunto appertaining as seem necessary to that end. He has just enough stomach to arrange nourishment for his neck, just enough wings to fly painfully along with his neck, and just enough legs to keep his neck from dragging on the ground; and, as if his neck were not already pronounced enough by reason of its size, it is further accentuated by the circumstance that it is light colored, while the rest of him is dark. When the water turkey saw us, he jumped up on a limb and stared. Then suddenly he dropped into the water, sank like a leaden ball out of sight, and made us think he was certainly drowned, when presently the tip of his beak appeared, then the length of his neck lay along the surface of the water, and in this position, with his body submerged, he shot out his neck, drew it back, wriggled it, twisted it, twiddled it, and spirally poked it into the east, the west, the north, and the south, with a violence of involution and a contortionary energy that made one think in the same breath of corkscrews and of lightning. But what nonsense! All that labor and perilous asphyxiation for a beggarly sprat or a couple of inches of water snake! Yet I make no doubt this same water turkey would have thought us as absurd as we him if he could have seen us taking our breakfast a few minutes later. For as we sat there, some half-dozen men at table in the small cabin, all that sombre melancholy which comes over the average American citizen at his meals descended upon us. No man talked after the first two or three feeble sparks of conversation had gone out; each of us could hear |