lines:

    "To me the meanest flower that blows can give
    Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears;"*16*

and beside them one may put this line of Lanier's,

"The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep,"*17*

because, as the context shows, he was

    "Shaken with happiness:
    The gates of sleep stood wide."*18*

And how naive and tender was this nature-worship! He speaks of the clover*19* and the clouds*20* as cousins, and of the leaves*21* as sisters, and in so doing reminds us of the earliest Italian poetry, especially of `The Canticle of the Sun', by St. Francis of Assisi, who brothers the wind, the fire, and the sun, and sisters the water, the stars, and the moon. Notice the tenderness in these lines of `Corn':

    "The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
    Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
    A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
    The copse-depths into little noises start,
    That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
    Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart;"*22*

to which we find a beautiful parallel in a poem by Paul Hamilton Hayne, himself a reverent nature-worshiper:

              "Ah! Nature seems
    Through something sweeter than all dreams
    To woo me; yea, she seems to speak
    How closely, kindly, her fond cheek
    Rested on mine, her mystic blood
    Pulsing in tender neighborhood,
    And soft as any mortal maid,
    Half veiled in the twilight shade,
    Who leans above her love to tell
    Secrets almost ineffable!"*23*

Moreover, this worship is restful:

    "Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
    Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
    From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
    By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

. . . . .

    "By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
    I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
    Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
    The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn."*24*

But to Lanier the ministration of nature was by no means passive; and we find him calling upon the leaves actively to minister to his need and even to intercede for him to their Maker:

        "Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,
        Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,
        Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,
        Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves,
    Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me
    Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain me, —
    Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet
    That advise me of more than they bring, — repeat
    Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought breath
    From the heaven-side bank of the river of death, —
     Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
     The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach me, —
                    And there, oh there
    As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
                    Pray me a myriad prayer."*25*

In this earnest ascription of spirituality to the leaves
Lanier recalls Ruskin.*26*

— *1* See `The Waving of the Corn' and `Corn'. *2* See `Clover'. *3* See `The Mocking-Bird' and `To Our Mocking-Bird'. *4* See `Tampa Robins'. *5* See `The Dove'. *6* See `From the Flats', last stanza. *7* See `Sunrise'. *8* See `Sunrise' and `Corn'. *9* See `The Song of the Chattahoochee' and `Sunrise'. *10* See `Corn'. *11* See `Sunrise' and `At Sunset'. *12* See `Individuality'. *13* See `Sunrise', etc. *14* See `At Sunset'. *15* See `The Marshes of Glynn', and read Barbe's tribute to Lanier, cited in the `Bibliography'. *16* `Intimations of Immortality', ll. 202-203. *17* `The Symphony', l. 3. *18* `The Symphony', ll. 13-14. *19* `Clover', l. 57. *20* `Individuality', l. 1. *21* `Sunrise', l. 42. *22* `Corn', ll. 4-9. Compare `The Symphony', ll. 183-190. *23* Hayne's `In the Gray of Evening': Autumn, ll. 37-46, in `Poems' (Boston, 1882), p. 250. *24* `The Marshes of Glynn', ll. 61-64, 75-78. *25* `Sunrise', ll. 39-53. *26* See his `Modern Painters', vol. v., part vi., chapter iv., and Scudder's note to the same in her `Introduction to Ruskin' (Chicago, 1892), p. 249. —

To take up his next theme, Lanier, like every true Teuton, from Tacitus to the present, saw "something of the divine" in woman. It was this feeling that led him so severely to condemn a vice that is said to be growing, the marriage for convenience. I quote from `The Symphony', and the "melting Clarionet" is speaking:

    "So hath Trade withered up Love's sinewy prime,
    Men love not women as in olden time.
    Ah, not in these cold merchantable days
    Deem men their life an opal gray, where plays
    The one red sweet of gracious ladies'-praise.
    Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye —
    Says, `Here, you lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy:
    Come, heart for heart — a trade? What! weeping? why?'
    Shame on such wooer's dapper-mercery!"*1*

And then follows a wooing that, to my mind, should be irresistible, and that, at any rate, is quite as high-souled as Browning's `One Way of Love', which I have long considered the high-water-mark of the chivalrous in love. The Lady Clarionet is still speaking:

    "I would my lover kneeling at my feet
    In humble manliness should cry, `O Sweet!
    I know not if thy heart my heart will greet:
    I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
    Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say,
    I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay:
    I do but know I love thee, and I pray
    To be thy knight until my dying day.'"*2*

I imagine, too, that any wife that ever lived would be satisfied with his glorious tribute to Mrs. Lanier in `My Springs', which closes thus:

    "Dear eyes, dear eyes, and rare complete —
    Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet —
    I marvel that God made you mine,
    For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine."*3*

Almost equally felicitous are these lines of `Acknowledgment':

    "Somehow by thee, dear Love, I win content:
    Thy Perfect stops th' Imperfect's argument."*4*

But the cleverest thing that Lanier has written of woman occurs in his `Laus Mariae':

    "But thou within thyself, dear manifold heart,
    Dost bind all epochs in one dainty fact.
    Oh, Sweet, my pretty sum of history,
    I leapt the breadth of time in loving thee!"*5*

— a scrap worthy to be placed beside Steele's "To love her is a liberal education," which has often been declared the happiest thing on the subject in the English language.

— *1* `The Symphony', ll. 232-240. *2* `The Symphony', ll. 241-248. *3* `My Springs', ll. 53-56. *4* `Acknowledgment', ll. 41-42. *5* `Laus Mariae', ll. 11-14. —

To Lanier there was but one thing that made life worth