A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 25

Only just as I left him did he let fall a single remark that I later saw showed how severe and unfortunate, probably, was the strain of it all."

Brave as he was, however, and eager to keep at his work, he finally submitted to the inevitable, and in May started with his brother to the mountains of western North Carolina. His final interview with Dr. Gilman is thus related by the latter: --

"The last time that I saw Lanier was in the spring of 1881, when after a winter of severe illness he came to make arrangements for his lectures in the next winter and to say good-bye for the summer.

His emaciated form could scarcely walk across the yard from the carriage to the door. 'I am going to Asheville, N.C.,' he said, 'and I am going to write an account of that region as a railroad guide.

It seems as if the good Lord always took care of me.

Just as the doctors had said that I must go to that mountain region, the publishers gave me a commission to prepare a book.' 'Good-bye,' he added, and I supported his tottering steps to the carriage door, never to see his face again."*

-- * 'South Atlantic Quarterly', April, 1905.

The last months of Lanier's career seem to bring together all the threads of his life. He was in the mountains which had first stimulated his love of nature and were the background of his early romance.

He was lovingly attended by father, brother, and wife, and took constant delight in the little boy who had come to cheer his last days of weariness and sickness. He named the tent Camp Robin, after his youngest son, and from that camp sent his last message to the boys of America. They are the words of the preface to "The Boy's Mabinogion", or "Knightly Legends of Wales": "In now leaving this beautiful book with my young countrymen, I find myself so sure of its charm as to feel no hesitation in taking authority to unite the earnest expression of their grat.i.tude with that of my own to Lady Charlotte Guest, whose talents and scholarship have made these delights possible; and I can wish my young readers few pleasures of finer quality than that surprised sense of a whole new world of possession which came with my first reading of these Mabinogion, and made me remember Keats's

watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken."

A letter to President Gilman indicates his continued interest in scientific investigation: --

Asheville, N.C., June 5, 1881.

Dear Mr. Gilman, -- Can you help me -- or tell me how I can help myself -- in the following matter? A few weeks from now I wish to study the so-called no-frost belt on the side of Tryon Mountain; and in order to test the popular account I propose to carry on two simultaneous series of meteorological observations during a fortnight or longer, -- the one conducted by myself in the middle of the belt, the other by a friend stationed well outside its limits. For this purpose I need two small self-registering thermometers, two aneroid thermometers, and two hygrometers of any make.

It has occurred to me that since these observations will be conducted during the University recess I might -- always provided, of course, that there is any authority or precedent for such action -- procure this apparatus from the University collection, especially as no instrument is included which could not easily be replaced.

Of course I would cheerfully deposit a sum sufficient to cover the value of the whole outfit.

Should this arrangement be possible, I merely ask that you turn this letter over to Dr. Hastings, with the request that he will have this apparatus packed at my expense and shipped by express to me at this point immediately.

Yours very sincerely, Sidney Lanier.

The impulse to poetry was with him, too. He jotted down or dictated to his wife outlines and suggestions of poems which he hoped to write.

Of these one has been printed: --

I was the earliest bird awake, It was a while before dawn, I believe, But somehow I saw round the world, And the eastern mountain top did not hinder me.

And I knew of the dawn by my heart, not by mine eyes.

One agrees with "Father" Tabb that no utterance of the poet ever betrayed more of his nature, -- "feeble and dying, but still a 'bird', awake to every emotion of love, of beauty, of faith, of star-like hope, keeping the dawn in his heart to sing, when the mountain-tops hindered it from his eyes."

On August 4 the party started across the mountains to Lynn, Polk County, North Carolina. On the way they stopped with a friend in whose house Lanier gave one more exhibition of his love of music. "It was in this house,"

says Miss Spann, "the meeting-place of all sweet n.o.bility with nature and with the human spirit, that he uttered his last music on earth. At the close of the day Lanier came in and pa.s.sed down the long drawing-room until he reached a western window.

In the distance were the far-reaching Alleghany hills, with Mt. Pisgah supreme among them, and the intervening valley bathed in sunset beauty.

Absorbed away from those around him, he watched the sunset glow deepen into twilight, then sat down to the piano, facing the window.

Sorrow and joy and pain and hope and triumph his soul poured forth.

They felt that in that twilight hour he had risen to an angel's song."*

-- * 'Independent', June 28, 1894.

Lynn is in a sheltered valley among the mountains of Polk County, whose "climate is tempered by a curious current of warm air along the slope of Tryon Mountain, its northern boundary, a sort of ethereal Gulf Stream." Here death came soon than was antic.i.p.ated by the brother, who had gone back to Montgomery, preceded already by his father. Mrs. Lanier's own words tell the story of the end in simplicity and love: "We are left alone (August 29) with one another.

On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of G.o.d." His death before the open window was a realization of Matthew Arnold's wish with regard to dying: --

Let me be, While all around in silence lies, Moved to the window near, and see Once more, before my dying eyes, --

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aerial landscape spread, The world which was ere I was born, The world which lasts when I am dead."

The closing lines of "Sunrise" express better than anything else Lanier's own confident faith as he pa.s.sed behind the veil: --

And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art -- till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The day being done.

His body was taken to Baltimore, where it rests in Greenmount Cemetery in the lot of his friends, the Turnbulls, close by the son whose memory they have perpetuated by the endowment of a permanent lectureship on poetry in Johns Hopkins University. The grave is unmarked -- even by a slab.

It divides the interest of visitors to Baltimore with the grave of Poe, which, however, is in another part of the city. So these two poets, whose lives and whose characters were so strikingly unlike, sleep in their adopted city.

Shortly after Lanier's death memorial services were held at Johns Hopkins University, at which time beautiful tributes were paid to him by his colleagues and friends. A committee of the citizens of Baltimore was appointed to raise a fund for the sustenance and education of the poet's family. They were aided in this by admirers of Lanier and public-spirited citizens throughout the country.

Meantime his fame was growing, the publication of his poems in 1884 giving fresh impetus thereto.

Seven years after his death a bust of the poet was presented to the University by Mr. Charles Lanier of New York.* "The hall was filled,"

says ex-President Gilman, "with a company of those who knew and admired him.

On the pedestal which supported the bust hung his flute and a roll of his music; a garland of laurels crowned his brow, and the sweetest of flowers were strewn at his feet. Letters came from Lowell, Holmes, Gilder, Stedman; young men who never saw him, but who had come under his influence, read their tributes in verse; a former student of the University made a critical estimate of the 'Science of Verse'; a lady read several of Lanier's own poems; another lady sang one of his musical compositions adapted to words of Tennyson, and another song, one of his to which some one else wrote the music; a college president of New Jersey held up Lanier as a teacher of ethics; but the most striking figure was the trim, gaunt form of a Catholic priest, who referred to the day when they, two Confederate soldiers (the Huguenot and the Catholic), were confined in the Union prison, and with tears in his eyes said, his love for Lanier was like that of David for Jonathan.

The sweetest of all the testimonials came at the very last moment, unsolicited and unexpected, from that charming poetess, Edith Thomas.

She heard of the memorial a.s.sembly, and on the spur of the moment wrote the well-known lines, suggested by one of Lanier's own verses: --

On the Paradise side of the river of death."

-- * For a full record of the exercises see 'A Memorial of Sidney Lanier', Baltimore, 1888.

The aftermath of Lanier's home life is all pleasant to contemplate.

His wife, although still an invalid, has, by her readings from her husband's letters and poems, and by her sympathetic help for all those who have cared to know more about him, done more than any other person to extend his fame. With tremendous obstacles in her way, she has reared to manhood the four sons, three of whom are now actively identified with publishing houses in New York city, and one of whom, bearing the name of his father, is now living upon a farm in Georgia. Charles Day Lanier is president of the Review of Reviews Company, and is a.s.sociated with his youngest brother, Robert Sampson Lanier, in editing "The Country Calendar". Henry Wysham Lanier is a member of the firm of Doubleday, Page & Company, and editor of "Country Life in America". They all inherit their father's love of music and poetry, and through their magazines are doing much to foster among Americans a taste for country life.

By a striking coincidence -- entirely unpremeditated on their part -- three of the sons and their mother live at Greenwich, Connecticut.

It will be remembered that the home of the English Laniers was at Greenwich, -- and so the story of the Lanier family begins and ends with this name, -- one in the Old World and one in the New.

Chapter XIII. The Achievement in Criticism and in Poetry

Speculations as to what Lanier might have done with fewer limitations and with a longer span of years inevitably arise in the mind of any one who studies his life. If, like the late Theodore Thomas, he had at an early age been able to develop his talent for music in the musical circles of New York; if, like Longfellow, he had gone from a small college to a German university, or, like Mr. Howells, from the provinces to Cambridge, where he would have come in contact with a group of men of letters; if, after the Civil War, he had, like Hayne, retired to a cabin and there devoted himself entirely to literary work; if, like Lowell, he could have given attention to literary subjects and lectured in a university without teaching cla.s.ses of immature students or without resorting to "pot-boilers", "nothings that do mar the artist's hand;" if, like Poe, he could have struck some one vein and worked it for all it was worth, -- if, in a word, the varied activity of his life could have given way to a certain definiteness of purpose and concentration of effort, what might have been the difference! Music and poetry strove for the mastery of his soul. Swinburne, speaking of those who attempt success in two realms of art, says, "On neither course can the runner of a double race attain the goal, but must needs in both races alike be caught up and resign his torch to a runner with a single aim." And yet one feels that if Lanier had had time and health to work out all these diverse interests and all his varied experiences into a unity, if scholarship and music and poetry could have been developed simultaneously over a long stretch of time, there would have resulted, perhaps, a more many-sided man and a finer poetry than we have yet had in America.

So at last the speculation reduces itself to one of time. Lycidas was dead ere his prime. From 1876 till the fatal illness took hold of him he made great strides in poetry. Up to the very last he was making plans for the future. His letters to friends outlining the volumes that he hoped to publish, -- work demanding decades instead of years, -- the memoranda jotted down on bits of paper or backs of envelopes as the rough drafts of essays or poems, would be pathetic, if one did not believe with Lanier that death is a mere incident in an eternal life, or with Browning, that what a man would do exalts him.

The lines of Robert Browning's poems in which he sets forth the glory of the life of aspiration -- aspiration independent of any achievement -- ring in one's ears, as he reads the story of Lanier's life.

This low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it; This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it.

The imperfect poems, the unfinished poems, the sheaves unharvested, not like Coleridge's for lack of will, but for lack of time, are suggestive of one of the finest aspects of romantic art.

"I would rather fail at some things I wot of than succeed at others,"

said Lanier. There are moods when the imperfection of Lanier pleases more than the perfection of Poe -- even from the artistic standpoint.

What he aspired to be enters into one's whole thought about his life and his art. The vista of his grave opens up into the unseen world.