I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it, Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too.

For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,

After dread suffering have seen their lives pass off with smiles;

And I have watch'd the death-hours of the old; and seen the infant die;

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;

And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath'd my every breath

Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

NIGHT AND DAY

THE innocent, sweet Day is dead.
Dark Night hath slain her in her bed.
O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!
Put out the light, said he.

A sweeter light than ever rayed
From star of heaven or eye of maid
Has vanished in the unknown Shade.
She's dead, she 's dead, said he.
Now, in a wild, sad after-mood
The tawny Night sits still to brood
Upon the dawn-time when he wooed.
- I would she lived, said he.

Star-memories of happier times,
Of loving deeds and lovers' rhymes,
Throng forth in silvery pantomimes.
- Come back, O Day! said he.

1866.

1884.

SONG FOR THE JACQUERIE''

THE hound was cuffed, the hound was kicked,

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

(AU.) Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.
The hound into his kennel crept;
He rarely wept, he never slept.

1 One of Lanier's early plans was for a long poem in heroic couplets, with lyric interludes, on the insurrection of the French peasantry in the fourteenth century. Although,' says Mrs. Lanier, "The Jacquerie" remained a fragment for thirteen years, Mr. Lanier's interest in the subject never abated. Far on in this interval he is found planning for leisure to work out in romance the story of that savage insurrection of the French peasantry, which the Chronicles of Froissart had impressed upon his boyish imagination.' 'It was the first time,' says Lanier himself, in a letter of November 15, 1874, that the big hungers of the People appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance.' Five chapters of the story, and three lyrics, were completed. See the Poems, pp. 191-214.

We're all for love,' the violins said.1
'Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale?
Grant thee, O Trade! thine uttermost hope:
Level red gold with blue sky-slope,
And base it deep as devils grope:
When all 's done, what hast thou won
Of the only sweet that's under the sun? 10
Ay, canst thou buy a single sigh
Of true love's least, least ecstasy?'
Then, with a bridegroom's heart-beats
trembling,

All the mightier strings assembling
Ranged them on the violins' side

As when the bridegroom leads the bride,
And, heart in voice, together cried:
'Yea, what avail the endless tale
Of gain by cunning and plus by sale?
Look up the land, look down the land,
The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand
Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand
Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore:
They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh
For the outside leagues of liberty,
Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky
Into a heavenly melody.

20

"Each day, all day" (these poor folks say), "In the same old year-long, drear-long

66

ments and re-distilled them into the clear liquid of that wondrous eleventh - Love God utterly, and thy neighbor as thyself so I think the time will come when music, rightly developed to its now-little-foreseen grandeur, will be found to be a later revelation of all gospels *n one. (LANIER, in a letter of March 12, 1875. The Letters of Sidney Lanier, p. 113.)

1 Music is utterly unconscious of aught but Love. (LANIER, in a letter of October, 1866. The Letters of Sidney Lanier, p. 66.)

And the kilns and the curt-tongued mills say Go!

There's plenty that can, if you can't: we know.

Move out, if you think you're underpaid.
The poor are prolific; we're not afraid ;
Trade is trade."'

Thereat this passionate protesting
Meekly changed, and softened till
It sank to sad requesting
And suggesting sadder still:

And oh, if men might sometime see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be !
Does business mean, Die, you - live, I?
Then "Trade is trade" but sings a lie:
'Tis only war grown miserly.

50

60

If business is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so,
And widows less will blame it so.
Alas, for the poor to have some part
In yon sweet living lands of Art,
Makes problem not for head, but heart.
Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it:
Plainly the heart of a child could solve it.'

To linger in the sacred dark and green Where many boughs the still pool overlean And many leaves make shadow with their sheen.

Full powers from Nature manifold.
I speak for each no-tongued tree
That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
And dumbly and most wistfully
His mighty prayerful arms outspreads 120
Above men's oft-unheeding heads,
And his big blessing downward sheds.
I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves,
Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
And briery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins;
For every long-armed woman-vine
That round a piteous tree doth twine;
For passionate odors, and divine
Pistils, and petals crystalline;
All purities of shady springs,
All shynesses of film-winged things
That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings;
All modesties of mountain-fawns
That leap to covert from wild lawns,
And tremble if the day but dawns;
All sparklings of small beady eyes
Of birds, and sidelong glances wise
Wherewith the jay hints tragedies;

130

140

150

All piquancies of prickly burs,
And smoothnesses of downs and furs,
Of eiders and of minevers;
All limpid honeys that do lie
At stamen-bases, nor deny
The humming-birds' fine roguery,
Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly;
All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings;
Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell
Wherewith in every lonesome dell
Time to himself his hours doth tell;
All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones,
Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans,
And night's unearthly under-tones;
All placid lakes and waveless deeps,
All cool reposing mountain-steeps,
Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps; -
Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights,
And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
Of Nature's utmost depths and heights,
-These doth my timid tongue present,
Their mouthpiece and leal instrument
And servant, all love-eloquent.

160

I heard, when "All for love" the violins cried:

So, Nature calls through all her system wide,

Give me thy love, O man, so long denied. 170 Much time is run, and man hath changed

his ways,

Since Nature, in the antique fable-days, Was hid from man's true love by proxy

fays,

False fauns and rascal gods that stole her praise.

The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder brain;

Chilled Nature's streams till man's warm heart was fain

Never to lave its love in them again.
Later, a sweet Voice Love thy neighbor said;
Then first the bounds of neighborhood out-
spread

Beyond all confines of old ethnic dread. 180 Vainly the Jew might wag his covenant head:

"All men are neighbors," so the sweet Voice said.

So, when man's arms had circled all man's

race,

The liberal compass of his warm embrace Stretched bigger yet in the dark bounds of

space;