Part 2 (1/2)

It was in Baltimore, too, that he gave the lectures which resulted in his most important prose-writings, ”The Science of English Verse,”

”The English Novel,” ”Shakespeare and His Forerunners.”

In August, 1874, at Sunnyside, Georgia, amid the loneliness of abandoned farms, the glory of cornfields, and the mysterious beauty of forest, he wrote ”Corn,” the first of his poems to attract the attention of the country. It was published in _Lippincott's_ in 1875.

Charlotte Cushman was so charmed by it that she sought out the author in Baltimore, and the two became good friends.

At 64 Centre Street, Baltimore, Lanier wrote ”The Symphony,” which he said took hold of him ”about four days ago like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since,” which is the only way that a real poem or real music or a real picture ever can get into the world. He says that he ”will be rejoiced when it is finished, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit.” It appeared in _Lippincott's_, June, 1875.

Lanier was at 66 Centre Street, Baltimore, when he wrote the words of the Centennial Cantata, which he said he ”tried to make as simple and candid as a melody of Beethoven.” He wrote to a friend that he was not disturbed because a paper had said that the poem of the Cantata was like a ”communication from the spirit of Nat Lee through a Bedlamite medium.” It was ”but a little grotesque episode, as when a catbird paused in the midst of the most exquisite roulades and melodies to mew and then take up his song again.”

In December of that year he was compelled to seek a milder climate in Florida, taking with him a commission to write a book about Florida for the J.B. Lippincott Company. Upon arriving at Tampa, he wrote to a friend:

Tampa is the most forlorn collection of little one-story frame houses imaginable, and as May and I walked behind our landlord, who was piloting us to Orange Grove Hotel, our hearts fell nearer and nearer towards the sand through which we dragged. Presently we turned a corner and were agreeably surprised to find ourselves in front of a large three-story house with old nooks and corners, clean and comfortable in appearance and surrounded by orange trees in full fruit. We have a large room in the second story, opening upon a generous balcony fifty feet long, into which stretch the liberal arms of a fine orange tree holding out their fruitage to our very lips. In front is a sort of open plaza containing a pretty group of gnarled live-oaks full of moss and mistletoe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIDNEY LANIER From a photograph owned by H.W. Lanier]

In May he made an excursion of which he wrote:

For a perfect journey G.o.d gave us a perfect day. The little 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 Palatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her pa.s.sengers 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, one hundred miles above Jacksonville.

It was on this journey that he saw the most magnificent residence that he had ever beheld, the home of an old friend of his, an alligator, who possessed a number of such palatial mansions and could change his residence at any time by the simple process of swimming from one to another.

On his return to Baltimore he lived at 55 Lexington in four rooms arranged as a French flat. He makes mention of a gas stove ”on which my comrade magically produces the best coffee in the world, and this, with fresh eggs (boiled through the same handy little machine), bread, b.u.t.ter, and milk, forms our breakfast.” December 3 he writes from the little French flat, announcing that he ”has plunged in and brought forth captive a long Christmas poem for _Every Sat.u.r.day_,” a Baltimore weekly publication. The poem was ”Hard Times in Elfland.” He says, ”Wife and I have been to look at a lovely house with eight rooms and many charming appliances,” whereof the rent was less than that of the four rooms.

The next month he writes from 33 Denmead Street, the eight-room house, to which he had gone, with the attendant necessity of buying ”at least three hundred twenty-seven household utensils” and ”hiring a colored gentlewoman who is willing to wear out my carpets, burn out my range, freeze out my water-pipes, and be generally useful.” He mentions having written a couple of poems, and part of an essay on Beethoven and Bismarck, but his chief delight is in his new home, which invests him with the dignity of paying taxes and water rates. He takes the view that no man is a Bohemian who has to pay water rates and street tax.

In addition to supporting his new dignity he finds time and strength for his usual work, and he writes on January 30, 1878, ”I have been mainly at work on some unimportant prose matter for pot-boilers, but I get off a short poem occasionally, and in the background of my mind am writing my Jacquerie.” Unfortunately, ”Jacquerie” remained in the background of his mind, with the exception of two songs--all we have to indicate what a stirring presentation our literature might have had of the fourteenth century awakening of ”Jacques Bonhomme,” that early precursor of the more terrible arousing in 'Ninety-Three.

In the latter part of the year Lanier was living at Number 180 St.

Paul Street, and in December he wrote to a friend:

”Bayard Taylor's death slices a huge cantle out of the world.... It only seems that he has gone to some other Germany a little farther off.... He was such a fine fellow, one almost thinks he might have talked Death over and made him forego his stroke.”

At Bayard Taylor's home, where Lanier visited, were two immense chestnut trees, much loved by the two poets. Mrs. Taylor wrote that one of the trees died soon after the death of its poet owner. The other lingered until a short time after the pa.s.sing of Lanier. It was in connection with the lines of the ”Cantata,” written in the Baltimore home of the Southern poet, that the poet friends began a long-continued series of letters which one loves to read on a winter night, when the winds are battling with the world outside, and the fire gleams redly in the open grate, and the lamp burns softly on the library table, and all things invite to poetic dreams.

November 12, 1880, Sidney Lanier wrote to his publisher a letter of appreciation of the beautiful work done upon his volume, ”The Boy's King Arthur.” It is dated at Number 435 North Calvert Street, the latest Baltimore address that we have.

The distinction Sidney Lanier achieved as first flutist in the orchestra of the Peabody Inst.i.tute led to an offer of a position in the Thomas Orchestra, which the condition of his health did not permit him to accept.

In the summer of 1880 his ”Science of English Verse” was published.

”Shakespeare and His Forerunners” resulted from his work with his cla.s.ses in Elizabethan Poetry. ”The English Novel” is the course of lectures on ”Personality Ill.u.s.trated by the Development of Fiction,”

delivered at Johns Hopkins University in the winter of 1880-'81. As we read the printed work in its depth and strength, we do not realize that his wife took the notes from his whispered dictation, and that his auditors as they listened trembled lest, with each sentence, that deep musical voice should fall on eternal silence. All this while he had been working at lectures and boys' books, when, as he said, ”a thousand songs are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon.” One of the thousand, ”Sunrise,” he uttered with a temperature of 104 degrees burning out his life, but it is full of the rapture of the dawn.

To the pines of North Carolina the poet was taken, in the hope that they might give him of their strength. But the wind-song through their swaying branches lulled him to his last earthly sleep. On the 7th of September the narrow stream of his earthly existence broadened and deepened and flowed triumphantly into the great ocean of Eternal Life.