Selections from Sidney Lanier, Prose and Verse
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SELECTIONS FROM SIDNEY LANIER BOOKS BY SIDNEY LANIER Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Poems. Edited by his Wife, with a Memo- rial by William Hayes ward. With portrait. 12mo net |2.00 Select Poems of Sidney Lanier. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Prof. Morgan Callaway, Jr., University of Texas. r2mo . net $1.00 Hymns of the Marshes. With 12 full, page illustrations, photogravure frontis- piece, and head and tail pieces. 8vo net (2.00 Bob. The Story of Our Mocking Bird. With 16 full-page illustrations in colors ftrom photographs by A. R. DUGMORB. 12mo net %0.1h Letters of Sidney Lanier. Selections from his Correspondence. 1866-1881. With two portraits in photogravure. 12mo net $2.00 Retrospects and Prospects. Descrip- tive and Historical Essays. 12mo . net $1.50 Music and Poetry. A Volume of Es- says. 12mo net $1.50 The Engrltsh Novel. A Study in the De- velopment of Personality. Crown 8vo net $2.00 The Science of English Verse. Crown 8vo net $2.00 The Lanier Book. Selections for School Reading. Edited and arranged by Mary E. BURT. in co-operation with Mrs. Lanier. Illustrated. (Scribner Series o/ School Reading.) 12mo . net $0.50 Selections from Sidney Lanier. Prose and Verse for Use in Schools, r2mo net $0.50 BOY'S LIBRARY OF LEGEND AND CHIVALRY The Boy's Frolssart. Illustrated. Al. FRED Kappes net $1.80 The Boy's King: Arthur. Illustrated net $1.80 Knightly Legends of Wales ; or. The Boy's Mabinogion. Illustrated . net $1.80 The Boy's Percy. Illustrated . net $1.80 SELECTIONS FROM SIDNEY LANIER PROSE AND VERSE WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES EDITED BY HENRY W. LANIER CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 13 Copyright, 1916, bt CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS iCI,A427108 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION vii POEMS The Tournaivient , , 1 ^ Life and Song 5 • Song for "The Jacquerie," I 6 Song for "The Jacquerie," II 7 Thar's More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land 8 / The Power of Prayer 10 \/ The Symphony 15 K^ The Discovery 27 ^ Evening Song 32 Song of the Chattahoochee 32 •^ The Mocking-Bird 34 Taaipa Robins 35 •^ The Revenge of Hamish 36 ^ A Song of the Future 42 ^ The Marshes of Glynn 43 l/ How Love Looked for Hell 49 k^Marsh Song—at Sunset 53 • Owl Against Robin 53 V vi CONTENTS PAGB A Song of Love 56 V A Ballad of Trees and the Master .... 56 Marsh Hymns 67 Control 57 Sunrise 58 POEM OUTLINES 67 PROSE The War-Flower 70 The Charge of Cain Smallin 76 The Ocklawaha River 90 The Tragedy of the Alamo 107 The Story of a Proverb 117 The Legend of St. Leonor 126 Bob: The Story of Our Mocking-Bird . 129 An English Hero of a Thousand Years Ago . 142 The Story of Silas Marner 151* NOTES 157 — INTRODUCTION THE LIFE OF LANIER I. BOYHOOD—COLLEGE DAYS 1842-1860 A FEW years before the Civil War there was living in the town of Macon, Ga., a boy named Sidney Lanier. He was a slender fellow, with large gray eyes which harbored dreams yet easily flashed into quick humor or set to an almost fierce intentness eyes that could look unblinking into the full blaze of the sun. He joined enthusiastically in the games of Macon boys, from marbles to the all-year-round coasting down steep Pine Hill with barrel-stave sleds, on which one sped over the slippery pine needles almost as fast as a Canada boy covers the toboggan slide; with his brother or other companions he spent many a Saturday in the woods, marshes, and "old fields" near the river, looking for Indian arrow-heads, picking haws and hickory nuts, hunt- ing doves, snipe, and rabbits; but every now and then he liked to get off alone on a fishing trip, fre- quently stealing out of the house by dawn with his lunch in his pocket, to spend a solitary day on the banks of the Ocmulgee. He brought home fish from these excursions, but he brought also pictures vii viii INTRODUCTION of placid river and starry water-lilies and tangled thicket and clambering jessamine vines, and vague young dreams that nestled in these coverts. He was a favorite with other boys. To begin with, he was quick, electric, flashing, full of jokes and gaiety, full of ideas. He could mimic to the life a travelling showman, the slow "Crackers," some negro fun-maker; with his flute he could imi- tate the birds' calls with bewildering exactness. When he was only six, his first circus incited him to get up a home performance with his brother and sister. At twelve, after reading Froissart and Scott, he had organized a military company, uniformed in white and blue, which was armed first with bows and arrows, then with wooden guns. And so faith- fully were they drilled that on one memorable Fourth of July, when the Floyd Rifles and Macon Volunteers, many of them veterans of the Mexican and Indian Wars, paraded in state, the boys' com- pany turned out too, and made such a creditable showing that they were all invited to the big dinner, and their leader was called on to answer to a toast. Then he was at once brave and gentle: a striking mixture of sensitiveness with a spirit that stopped at nothing when aroused. Fifty years after it hap- pened, a boyhood friend told of his wonder at the way in which Sidney, then just a little fellow, stood the pain of an accident, when a window fell on his finger and took the end right off; and in the only fight his school fellows remember—a formal challenge to meet and settle matters in the alley after school—the other fellow, finding himself get- INTRODUCTION ix ting the worst of it, pulled out a big barlow knife: the circle of watchers were too much awed to do anything at first; but on seeing Sidney rush for- ward as determinedly as ever and tackle his oppo- nent in spite of this wicked looking weapon, they all closed in and separated the pair. Another thing which marked him out among the boys who were getting ready for college at the "'Cademy," was a native musical ability. Before he was six he would rattle a rhythmical accompani- ment on the bones in perfect time to his mother's piano music; at seven he had made himself a reed flageolet, and when Christmas brought a little one- keyed yellow flute he would shut himself up after school and practise by the hour on this. His mother taught him the notes on the piano, and he promptly passed on this new knowledge to John Booker, a musical negro barber of the neighborhood (who later had a famous troupe of darky minstrels which toured this country and Europe), Presently he had a minstrel troupe of his own among his boy friends, and learning to play passably well on half a dozen instruments before he could write legibly, he was always the centre of a gay quartet, an amateur band, or some more ambitious musical group. Just before his fifteenth birthday he entered Oglethorpe College; but his father, who though devotedly fond of him, was always fearful of the quickness of his impulses and of his passion for music, withdrew him presently on hearing of him as leader in the serenading parties of the college boys. So he spent most of a year as a clerk in the X INTRODUCTION Macon post-office, entertaining family and friends with a host of comical stories of the queer back- country folk who came in for mail; and then, in 1858, he returned to Oglethorpe, entering as a Junior. There were many evidences during these years of an unusual combination of mental qualities. He had the true scholar's passion for exact knowl- edge (much fostered by contact with James Wood- row, a man of rare quality, who became interested in the alert young student, and gave him something of his own confident outlook on the new world then opening in science through the work of Darwin and Huxley); hard work and quick intellect put him at the head of his classes, and he especially distinguished himself in mathematics; yet at the same time he was absorbing Keats, Shelley, Cole- ridge, Tennyson, and the other great poets, and be- ginning on quiet walks in the woods to try to ex- press some of the poetic fancies to which his reveries had given birth—efforts resulting at that time in "mere doggerel," according to one intimate; a keen delight in the picturesque romances of the days of chivalry, in the humor and whimsicalities and conceits of Montaigne, Burton, Don Quixote, Rey- nard the Fox, went side by side with a profound satisfaction in the mystical and metaphysical specu- lations of German philosophers, to whom he was drawn through his pleasure in Carlyle; he had be- gun to play the violin with such effect upon himself that he would at times lose consciousness and come to his senses hours later, much shaken in nerves. INTRODUCTION xi His father was fearful of this musical stimulation, and induced him to give up that instrument; so, returning to the flute on which he had specialized since his childhood days, he soon had organized a quartet of gay flute and guitar players which, after much practising together, would sally forth on Friday evenings to serenade the pretty girls of the village. On these excursions he was the musical leader and the life of the party.