Sidney Lanier | Page 5

Macon, and elsewhere, will convince any one
of the essential vigor and buoyancy of his nature. He would have

resented the expression "poor Lanier", with as much emphasis as did
Lamb the condescending epithet used by Coleridge. He was ever a
fighter, and he won many triumphs. He had the power of meeting all
oppositions and managing them, emerging into "a large blue heaven of
moral width and delight."
He was a sufferer from disease, but even in the midst of its grip upon
him he maintained his composure, cheerfulness, and unfailing good
humor. He had remarkable powers of recuperation. Writing to his
father from San Antonio in 1872, he said: "I feel to-day as if I had been
a dry leathery carcass of a man into whom some one had pumped
strong currents of fresh blood, of abounding life, and of vigorous
strength. I cannot remember when I have felt so crisp, so springy, and
so gloriously unconscious of lungs." During these intervals of good
health he was mentally alert, -- a prodigious worker, feeling "an
immortal and unconquerable toughness of fibre" in the strings of his
heart. There was something more than the cheerfulness that attends the
disease to which he was subject. There was an ardor, an exuberance
that comes only from "a lordly, large compass of soul." As to his
poverty, it must be said that few poets were ever so girt about with
sympathetic relatives and friends, and few men ever knew how to meet
poverty so bravely. He fretted at times over the irresponsiveness of the
public to his work, but not so much as did his friends, to whom he was
constantly speaking or writing words of encouragement and hope.
Criticism taught him "to lift his heart absolutely above all expectation
save that which finds its fulfillment in the large consciousness of
faithful devotion to the highest ideals in art." "This enables me," he said,
"to work in tranquillity." He knew that he was fighting the battle which
every artist of his type had had to fight since time began. In his
intellectual life he passed through a period of storm and stress, when he
felt "the twist and cross of life", but he emerged into a state where
belief overmasters doubt and he knew that he knew. He was cheerful in
the presence of death, which he held off for eight years by sheer force
of will; at last, when he had wrested from time enough to show what
manner of man he was, he drank down the stirrup-cup "right
smilingly".

Looked at from every possible standpoint, it may be seen that none of
these obstacles could subdue his hopeful and buoyant spirit. "He was
the most cheerful man I ever knew," said Richard Malcolm Johnston.
Ex-President Gilman expressed the feeling of those who knew the poet
intimately when he said, "I have heard a lady say that if he took his
place in a crowded horse-car, an exhilarating atmosphere seemed to be
introduced by his breezy ways. . . . He always preserved his sweetness
of disposition, his cheerfulness, his courtesy, his industry, his hope, his
ambition. . . . Like a true knight errant, never disheartened by difficulty,
never despondent in the face of dangers, always brave, full of resources,
confident of ultimate triumph." The student at Johns Hopkins
University who knew him best said: "No strain of physical wear or
suffering, no pressure of worldly fret, no amount of dealing with what
are called `the hard facts of experience', could stiffen or dampen or
deaden the inborn exuberance of his nature, which escaped incessantly
into a realm of beauty, of wonder, of joy, and of hope." Certainly the
great bulk of his published lectures and his poems bear out this
impression. His brother, Mr. Clifford Lanier, says that he would not
publish some of his early poems because they were not hale and hearty,
"breathing of sanity, hope, betterment, aspiration." "Those are the best
poets," said Lanier himself, "who keep down these cloudy sorrow
songs and wait until some light comes to gild them with comfort." And
this he did.
Lanier, whose career has been here briefly suggested, makes his appeal
to various types of men and women. Enjoying the use of the Peabody
Library and living in the atmosphere of a newly created university, he
gave evidence of the modern scholar's zest for original research; and in
addition thereto displayed a spiritual attitude to literature that is rare.
The professional musician sees in him one of the advance guard of
native-born Americans who have achieved success in some one field of
musical endeavor, while a constantly increasing public, intent upon
musical culture, finds in his letters and essays an expression of the
deeper meaning of music and penetrative interpretations of