lies upon a violet bank. There are other more portentous utterances, such as a Sonnet addressed to Despair, which begins,

Pale ruthless Demon! terrible Despair,

and another," written near the sea," which talks about "Ocean's deep tempestuous roar" and goes on to say that far more wild is the soul's tumult:

More turbulent the feelings tossing there;

For every hope is blasted by Despair

And clouds of darkness o'er my prospects roll.

There were, however, brighter moments, and in some of them Miss Evance makes incursions into natural history and tells us about the "faint imploring cry" of the Fly, which is adjured to "leave the haunt of man" and take its flight to

Where heathy mountains wild arise,
Where sun-beams ever warm and bright
Serenely gleam from cloudless skies,
Where lovely flow'rets lift their heads,
And to the gale soft fragrance give;
Where Nature every beauty spreads-
There sip each sweet-and gaily live.

which would be all very well, if the fly were a bee; but where is the garbage for it to feed upon?

Miss Evance is very scrupulous in making her elisions. Violets are generally vi'lets, just as flowers are flow'rets. And she has studied her Milton to some purpose, as when she apostrophises Hope to "illume" her "fleeting transient day":

Not deckt in sweet alluring smiles
Not with thy train of sportive wiles;
But come with looks benignly grave,
And from despair my bosom save;

Gild with thy beams this dark oppressive gloom,

And point with steady hand unto the peaceful tomb.

We are back at that tomb even when it is Hope that is in question. There are other Miltonic touches, as in the Canzonette, which would have us find pleasure, "not in Fashion's gilded fane "

But in some still secluded spot,

Where Innocence has raised her cot,
And meek-eyed Peace delights t'appear,
While calm Contentment lingers near
With holy Piety;

only-and this is Evantic, not Miltonic

In such a scene my quiet mind
Feels soothed, exalted and refined.

Miss Evance is best when she is Miltonic.

She is worst

when she is moralizing, or elegiac, as in the poem To Miss Burton:

But here that gentle form of thine

I never more shall view;

Thy last farewell of love is mine-
Maria, oh―adieu.

Prepar'd as thou art to depart,

I should not wish thy stay;

Be still, my weak, my throbbing heart!

Ye tears away, away.

The 'feeling heart,' indeed, is part of her religion.

The God of Nature-he alone,

Who form'd the feeling heart, and knows
Each secret throb-each stifled groan-
He can relieve its mighty woes.

It is a comfort to know that there were other moments when her emotions were of a gentler order and the redbreast could inspire her with "a wish of emulative love," or when she quitted "the social throng" with sighs for the loss of Mr.'s mild manners.

Warm'd by benevolence so kind;

That conversation ever sweet

Improving, elegant, refin'd!

The little volume-it is only one hundred and thirty-one pages-ends appropriately with a poem To Sensibility: Ah! child of sensibility!

The cold world nothing knows of thee!

And apparently the world has been content to know nothing more of Miss Evance.

*

There is little space left for Charlotte Smith; but she was more novelist than poet. She did, however, publish two thin volumes of Elegiac Sonnets, which ran into nine editions and were not without merit. She seems to have been as precocious a child as Felicia Browne and even more unfortunately married, for her husband had a passion for expensive and futile undertakings, and they had twelve children to support. To add to her troubles, the family were involved in interminable litigation by the grandfather's obstinacy in drawing up his own will, a most voluminous docu

ment profiting no one except the lawyers. She alludes to these difficulties with some bitterness in the preface to a later edition of her Sonnets; but the sadness of the sonnets themselves sprang mainly from grief at the loss of her eldest boy. "When in the beech woods of Hampshire I first struck the chords of the melancholy lyre, its notes were never intended for the public ear; it was unaffected sorrow drew them forth; I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy!" "Unaffected" is the word which best describes her poetry. It is simple and sincere and achieves considerable felicity of expression:

Ah! then, how dear the Muse's favors cost,
If those paint sorrow best-who feel it most!
And she has a tender appreciation of nature:
Again the wood, and long-withdrawing vale,
In many a tint of tender green are drest,
Where the young leaves unfolding, scarce conceal
Beneath their early shade, the half formed nest
of finch or woodlark; and the primrose pale,
And lavish cowslip, wildly scattered round,

Give their sweet spirits to the sighing gale.

Still it says a good deal for the general appreciation of poetry in 1789 that "so many noble, literary and respectable" people were prepared to subscribe for copies of the Elegiac Sonnets, which by that year had run into five editions and eventually reached nine. Charlotte Smith finally left her husband and supported herself and her children mainly by her pen; but as the rest of her work was prose fiction or books for young people (Rural Walks, Minor Morals and the like), she has no further place in a chronicle of poetesses.

MRS. W. S. COURTNEY.

PORTRAIT OF SIDNEY LANIER

BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD

LANIER lived in a spiritual whirlwind, until it snuffed him out. His whole existence was a fight with circumstances; but if every external circumstance had been easy for him, still he would have nourished a perpetual tumult and turmoil within.

Nor was this instinct of fighting wholly figurative or spiritual. As a mere child, Lanier organized a military company among his Georgia playmates and drilled them so thoroughly that they were admitted to parade beside their elders. Before he was a man, the Civil War came, and he enlisted in the cause of his beloved South and served her with distinction. Military glory was not the kind he sought. He was not in the least a bravo or a ranter, and the references in his letters to his military experiences are few and slight. But a touch now and then shows that he knew what suffering was and what endurance was: "Did you ever lie for a whole day after being wounded, and then have water brought to you? If so, you will know how your words came to me.' ." And if he had felt the agony and strain of war, so he responded with the keenest thrill to its picturesqueness, its fever of excitement, its glow and glory.

But the clash of physical war was the least part of Lanier's fierce and constant struggles with circumstance. From his youth till his death in 1881, in his fortieth year, he had ill-health against him, had to contend not only with actual disease and pain, but with the depression and the listless, hopeless discouragement which disease and pain bring with them and leave behind them. The results of this incessant struggle were written on his face and figure, manly and dignified and noble as they were. The worn carriage showed it, the finely cut features, the deep, earnest, passionate eyes, the hands that were vigorous, but white and fine

and delicate. He understood and analyzed his condition perfectly, sometimes trumpeting those fits of exaltation which seem to lift the tuberculous invalid above the world: "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." And again he describes consumptives as "beyond all measure the keenest sufferers of all the stricken of the world," or casually speaks of himself, "tortured as I was this morning, with a living egg of pain away in under my collar bone." But never for a moment could pain or lassitude subdue him or make him give up the struggle to do his work. In the splendid moments of hope he worked. In the dark, dull moments of despair he worked. If ever a man died fighting, he did.

All these strains and torments of ill-health are bad enough when one has means to meet them, can afford at least the necessary lenitives, without anxiety as to where every dollar is to come from. This was far from being the case with Lanier. No one ever lived who cared less for the excitement or the satisfaction of accumulating wealth. He did not even long for the finer luxuries and elegancies that go with wealth, it was simply a question of hard, bitter struggle for actual necessaries. Brought up in the full taste of Southern ease and abundance, he found himself, at the close of the War, like so many Southerners, beginning life in the most cramping bonds of poverty, obliged to fight his way upward from the bottom against every difficulty that material obstacles could oppose to him. Determined as he was to win success in lines of life not in themselves profitable, or only rarely and poorly so, he could not give himself to getting money with the single energy which is most of all necessary to achieve that result.

How desperate, how constant, how blighting this need of money was, is written all through Lanier's biography and letters. Bread-mere, bare bread-is the word that occurs and recurs. Indiscreet utterance "may interfere with one's already very short allowance of bread." Again, "My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper."

Any honest means of earning is resorted to. To all are given faithful, conscientious effort. Comfort and independ