Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/265

SIDNEY LANIER sense of beauty governed and gave tone to all other senses and motive powers. He was first of all a poet and artist, and of a refined and novel order.

No man, in fact, displayed more clearly the poetic and artistic temperaments in their extreme conjunction. It may be said that they impeded, rather than hastened, his power of adequate expression. He strove to create a new language for their utterance, and a method of his own. To reach the effects toward which his subtle instincts guided him, he required a prolonged lifetime of experiment and discovery; and to him how short a life was given—and that how full of impediment! He had scarcely sounded the key-note of his overture when the bow fell from his hand; and beyond all this he meant to compose, not an air or a tune, but a symphony—one involving all harmonic resources, and combinations before unknown.

I find that I am involuntarily using the diction of music to express the purpose of his verse, and this fact alone has a bearing upon what he did, and what he did not do, as an American poet. What seemed affectation in him was his veritable nature, which differed from, and went beyond, or outside, that of other men. He gave us now and then some lyric, wandering or regular, that was marked by sufficient beauty, pathos, weirdness, to show what he might have accomplished, had he been content to sing spontaneously—as very great poets have sung—without analyzing his processes till the song was done. But Lanier was a musician, and still heard in his soul "the music of wondrous melodies." He had, too, the constructive [251]