I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green
Dying to silent hints of kisses keen
As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.
This exemplifies the sort of English, the sort of imagination, the sort of style which are to make Keats and Shelley—who have found Bryant and Landor, Rossetti and Emerson, unworthy of their company—comfortable with a mate at last. If these vapid and eccentric lines were exceptional, if they were even supported by a minority of sane and original verse, if Lanier were ever simple or genuine, I would seize on those exceptions and gladly forget the rest; but I find him on all occasions substituting vague, cloudy rhetoric for passion, and tortured fancy for imagination, always striving, against the grain, to say something prophetic and unparalleled, always grinding away with infinite labour and the sweat of his brow to get that expressed which a real poet murmurs, almost unconsciously, between a sigh and a whisper.
Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong.
Lanier must have been a charming man, and one who exercised a great fascination over those who knew him. But no reasonable critic can turn from what has been written about Lanier to what Lanier actually wrote, and still assert that he was the Great American Poet.
It is not likely to be seriously contended that there were in 1888 more than four of the deceased poets of America who need to have their claims discussed in connection with the highest honours in the art. These are Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Poe. There is one other name which, it may seem to some of my readers, ought to be added to this list. But originality was so entirely lacking in the composition of that versatile and mellifluous talent to which I allude, that I will not even mention here the fifth name. I ask permission rapidly to inquire whether Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson and Poe are worthy of a rank beside the greatest English twelve.