Chapter IX. Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University
The Peabody lectures led to the appointment of Lanier as lecturer in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. As early as the fall of 1876, he had written to President Gilman, asking for a catalogue of the institution. In answer to his first letter of inquiry, President Gilman, who had followed with interest his Centennial poem, and had been from the first an admirer of his poetry, requested an interview for the purpose of discussing with him the possibility of identifying him with the University. Lanier had then talked with him about the advisability of establishing a chair of music and poetry, a plan which appealed to Dr. Gilman. In a letter to his brother he writes of this interview: "He invited me to tea and gave up his whole evening to discussing ways and means for connecting me officially with the University." He had been delayed in suggesting the matter to him before by his "ignorance as to whether I had pursued any special course of study in life." Dr. Gilman recommended to the trustees that Lanier be appointed to such a chair, and the latter looked forward to a "speedy termination of his wandering and a pleasant settlement for a long time." For some reason, however, the plan did not materialize, and we find Lanier a year later writing a letter applying for a fellowship: —
Washington, D.C., Sept. 26, 1877.
Dear Mr. Gilman, — From a published report of your very interesting address I learn that there is now a vacant Fellowship. Would I be able to discharge the duties of such a position?
My course of study would be: first, constant research in the physics of musical tone; second, several years' devotion to the acquirement of a thoroughly scientific GENERAL view of Mineralogy, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy; third, French and German Literature. I fear this may seem a nondescript and even flighty process; but it makes straight towards the final result of all my present thought, and I am tempted, by your great kindness, to believe that you would have confidence enough in me to await whatever development should come of it.
Sincerely yours,
Sidney Lanier.
Such a plan of study did not fit in with the scheme of graduate courses, and so he was not awarded it. President Gilman had, however, heard with much satisfaction Lanier's lectures at Mrs. Bird's, and had cooperated with him in the series of lectures at the Peabody Institute. Finally, the trustees, convinced of Lanier's scholarship, and conscious of his growing influence in Baltimore, agreed to his appointment as lecturer in English literature, and Dr. Gilman had the rare pleasure of announcing the fact on the poet's thirty-seventh birthday — February 3, 1879. Lanier responded in a letter, indicative at once of the spirit in which he received the appointment and of his high personal regard for the president of the University. No story of Lanier's life would be adequate that did not pay tribute to the uniform kindness and thoughtful consideration of the poet's welfare manifested by Dr. Gilman. He has his place in that inner circle of Lanier's friends who meant much to him in opening up new fields of endeavor, and who after his death zealously promoted his fame.
Lanier occupies a place in the history of Johns Hopkins University that has perhaps not been fully appreciated. His appointment was not a merely nominal one, for he threw himself with zeal and energy into the life of the University. He breathed its atmosphere. He was a personal friend of the president, of nearly every member of the faculty, and of the university officers. He caught its spirit and grew with it into a real sense of the ideals of University work. While his poem written on the fourth anniversary of the opening of the University, is not one of his best, it indicates the great love that he had for the institution: —
How tall among her sisters, and how fair, —
How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair
As dawn! . . .
Has she, old Learning's latest daughter, won
This grace, this stature, and this fruitful fame.
What the University meant to Lanier can be realized only by those who have noted the eager spirit with which he responded to every great influence brought into his life, and who realize what "those early days of unbounded enthusiasm and unfettered ideality," characteristic of the newly founded University, meant to the American educational system. Her sister institutions have in later days gone far beyond Johns Hopkins in equipment and in opportunities for research, but students of American education can never forget the pioneer work of the University in the line of graduate study. Fortunately its benefactor had left a board of trustees absolutely untrammeled by any condition or reservation, political, religious, or literary. A body of unusually strong men, they were fortunate in securing the services of Daniel Coit Gilman, whose experience in educational matters had commended itself to the judgment of the four leading university presidents of the country to such an extent that each of them without consulting with the others advised his election. The newly elected president and the trustees were accessible to ideas, and finally decided that the wisest thing that could be done was to make possible what had been previously wanting in American universities, a graduate school with high standards. American professors had studied in German universities and distinguished European scholars had been called to chairs in American universities, but neither had succeeded in essentially modifying the type of higher education. Dr. Gilman himself had tried in vain to secure the opportunity for graduate work in this country. Now, without any traditions to bind them, the organizers of the University had the opportunity "which marked the entrance of the higher education in America upon a new phase in its development." "The great work of Hopkins," said President Eliot at the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation, "is the creation of a school of graduate studies, which not only has been in itself a strong and potent school, but which has lifted every other university in the country in its departments of arts and sciences."