The impulse to poetry was with him, too. He jotted down or dictated to his wife outlines and suggestions of poems which he hoped to write. Of these one has been printed: —
I was the earliest bird awake,
It was a while before dawn, I believe,
But somehow I saw round the world,
And the eastern mountain top did not hinder me.
And I knew of the dawn by my heart, not by mine eyes.
One agrees with "Father" Tabb that no utterance of the poet ever betrayed more of his nature, — "feeble and dying, but still a `bird', awake to every emotion of love, of beauty, of faith, of star-like hope, keeping the dawn in his heart to sing, when the mountain-tops hindered it from his eyes."
On August 4 the party started across the mountains to Lynn, Polk County, North Carolina. On the way they stopped with a friend in whose house Lanier gave one more exhibition of his love of music. "It was in this house," says Miss Spann, "the meeting-place of all sweet nobility with nature and with the human spirit, that he uttered his last music on earth. At the close of the day Lanier came in and passed down the long drawing-room until he reached a western window. In the distance were the far-reaching Alleghany hills, with Mt. Pisgah supreme among them, and the intervening valley bathed in sunset beauty. Absorbed away from those around him, he watched the sunset glow deepen into twilight, then sat down to the piano, facing the window. Sorrow and joy and pain and hope and triumph his soul poured forth. They felt that in that twilight hour he had risen to an angel's song."*
— * `Independent', June 28, 1894. —
Lynn is in a sheltered valley among the mountains of Polk County, whose "climate is tempered by a curious current of warm air along the slope of Tryon Mountain, its northern boundary, a sort of ethereal Gulf Stream." Here death came soon than was anticipated by the brother, who had gone back to Montgomery, preceded already by his father. Mrs. Lanier's own words tell the story of the end in simplicity and love: "We are left alone (August 29) with one another. On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of God." His death before the open window was a realization of Matthew Arnold's wish with regard to dying: —
Let me be,
While all around in silence lies,
Moved to the window near, and see
Once more, before my dying eyes, —
Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aerial landscape spread,
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead."
The closing lines of "Sunrise" express better than anything else
Lanier's own confident faith as he passed behind the veil: —
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
Labor, at leisure, in art — till yonder beside thee
My soul shall float, friend Sun,
The day being done.