suggestive. EDWARD R. SILL (1841-1887), long resident in the West but a native of the East, whose early death prevented the full development of his poetic gifts, had sweet flow of verse, originality in phrase and imagery, freshness in handling classic myths, and considerable intellectual and satiric power in treating problems of modern thought. A rare vein was that of EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886), whose condensed little poems on nature and human life startle and stab by their erratic originality of thought and phrase. EMMA LAZARUS (1849-1887), a rich and passionate nature, in her earlier poems wrote on nature, moods, and classic and mediæval legends with an intellectual beauty and purity of style reminiscent of Arnold; in her later poems, preeminently in the powerful Dance to Death, she gave expression to deep racial sympathy aroused by recent persecutions of the Jews in Europe. RICHARD W. GILDER (1844-1909) and HENRY C. BUNNER (18551896) may be mentioned for their skill in the lighter kinds of verse. LLOYD MIFFLIN (1846– ) has written chiefly in the difficult form of the Petrarchan sonnet, touching various subjects with dignity but without marked originality. CLINTON D. SCOLLARD (1860who has been publishing verse since 1884, has a distinctive place among the minor poets by reason of the easy finish of his style; his best volume, Lyrics from a Library (1913), treats literary and bibliographical topics with a delightfully human touch.

Among Southern poets SIDNEY LANIER1 is second

1 LIFE. Born Feb. 3, 1842, at Macon, Ga., of Huguenot and Scotch stock. Graduated at Oglethorpe College, Ga., 1860, with first honors. Tutor in the college until outbreak of Civil War. Served in the Con

only to Poe. A man of exquisite sensibility and a skilled musician, he produced dreamy, mist-like effects that were new in English verse; and his feeling for nature, especially for Southern woods and marshes, is thoroughly modern in its union of exact observation with imaginative subtlety. Hymns of the Marshes is undoubtedly his greatest poetry, containing rich yet delicate harmonies, beauty and brilliancy in description of nature, and a broad religious sense. But his range was wider than is sometimes realized. In The Revenge of Hamish, a terrible picture of the revenge of a Scotch henchman for the cruelty of his lord, and in The Jacquerie, poems revealing the animal-like fury of hate in the souls of French peasants before the Revolution, he expressed the modern humanitarian and democratic feeling; The Psalm of the West is an eloquent glorification of the New World and its freedom; The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson and other poems give pathetically the Southern view of the "Lost Cause"; in How Love Looked for Hell he embodied with brilliant suggestiveness the belief that heaven and hell are rather states of mind than places; in various poems he wrote of music as only a poet musician could; and in

federate Army, 1861-1865. Married Mary Day, 1867. Began to have hemorrhages from the lungs in 1868, and henceforth had to struggle with tuberculosis. Studied and practised law in Macon, Ga., 1868– 1872. Settled in Baltimore, in 1873, as first flute in an orchestra. Appointed lecturer on English literature in Johns Hopkins University, 1879. Died Sept. 7, 1881, in Lynn, N. C., whither he had gone for his health.

WORKS. Tiger Lilies, a Novel, 1867. Poems, 1876, 1877. The Science of English Verse, 1880. The English Novel and the Principle of its Development, 1883. Music and Poetry, 1898. Shakspere and his Forerunners, 1902.

Dialect Poems he broke ground in a new field, though not with entire success, by portraying in verse the characters of negroes and "poor whites." Lanier's versification is sometimes excessively intricate, and his thought occasionally falls away into inarticulate dreamery; but these faults are only the defects of his virtues. Had he lived longer, and developed somewhat more virility, he might have become one of the greatest American poets; as it is he stands only a little lower, in a secure place of his own.

Except for Lanier the New South has done less distinguished work in poetry than in prose, and her poets are relatively few. JOHN B. TABB ("Father Tabb") (1845-1909) wrote exquisite little poems, many of them only four or eight lines long, which recall Herrick and Landor by their terse delicacy of thought and form. IRWIN RUSSELL (1853-1879) during his short and feverish life wrote a few poems in the negro dialect, which depict truthfully, without straining for effect, the "old-time negro," still dear to the Southern white; "I do not know," says Joel Chandler Harris, "where could be found to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of negro character." The negro race speaks directly in the poems of PAUL L. DUNBAR (1872-1906), who, although born and bred in Ohio, may be spoken of in connection with Southern writers as one herald of a higher intellectual and artistic life for his people. The most ambitious of recent Southern poets is MADISON CAWEIN (1865-1914), who through a quarter-century wrote and published steadily, taking his subjects from nature, mythology, and human life past and present; most of his poems are lyrical and descriptive, although

he also attempted the dramatic form. He tires by his facile profuseness, and often misses unity of effect through excess of decorative detail; but he has a rich sense of beauty, especially the beauty of nature, while in poems on certain aspects of Southern life, such as Lynchers and The Feud, his style has unusual compression and force.

In the Middle West the life of "the plain people " has been the chief inspiration to song. JOHN J. PIATT (1835-1917) wrote simply and with manly directness of the farmer's toil, patriotism, and personal joys and sorrows. JOHN HAY (1838-1905) sketched some of the rougher types of Western men, with virile virtues underneath their coarseness, in Pike County Ballads (1871), which have more vitality than the poems in which he expressed his own fine culture. In more recent years JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY (1852-1916) captivated the hearts of many readers by poems, chiefly in the Hoosier dialect, brimful of human kindliness, humor, and pathos. EUGENE FIELD (1850-1895), a more masculine type, wrote some gay and pathetic poems for or about children, besides rollicking verses of quite another sort.

In the Far West, FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902) pictured life in the mining camps in verses that have the same merits and faults as his stories. A very voluminous poet was CINCINNATUS H. MILLER ("Joaquin Miller") (1841-1913), the “Oregon Byron," whose poems on nature and human life on the Pacific slope and in Central America have fire, color, and dash, but are deficient in concentration and unity; his work as a whole is, nevertheless, the best expression in verse of

the romance and passion of the regions he describes. Among more recent poets INA D. COOLBRITH, in Songs from the Golden Gate (1895) and other poems, writes musically of the beauty of life in California.

The poets considered thus far, most of whom did their best work before 1900, followed in the main the traditions of English and American poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century. In the last generation have arisen poets who voice a new spirit—a democracy and humanitarianism more radical than the old, a questioning of all accepted beliefs, artistic, moral, and sociological, as well as religious, and a frank individualism that demands the joy of life, even at times with lawlessness and license.

The last-named aspect of this modern spirit found naïve and boisterous utterance before the close of the century in the Songs from Vagabondia (1894) by BLISS CARMAN (1861- ) and RICHARD HOVEY (1864-1900), who chanted lustily, albeit rather crudely and self-consciously, of the "joys of the road," the wild pleasures of buccaneer and outlaw, and the gladness of comradeship "when strong men drink together." It was all rather boyish, and not half so mad and bad as they would have liked proper people (whom of course they called "Pharisees") to believe; but they did express, in a rousing if amateur way, a growing instinct of revolt from conventional restraints and a new zest for the natural life. Mr. Hovey, in his dramatic poems on subjects from the Arthurian legend, following Swinburne instead of Tennyson, strove to bring out the romantic strength of passion in the old stories, not their moral lessons; in execution the poems are sig