Beneath the sunset's golden sheaves
The awful deep walks with the deep,
Where silent sea-doves slip and sweep,
And commerce keeps her loom and weaves.
The dead red men refuse to rest;
Their ghosts illume my lurid West.

CROSSING THE PLAINS 1

What great yoked brutes with briskets low,
With wrinkled necks like buffalo,

With round, brown, liquid, pleading eyes,
That turn'd so slow and sad to you,
That shone like love's eyes soft with tears,
That seem'd to plead, and make replies,
The while they bow'd their necks and drew
The creaking load; and looked at you.
Their sable briskets swept the ground,
Their cloven feet kept solemn sound.

Two sullen bullocks led the line,

Their great eyes shining bright like wine;

Two sullen captive kings were they,
That had in time held herds at bay,

And even now they crush'd the sod

1 Permission to reprint this poem was granted by the Harr Wagner Publishing Co., San Francisco, California, publishers of Joaquin Miller's Complete Poetical Works.

With stolid sense of majesty,
And stately stepp'd and stately trod,
As if 'twere something still to be
Kings even in captivity.

FROM "BYRON"

In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,

I do not dare to draw a line

Between the two, where God has not.

Edward Rowland Sill

Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly thereafter his poor health compelled him West. After various unsuccessful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the University of California. His uncertain physical condition added to his mental uncertainty. Unable to ally himself either with the lethargic, conservative forces whom he hated or with the radicals whom he distrusted, Sill became an uncomfortable solitary; half rebellious, half resigned. During the last decade of his life, his brooding seriousness was less pronounced, a lighter irony took the place of his dark reflections.

The Hermitage, his first volume, was published in 1867, a later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His two posthumous books are Poems (1887) and Hermione and Other Poems (1899).

Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to the West, in 1887.

SOLITUDE

All alone-alone,

Calm, as on a kingly throne,

Take thy place in the crowded land,
Self-centred in free self-command.
Let thy manhood leave behind

The narrow ways of the lesser mind:
What to thee are its little cares,
The feeble love or the spite it bears?

Let the noisy crowd go by:

In thy lonely watch on high,

Far from the chattering tongues of men, Sitting above their call or ken,

Free from links of manner and form Thou shalt learn of the wingéd stormGod shall speak to thee out of the sky.

DARE YOU?

Doubting Thomas and loving John,
Behind the others walking on:-

"Tell me now, John, dare you be

One of the minority?

To be lonely in your thought,
Never visited nor sought,

Shunned with secret shrug, to go
Thro' the world, esteemed its foe;

To be singled out and hissed,
Pointed at as one unblessed,
Warned against in whispers faint,
Lest the children catch a taint;
To bear off your titles well,—
Heretic and infidel?

If you dare, come now with me,
Fearless, confident, and free."

Thomas, do you dare to be

Of the great majority?

To be only, as the rest,

With Heaven's creature comforts blessed;

To accept, in humble part,

Truth that shines on every heart;

Never to be set on high,

Where the envious curses fly;

Never name or fame to find,

Still outstripped in soul and mind;
To be hid, unless to God,
As one grass-blade in the sod,
Underfoot with millions trod?
If you dare, come with us, be
Lost in love's great unity.

Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful performer on various instruments), and it is not surprising that

his verse emphasizes-even overstresses-the influence of music on poetry. He attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the age of eighteen (1860), and, a year later, volunteered as a private in the Confederate army. After several months' imprisonment (he had been captured while acting as signal officer on a blockade-runner), Lanier was released in February, 1865, returning from Point Lookout to Georgia on foot, accompanied only by his flute, from which he refused to be separated. His physical health, never the most robust, had been frightfully impaired by his incarceration, and he was already suffering from tuberculosis, the rest of his life being spent in an unequal struggle against it.

He was now only twenty-three years old and the problem of choosing a vocation was complicated by his marriage in 1867. He spent five years in the study and practice of law, during which time he wrote comparatively little verse. But the law could not hold him; he felt premonitions of death and realized he must devote his talents to art before it was too late. He was fortunate enough to obtain a position as flautist with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 in Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and literature he craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, he was made lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, and it was for his courses there that he wrote his chief prose work, a brilliant if not conclusive study, The Science of English Verse. Besides his poetry, he wrote several books for boys, the two most popular being The Boy's Froissart (1878) and The Boy's King Arthur (1880).

Lanier's poetry, charming though most of it is, suffers from his all too frequent theorizing, his too-conscious effort to bring verse over into the province of pure music. He thought almost entirely, even in his most intellectual conceptions, in terms of musical form. His main theory that English verse has for its essential basis not accent but a strict musical quantity is a wholly erroneous conclusion, possible only to one who could write "whatever turn I have for art is purely musical-poetry