Come, heart for heart -- a trade? What! weeping? why?'
Shame on such wooer's dapper-mercery!"1
And then follows a wooing that, to my mind, should be irresistible, and that, at any rate, is quite as high-souled as Browning's `One Way of Love', which I have long considered the high-water-mark of the chivalrous in love.
The Lady Clarionet is still speaking:
"I would my lover kneeling at my feet In humble manliness should cry, `O Sweet!
I know not if thy heart my heart will greet:
I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say, I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay:
I do but know I love thee, and I pray To be thy knight until my dying day.'"2I imagine, too, that any wife that ever lived would be satisfied with his glorious tribute to Mrs.Lanier in `My Springs', which closes thus:
"Dear eyes, dear eyes, and rare complete --Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet --I marvel that God made you mine, For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine."3Almost equally felicitous are these lines of `Acknowledgment':
"Somehow by thee, dear Love, I win content:
Thy Perfect stops th' Imperfect's argument."4But the cleverest thing that Lanier has written of woman occurs in his `Laus Mariae':
"But thou within thyself, dear manifold heart, Dost bind all epochs in one dainty fact.
Oh, Sweet, my pretty sum of history, I leapt the breadth of time in loving thee!"5-- a scrap worthy to be placed beside Steele's "To love her is a liberal education," which has often been declared the happiest thing on the subject in the English language.
1 `The Symphony', ll.232-240.
2 `The Symphony', ll.241-248.
3 `My Springs', ll.53-56.
4 `Acknowledgment', ll.41-42.
5 `Laus Mariae', ll.11-14.
To Lanier there was but one thing that made life worth living, and that was love.Even the superficial reader must be struck with the frequent use of the term in the poet's works, while all must be uplifted by his conception of its purpose and power.
The ills of agnosticism, mercantilism, and intolerance all find their solution here and here only, as is admirably set forth in `The Symphony', of which the opening strain is, "We are all for love,"and the closing, "Love alone can do." The matter is no less happily put in `Tiger-lilies': "For I am quite confident that love is the only rope thrown out by Heaven to us who have fallen overboard into life.
Love for man, love for woman, love for God, -- these three chime like bells in a steeple and call us to worship, which is to work....
Inasmuch as we love, in so much do we conquer death and flesh;by as much as we love, by so much are we gods.For God is love;and could we love as He does, we could be as He is."1To the same effect is his statement in `The English Novel':
"A republic is the government of the spirit."2 The same thought recurs later: "In love, and love only, can great work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done; it is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in art."3 In the poem entitled `How Love Looked for Hell', Mind and Sense at Love's request go to seek Hell; but ever as they point it out to Love, whether in the material or the immaterial world, it vanishes; for where Love is there can be no Hell, since, in the words of Tolstoi's story, "Where Love is there is God." But in one of his poems Lanier sums up the whole matter in a line:
"When life's all love, 'tis life: aught else, 'tis naught."41 `Tiger-lilies', p.26.
2 `The English Novel', p.55.
3 `The English Novel', p.204.
4 `In Absence', l.42.
It is but a short way from love to its source, -- God.
And, as Lanier was continually in the atmosphere of the one, so, I believe, he was ever in the presence of the other; for the poet's "Love means God"is but another phrasing of the evangelist's "God is love".1Of Lanier's grief over church broils and of his longing for freedom to worship God according to one's own intuition, we have already learned from his `Remonstrance'.What he thought of the Christ we learn from `The Crystal', which closes with this invocation:
