Yet let me not be too hasty,

Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended into one;

Then if we die we die together (yes, we 'll remain one),

If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,

May-be we 'll be better off and blither, and learn something,

May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning so now finally, Good-bye- and hail! my Fancy.

DEATH'S VALLEY

1891.

To accompany a picture; by request. 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death,' from the painting by George Inness.

NAY, do not dream, designer dark,

Thou hast portray'd or hit thy theme entire;

I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it, Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too.

For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,

After dread suffering - have seen their lives pass off with smiles;

And I have watch'd the death-hours of the old; and seen the infant die;

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;

And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath'd my every breath

Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

And out of these and thee,

I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee, Nor gloom's ravines, nor bleak, nor dark for I do not fear thee,

Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),

Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass,

And the low hum of living breeze - and in the midst God's beautiful eternal right hand,

Thee, holiest minister of Heaven - thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,

Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call'd life,

Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.

1896. (1897.)

O' the ears was cropped, o' the tail was nicked,

(All.) Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.
The hound into his kennel crept;
He rarely wept, he never slept.

1 One of Lanier's early plans was for a long poem in heroic couplets, with lyric interludes, on the insurrec tion of the French peasantry in the fourteenth century. 'Although,' says Mrs. Lanier, "The Jacquerie" remained a fragment for thirteen years, Mr. Lanier's interest in the subject never abated. Far on in this interval he is found planning for leisure to work out in romance the story of that savage insurrection of the French peasantry, which the Chronicles of Froissart had impressed upon his boyish imagination.' 'It was the first time,' says Lanier himself, in a letter of November 15, 1874, that the big hungers of the People appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance.' Five chapters of the story, and three lyrics, were completed. See the Poems, pp. 191-214.