his books for boys: `Froissart', `King Arthur', `Mabinogion', and `Percy',
which have had, as they deserve, a large sale; and his posthumous
`From Bacon to Beethoven', a highly instructive essay on music.




III. Lanier's Poetry: Its Themes



But it is chiefly as a poet that we wish to consider Lanier,
and I turn to the posthumous edition of his `Poems' gotten out by his wife.
At the outset let us ask, How did the poet look at the world?
what problems engaged his attention and how were they solved?
A careful investigation will show, I believe, that,
despite the brevity of his life and its consuming cares,
Lanier studied the chief questions of our age, and that in his poems
he has offered us noteworthy solutions.

What, for instance, is more characteristic of our age than its tendency
to agnosticism? I pass by the manifestations of this spirit
in the world of religion, of which so much has been heard,
and give an illustration or two from the field of history and politics.
Picturesque Pocahontas, we are told, is no more to be believed in;
moreover, the Pilgrim Fathers did not land at Plymouth Rock,
nor did Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Which way we turn
there is a big interrogation-point, often not for information
but for negation. Of the good resulting from the inquisitive spirit,
we all know; of the baneful influence of inquisitiveness