ver the sweet young face,
Where a woman's tenderness blends to-night
With the guileless pride of a haughty race.

Her hands lie clasped in a listless way
On the old _Romance_--which she holds on her knee--
_Of Tristram_, the bravest of knights in the fray,
_And Iseult_, who waits by the sounding sea.

And her proud, dark eyes wear a softened look
As she watches the dying embers fall--
Perhaps she dreams of the knight in the book,
Perhaps of the pictures that smile on the wall.

What fancies I wonder are thronging her brain,
For her cheeks flush warm with a crimson glow!
Perhaps--ah! me, how foolish and vain!
But I'd give my life to believe it so!

Well, whether I ever march home again
To offer my love and a stainless name,
Or whether I die at the head of my men,--
I'll be true to the end all the same.

_Petersburg Trenches, 1864._

FOOTNOTE:

[38] By permission of the author.

SIDNEY LANIER.

~1842=1881.~

SIDNEY LANIER was born in Macon, Georgia, descended from a line of
artist ancestors, through whom he inherited great musical ability. He
was educated at Oglethorpe College, being graduated in 1860. He and
his brother Clifford entered the Confederate Army together in 1861 and
served through the war; but the exposure and hardships and
imprisonment developed consumption which finally caused his death.

After the war he lived for two years in Alabama as a clerk and a
teacher; but his health failed and he was forced to return home where
he practised law with his father till 1873. Then deciding to devote
himself to music and poetry, he went to Baltimore where he was engaged
as first flute in the Peabody Symphony Concerts and in 1879 as
lecturer on English Literature in Johns Hopkins University. His dread
disease never relaxed and he was often obliged to quit work and go to
Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania in search of
strength. His death occurred at Lynn, Polk County, North Carolina, on
his last quest for strength and life with which to continue the work
he so much loved.

His "Science of English Verse" is said to be a new and valuable
addition to the study of poetry. His poems belong to the new order of
thought and life. His "Tiger-Lilies" is a prose-poem, written in three
weeks just after the war and laid in the mountains of Tennessee and on
the eastern shore of Virginia where he was st