with the assistance of huge sails which they support with extended arms, are enabled to travel long distances at a high rate of speed. St. Mary's River, that beautiful winding stream which connects Lakes Huron and Superior, is frequently dotted, in winter, with sleighs and sleds drawn by horses or oxen; and sometimes dog sledges, so suggestive of Arctic modes of conveyance, are seen skimming across between the Canadian and American shores.

To many men other than lake sailors the wintry blasts which sweep down from the north mark the advent of a season the programme of which is one of daily deeds of daring. The life-savers see many battles with ice-capped surf ere their season of activity ends, and an ice-choked sea frequently works something of hardship for the keepers of lonely lighthouses. The real heroism, however, the fortitude which must wear through a long dreary winter, is that of the keepers of the cribs which constitute the remotest outposts of the waterworks systems of the great cities. Within sight of land, but with all communication oftentimes cut off, these men have a weary vigil. In the late autumn, when the ice is thin, or in the spring, when the frozen field is breaking up, their efforts to go back and forth are fraught with the gravest danger.

It would be scarcely just to include the glories of Niagara Falls in the category of winter beauties of the lakes, but mention should not be omitted of the vast ice-jam which forms every year in the vicinity of Buffalo. When the winds of springtime drive the ice down Lake Erie, the accumulation is often too great to be carried down the Niagara River, and consequently there is formed an immense blockade which sometimes keeps the port of Buffalo closed for weeks after the others on the lower lakes have been opened.

Like Niagara, the lakes in winter, while despoiled of much of the loveliness which makes them beautiful in summer, have a majesty of their own which, if indescribable, is irresistible once it is given an opportunity to exert its influence. Some day, perhaps, the vast wastes of ice will be put to some use that will compare

not unfavorably with the summer activity on fresh water.

The success of the Russians, whose employment of powerful ice-breaking steamers enabled them last year to keep open to commerce Vladivostok and other ports

A WALK OVER THE ICE TO THE CRIB

previously closed during several months of the year, has very naturally started an agitation for the use of such facilities on the great lakes of America. Indeed it is not impossible that a project embodying some such idea may be brought up in Congress before the close of the century. With a constantly increasing dependency upon the sources of our iron supply the advantage of navigation the year round would of course be vastly greater on the inland seas of America than at Russian ports, the commerce of which is in the first stage of development. To the people of Montreal, also, the vision of an agency that would keep that port open to waterborne commerce in the winter is a most alluring one. The frozen channel of the St. Lawrence has ever proven a serious barrier to the development of Canada's oceanic shipping interests, and naturally if there be any way to remove this blockade of snow and ice it will be eagerly sought.

CLEVELAND.

WALDON FAWCETT.

S

IDNEY LANIER was a singer. His poems, his prose, his letters, his speech, were songs. He felt, he taught, he laughed, he mourned, in terms of music. Music was his heaven and his earth, his God and his man. In "Tiger Lilies," his only novel, he makes one of his characters say, "Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means God." When a boy about nine years of age he made a flute out of a reed, with which he played the forest songs of the birds. He was so susceptible to the music of the violin that it often threw him into a trance from which he would sometimes awaken in his room early in the morning alone and cold. Of these trances he could remember little except that he had been in a paradise of music where rhythm and harmony of song pervaded and controlled.

Without special training he played almost every kind of musical instrument. He did not have to study harmony; his soul seemed to have been born into a harmony more perfect than the instructor of music could give, and when he played he freed his soul, as it were, and an exalted music, timid, pathetic, passionate, swept the souls of his audience. It has been said by some of the greatest American critics that he was the best flute-player this country has produced.

Mr. Asger Hamerik, his director for six years in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, of Baltimore, says:

"To him, as a child in his cradle, Music was given: the heavenly gift to feel and to express himself in tones. His conception of music was not reached by an analytical study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous, like a woman's reason: he felt it so because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning. His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned, for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only the art of art, but it was an art above art."

It is impossible to understand the basic principles of Sidney Lanier's poetry without a knowledge of his passionate, divine insight into music. Music was to him what it is to the birds, what it is to the brook. No piece of written music was complete for him. He seemed to get out

row.

of it what the composer could not put in. He played the music technically as it was written, but he added sunshine and springair, or laughter and tears, or joy and sorIn his playing he was like a divinely strung human harp that responded to every soul-sentiment in his audience. The mood of every person before him touched a string, and then there emanated from him such a harmony of rhythm and beauty as could never be portrayed by laws of music alone. He added to the barren music-laws what the frost-crystals and sunshine of winter add to the leafless tree. He tuned every beautiful element in his nature, and as his soul became impassioned these elements, all playing, formed an orchestra which accompanied the execution of the written music, while his personality reflected ten thousand lights and shadows which the technical selection never contained. When Patti heard him in Baltimore she said: "He reveals to me a world of soul sweeter than music. I cannot sing; he has made my music smell musty." She expressed his genius exactly. Everything else seemed sere and faded when compared with the youthful blush that suffused all that he did. He gave one the impression that a new life had been born with tints and colors which the world had never seen before.

There is a secret of his power which he reveals over and over in his poems and prose. He did not try to develop his art. He was forever working upon himself, and then he gave himself and all that he developed within himself to his art. He said once: "My flute is my faucet; it lets out just what I have put in. If I can become beautiful, the soul running through my flute will be beautiful also." He was conscious of the possibilities of his great power and felt the responsibilities of development. He did not believe that a genius is one through whom God works, but rather one who takes the tools God gave him and then does his own work. He accepted for himself the responsibility of the worker for his own work, and in

his poem ( Individuality" he asserts that principle:

"Awful is Art because 'tis free.
The artist trembles o'er his plan

Where men his Self must see,
Who made a song or picture, he
Did it, and not another, God or man.

"My Lord is large, my Lord is strong: Giving, He gave: my me, is mine.

How poor, how strange, how wrong, To dream He wrote the little song

I made to Him with love's unforced design!

a Oh, not as clouds dim laws have planned To strike down Good and fight for Ill,Oh, not as harps that stand

In the wind and sound the wind's command: Each artist Gift of Terror!-owns his will."

He believed that great music was but the rhythm of a great personality, and when he entered the realm of poetry he retained the same conviction. The rhythm of nearly every poem could as easily have been set to music. Great personality to him meant profound, comprehensive, and accurate scholarship saturated with the gentleness of love which made it supremely democratic. These were the principles which inspired all of his poetry, and they account for the spirit, the music, and the scholarship of his poems. They made him an original and powerful writer and musician, although throughout his whole professional career in literature and music his soul lived in a body which seemed to delight in playing near the grave. One can almost say with accuracy that his body was dead during the six years in which his literary work was done, but that his imperious will compelled it to shamble along on the earth and provide a shelter for his soul. During this time both lungs were almost entirely gone, and every line of some of his best poems was written while he gasped for breath. His little quatrain, "Struggle," is accurately true of his life.

"My soul is like the oar that momently

Dies in a desperate stress beneath the wave, Then glitters out again and sweeps the sea: Each second I'm new-born from some new grave."

Olive Schreiner, in one of her dream novels, portrays a painter who painted with a single color, and as he painted his picture became redder and redder and the artist grew paler and paler. People went up and down saying, "We like the picture; we like the glow." Artists came from afar to see his work and tried to learn the secret of his colors, but he would not tell and he painted on with his head bent low. One day they found him dead before his picture, and when they took him up to bury him they found a little That wound just above his left breast. Iwas where he had found his color. He had painted his picture with his blood. Spiritually and physically the metaphor

Smarely yours

Sienen Janier

them. They are all lofty, heroic, hopeful, and sublime in conception and in finish. Although his body, brooding over the clods of clay continually, must have been a pessimist, his soul was a jubilant optimist singing the larger life and the nobler things. Among all the tragic biographies of literature there is not a more pathetic or more beautiful story than that of the struggles and victories of Sidney Lanier. He had built his life upon a stupendous and beautiful design, and he wanted to live to tell the world of the

He

glories which a great life knows. sings that longing in "Life and Song":

"If life were caught by a clarionet,

And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy, and trill its fret,
And utter its heart in every deed,

"Then would this breathing clarionet

Type what the poet fain would be; For none o' the singers ever yet Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,

"Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of life and song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife;

"Or lived and sung, that life and song

Might each express the other's all, Careless if life or art were long

Since both were one to stand or fall.

"So that the wonder struck the crowd,
Who shouted it about the land:-
His song was only living aloud,

His work, the singing with his hand!»

And then in "Red Roses" he reveals another hope for his songs:

"Would that my songs might be

What roses make my day and night-
Distillments of my clod of misery
Into delight."

The poem which gave this Southern singer national fame for conception, charm, and music, and which compelled the recognition of his power, was "The Song of the Chattahoochee." One almost finds himself running by the stream as he reads, and the music of "Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall," peals through the mind and will not be stopped.

"Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,

I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side,
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.

"But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall

Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of duty call-

Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main;
The dry fields burn and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham
Calls through the valleys of Hall."

The broad sympathy and a fine conception of social conditions are portrayed in parts of the "Symphony" in which he deplores trade for trade's sake and appeals to men to recognize the princely fraternity of the family of mankind.

"Yea, what avails the endless tale

Of gain by cunning and plus by sale?
Look up the land, look down the land,
The poor, the poor, the poor they stand
Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand
Against an inward opening door.

'Each day, all day (these poor folks say)
In the same old year-long, drear-long way,
We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills?'

But who said once in Lordly tone,

Man shall not live by bread alone,
But all that cometh from the Throne?

Does business mean, Die, you— live, I?
Then trade is trade, but sings a lie:
'Tis only war grown miserly.

If business is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so:
And widows less will blame it so.
Alas for the poor to have some part
In yon sweet living land of art."

Such a poem is bold and strikes hard, for conviction is the heaviest hammer that man swings. But probably the greatest poem from the pen of Sidney Lanier, and the one which promised the largest work for the future if life could have been prolonged, is, "The Marshes of Glynn." It is so continuous in thought and in rhythm that one finds it almost impossible to make a selection without impairing its power. The continuous analogy between the vastness and the mystery of the Marshes and the vastness and mystery of God is one of the most powerful and beautiful conceptions in American poetry:

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothingwithholding and free,

Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!

Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains

and the sun,

T

HE recent celebrations in England of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Charles I and the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Oliver Cromwell have revived the interest in those men, whose history involves the fortunes of the House of Stuart and the marvellous rise of "England's uncrowned king."

The characters of the two men are as variously estimated to-day as during the seventeenth century; the king is regarded by many, as of old, as the "royal martyr;"> by others, as an unscrupulous monarch who deserved his fate. By one faction Cromwell is looked upon as a cruel leader and wanton iconoclast; by the other, as a stalwart Puritan who sacrificed his own ambitions in the interests of reform, for the good of the nation.

It is needless here to go into the historical details of the strife between the king and the Parliament, or to recount the fatal experiment by the king of governing without a Parliament. It suffices here to recall the fact that serious religious and political dif

ferences led to a civil war which only ended when the king had expiated his mistakes or crimes upon the scaffold. This brief article deals chiefly with the domestic affairs of the royal family, especially with the character of the second daughter, Elizabeth, whose personal charms and intellectual attainments make her one of the remarkable figures in history.

The queen of Charles I was Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France, who unfortunately incurred the displeasure of her husband's subjects on her first arrival among them, a young girl of but fifteen years. There were years of discord in their early married life; then the barrier between them was broken down and they became united in an indissoluble bond of affection. The queen, for a number of years, was absorbed in the care of her young family, rarely joining in the amusements of the gay court.

At the time of the outbreak of the civil war in 1639 there were five children of this royal union,- Mary, Charles, James, Elizabeth, and Henry. Mary became the