Dr. Gilman refers here to a scheme for a course in English literature outlined by the poet in the summer of 1879. Lanier indicated three distinct courses of study which would tend to give to students (1) a vocabulary of idiomatic English words and phrases, (2) a stock of illustrative ideas, (3) acquaintance with modern literary forms. To secure the first point, he suggests that students should read with a view to gathering strong and homely English words and phrases from a study of authors ranging from the Scotch poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Swift and Emerson. To secure ideas, the student should study systems of thought, ancient and modern. "The expansion of mental range, as well as special facilities in expression, attainable by such a course, cannot be too highly estimated." Under the third head he suggests the study of various forms of writing, -- an idea which has been carried out in recent years. The ultimate end of all this study, however, is "the spiritual consolation and refreshment of literature when the day's work is over, the delight of sitting with a favorite poet or essayist at evening, the enlargement of sympathy, derivable from powerful individual presentations such as Shakespeare's or George Eliot's; the gentle influences of Sir Thomas Browne or Burton or Lamb or Hood, the repose of Wordsworth, the beauty of Keats, the charm of Tennyson should be brought out so as to initiate friendships between special students and particular authors, which may be carried on through life."*

--
* `The Independent', March 18, 1886.
--

In another letter he wrote still further of his plans, clearly distinguishing between the popular lectures and the more technical work of the University class-room. It is a long letter, but gives so well Lanier's idea of his work in the University and his plans for the future that it serves better than much comment: --

                                   180 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Md.,
                                              July 13, 1879.

My dear Mr. Gilman, -- I see, from your letter, that I did not clearly explain my scheme of lectures.

The course marked "Class Lectures" is meant for advanced students, and involves the hardest kind of University work on their part. Perhaps you will best understand the scope of the tasks which this course will set before the student by reading the inclosed theses which I should distribute among the members of the class as soon as I should have discovered their mental leanings and capacities sufficiently, and which I should require to be worked out by the end of the scholastic year. I beg you to read these with some care: I send only seven of them, but they will be sufficient to show you the nature of the work which I propose to do with the `University student'. I should like my main efforts to take that direction; I wish to get some Americans at hard work in pure literature; and will be glad if the public lectures in Hopkins Hall shall be merely accessory to my main course. With this view, as you look over the accompanying theses, please observe: --

1. That each of these involves original research and will -- if properly carried out -- constitute a genuine contribution to modern literary scholarship;

2. That they are so arranged as to fall in with various other studies and extend their range, -- for example, the first one being suitable to a student of philosophy who is pursuing Anglo-Saxon, the second to one who is studying the Transition Period of English, the sixth to one who is studying Elizabethan English, and so on;

3. That each one necessitates diligent study of some great English work, not as a philological collection of words, but as pure literature; and

4. That they keep steadily in view, as their ultimate object, that strengthening of manhood, that enlarging of sympathy, that glorifying of moral purpose, which the student unconsciously gains, not from any direct didacticism, but from this constant association with our finest ideals and loftiest souls.

Thus you see that while the course of "Class Lectures" submitted to you nominally centres about the three plays of Shakspere* therein named, it really takes these for texts, and involves, in the way of commentary and of thesis, the whole range of English poetry. In fact I have designed it as a thorough preparation for the serious study of the poetic art in its whole outcome, hoping that, if I should carry it out successfully, the Trustees might find it wise next year to create either a Chair of Poetry or a permanent lectureship covering the field above indicated. It is my fervent belief that to take classes of young men and to preach them the gospel according-to-Poetry is to fill the most serious gap in our system of higher education; I think one can already perceive a certain narrowing of sympathy and -- what is even worse -- an unsymmetric development of faculty, both intellectual and moral, from a too exclusive devotion to Science which Science itself would be the first to condemn.

--
* `Midsummer Night's Dream', `Hamlet', and `The Tempest'.
--

As to the first six class lectures on "The Physics and Metaphysics of Poetry": they unfold my system of English Prosody, in which I should thoroughly drill every student until he should be able to note down, in musical signs, the rhythm of any English poem. This drilling would continue through the whole course, inasmuch as I regard a mastery of the principles set forth in those lectures as vitally important to all systematic progress in the understanding and enjoyment of poetry.

I should have added, apropos of this class course, that there ought to be one examination each week, to every two lectures.

In the first interview we had, after my appointment, it was your intention to place this study among those required by the University for a degree. I hope sincerely you have not abandoned this idea; and the course outlined in "Class lectures" forwarded to you the other day, and in the theses of which I send the first seven herewith, seems to me the best to begin with. If it should be made a part of the "Major Course in English" (where it seems properly to belong), I could easily arrange a simpler and less arduous modification of it for the corresponding "Minor Course".