"He gloried in antiquarian lore and antiquarian literature. Hardly `Old Monkbarns' himself could have pored over a black-letter volume with greater enthusiasm. Especially he loved the tales of chivalry, and thus, when the opportunity came, was fully equipped as an interpreter of Froissart and `King Arthur' for the benefit of our younger generation of students. With the great Elizabethans Lanier was equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakespeare, he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly of Shakespeare's mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier's productions we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves more effectively — not only in the illustrations, but through the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style — than in some of his familiar epistles."*
— * `Letters', p. 220. —
That Lanier kept in touch, too, with contemporary literature is shown by an acute criticism of Browning's "The Ring and the Book", then recently published: "Have you seen Browning's `The Ring and the Book'? I am confident that, at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one — as in the old tale — crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist i' the neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a marvelous tortuous passage. Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't, and can't, come straight. A hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock. But what a shock it is! Did you ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? In a thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you. The first sixty or seventy pages of `The Ring and the Book' are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the English language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, that of Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini, are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, `me judice'. Here Browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect. You get lightning glimpses — and, as one naturally expects from lightning, zigzag glimpses — into the intense night of the passion of these souls. It is entirely wonderful and without precedent. The fitful play of Guido's lust, and scorn, and hate, and cowardice, closes with a master stroke: —
"Christ! Maria! God! . . .
POMPILIA, WILL YOU LET THEM MURDER ME?
"Pompilia, mark you, is dead, by Guido's own hand; deliberately stabbed, because he hated her purity, which all along he has reviled and mocked with the Devil's own malignant ingenuity of sarcasm."*
— * `Letters', p. 206; letter to Hayne, April 13, 1870. —
On account of ill health Lanier frequently had to leave Macon and go to places better suited to his physical temperament. At Brunswick, Georgia, — the scene of the Marsh poems, — at Alleghany Springs in Virginia, and at Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, he spent successive summers. In all of these places he reveled in the beauty and grandeur of the scenery. His letters written to his wife and his father during his absences from Macon are evidence that he was at this time developing steadily in that subtle appreciation of nature which was afterwards to play such an important part in his poetry. In fact, the letters themselves, when published, as they will be some time, show artistic growth when compared with the writings already noted. He was all his life a prolific letter-writer — and a great one. Writing from Alleghany Springs, July 12, 1872, he says to his wife: —
"How necessary is it that one should occasionally place oneself in the midst of those more striking forms of nature in which God has indulged His fantasy! It is very true that the flat land, the bare hillside, the muddy stream comes also directly from the creative hand: but these do not bring one into the sweetness of the heartier moods of God; in the midst of them it is as if one were transacting the business of life with God: whereas, when one has but to lift one's eyes in order to receive the exquisite shocks of thrilling form and color and motion that leap invisibly from mountain and groves and stream, then one feels as if one had surprised the Father in his tender, sportive, and loving moments.
"To the soul then, weak with the long flesh fight and filled with a sluggish languor by those wearisome disappointments which arise from the constant contemplation of men's weaknesses, and from the constant back-thrusting of one's consciousness of impotence to strengthen them — thou, with thy nimble fancy, canst imagine what ethereal and yet indestructible essences of new dignity, of new strength, of new patience, of new serenity, of new hope, new faith, and new love, do continually flash out of the gorges, the mountains, and the streams, into the heart, and charge it, as the lightnings charge the earth, with subtle and heavenly fires.
"A bewildering sorcery seems to spread itself over even those things which are commonplace. The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness.