Moreover, with a universality of poetic feeling, he has struck every chord, and always with a keen sensibility and delicacy of natural instinct. Among the finest poems, how wide is this range and varied this power!
"The Vision of Poesy", his longest work, written in youth, essaying the mission and the philosophy of the poetic art, has some lofty passages, and all the promise of his later power, felicity, and melody.
"A Year's Courtship" is in its glow, and grace, and music the perfection of classic art.
The dainty voluptuousness in a "Serenade" kindles with the luxuriousness of the South.
His "Præceptor Amat" is warm with the breath of rapturous feeling, and rich with the fragrance of flowers.
"Ethnogenesis", "the birth of the nation", is regarded by some his greatest poem. It is prophecy linked with the hope and aspiration of the newborn nation of the South. A permanent image of the Southern nature and character is thus richly portrayed:—
"But the type
Whereby we shall be known in every land
Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand,
And through the cold, untempered ocean pours
Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores
May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas."
"The Cotton Boll", in "the snow of Southern summers", is a forerunner of Lanier's "Corn". It reveals the mystic spell and kingly power of that far-stretching tropic snow, and contains that glowing painting of Carolina from sea to mountain, which closes
"No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays,
Or given a home to man!"
"Too Long, O Spirit of Storm", is the fused passion of the poet's heart appalled at the moral death of stagnation. It has all the intensity and subtlety of Shelley.