His "fieldward-faring eyes took harvest" "among the stately corn-ranks", in a portion of middle Georgia sixty miles to the north of Macon. It is a high tract of country from which one looks across the lower reaches to the distant Blue Ridge mountains, whose wholesome breath, all unobstructed, here blends with the woods-odors of the beech, the hickory and the muscadine: a part of a range recalled elsewhere by Mr. Lanier, as "that ample stretch of generous soil, where the Appalachian ruggednesses calm themselves into pleasant hills before dying quite away into the sea-board levels" — where "a man can find such temperances of heaven and earth — enough of struggle with nature to draw out manhood, with enough of bounty to sanction the struggle — that a more exquisite co-adaptation of all blessed circumstances for man's life need not be sought."
My Springs.
Of this newly-written poem Mr. Lanier says in a letter of March, 1874: "Of course, since I have written it to print I cannot make it such as *I* desire in artistic design: for the forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future. Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful as I would have it; and I therefore have another still in my heart, which I will some day write for myself."
VII. A Song of Love.
`A Song of Love', like `Betrayal', belongs to the early plan of `The Jacquerie'. It was written for one of the Fool's songs and, after several recastings, took its present shape in 1879.
To Nannette Falk-Auerbach.
This sonnet was originally written in the German and published in a German daily of Baltimore, while the author's translation appeared at the same time in the Baltimore `Gazette'.
To Our Mocking-Bird.
The history of this bird's life is given at length under the title of "Bob", in `The Independent' of August 3, 1882, and will show that he deserved to be immortal — as we hope he is.
Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.