This standard he could not forget in his judgments of artists.
There was something in Whitman which "refreshed him like harsh salt spray,"
but to Whitman's lawlessness of art he was an utter foe.
We find it written down in his notes:
== "Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle — is what Whitman feeds our souls with."
"As near as I can make it out, Whitman's argument seems to be, that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God." ==
So he says of Swinburne:
== "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt." ==
And of William Morris:
== "He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile." ==
Though not what would be called a religious writer, Lanier's large and deep thought took him to the deepest spiritual faiths, and the vastness of Nature drew him to a trust in the Infinite above us. Thus, his young search after God and truth brought him into the membership of the Presbyterian Church while at Oglethorpe College; and though in after years his creed became broader than that imposed by the Church he had joined on its clergy, he could not outgrow the simple faith and consecration which are all it requires of its membership. His college notebook records his earnestness;
== "Liberty, patriotism, and civilization are on their knees before the men of the South, and with clasped hands and straining eyes are begging them to become Christians." ==
How naturally his large faith in God finds expression in his "Marshes of Glynn"; or his reverent discipleship of the great Artist and Master in his "Ballad of the Trees and the Master", or his "The Crystal", which was Christ. Yet, with not a whit less of worshipfulness and consecration, there grew in him a repugnance to the sectarianism of the Churches which put him somewhat out of sympathy with their formal organizations. He wrote, in what may have been a sketch for a poem: