`And oh, if men might some time see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That trade no more than trade must be!
Does business mean, "Die, you -- live, I"?
Then "Trade is trade" but sings a lie:
'Tis only war grown miserly.
If business is battle, name it so.'"**

--
* `The Symphony', ll. 1-2.
** `The Symphony', ll. 31-61.
--

Of even wider sweep than mercantilism is the spirit of intolerance;
for, while the diffusion of knowledge and of grace has in a measure
repressed this spirit, it lacks much of being subdued. I do not wonder
that Lanier "fled in tears from men's ungodly quarrel about God,"
and that, in his poem entitled `Remonstrance', he denounces intolerance
with all the vehemence of a prophet of old.

But Lanier had an eye for life's beauties as well as its ills.
To him music was one of earth's chief blessings. Of his early passion
for the violin and his substitution of the flute therefor,
we have already learned. According to competent critics he was possibly
the greatest flute-player*1* in the world, a fact all the more interesting
when we remember that, as he himself tells us,*2* he never had a teacher.
With such a talent for music the poet has naturally strewn his pages
with fine tributes thereto. In `Tiger-lilies', for instance,
he tells us that, while explorers say that they have found
some nations that had no god, he knows of none that had no music,