After what has been said the qualities of style may be briefly handled.
As we have already seen, Lanier sometimes fails in clearness,
or, more precisely, in simplicity. This comes partly
from infelicitous sentence-construction, partly, perhaps,
from Lanier's extraordinary musical endowment, but chiefly, I think,
from over-luxuriance of imagination. But this occasional defect
has been unduly exaggerated. Thus Mr. Gosse*1* declares
that Lanier is "never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric
natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza," -- a statement
so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to call for notice. As a matter of fact,
Lanier has written numerous poems that offer little or no difficulty
to the reader of average intelligence, as `Life and Song', `My Springs',
`The Symphony', `The Mocking-Bird', `The Song of the Chattahoochee',
`The Waving of the Corn', `The Revenge of Hamish', `Remonstrance',
`A Ballad of Trees and the Master', etc. More than this,
Lanier at times manifests the simplicity that is granted
only to genius of the highest order: thus an English critic,*2*
who by the way declares that Lanier's volume has more of genius than
all the poems of Poe, or Longfellow, or Lowell (the humorous poems excepted),
and who considers Lanier the most original of all American poets,
and more original than any England has produced for the last thirty years,
says that "nothing can be more perfect than --

`The whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,'"*3*

lines in `My Springs', and that "the touch of wonder in the last two lines,

`I marvel that God made you mine,
For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine,'*4*