I know of none that came nearer being a true poem than did Lanier.
He was as spotless as "the Lady of Christ's", and infinitely more lovable.
Indeed, he seems to me to have realized the ideal of his own knightly Horn,
who hopes that some day men will be "maids in purity".*
I will not recall his gentle yet heroic life amid drawbacks
almost unparalleled; for it is even sadder than it is beautiful.
It is my deliberate judgment that, while, as the poet says
in his `Life and Song', no singer has ever wholly lived
his minstrelsy, Lanier came so near it that we may fairly say,
in the closing lines of the poem,

"His song was only living aloud,
His work, a singing with his hand."

And, for my part, I am as grateful for his noble private life
as for his distinguished public work.

--
* `The Symphony', l. 302.
--

And yet I will not close with this picture of the man; for my purpose
is rather to present the poet. Hampered though he was by fewness of years,
by feebleness of body, by shortness of bread, and, most of all perhaps,
by over-luxuriance of imagination, Lanier was yet, to my mind,
indisputably a great poet. For in technique he was akin to Tennyson;*
in the love of beauty and in lyric sweetness, to Keats and Shelley;
in the love of nature, to Wordsworth; and in spirituality, to Ruskin,
the gist of whose teaching is that we are souls temporarily having bodies;
to Milton, "God-gifted organ-voice of England"; and to Browning,