analysis of the poem, which occurs in his reply to the above-mentioned letter.
After giving various minute criticism (for Lanier had requested
his unreserved judgment), Judge Bleckley continues:
"Now, for the general impression which your Ode has made upon me.
It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait.
You paint the woods, a corn-field, and a worn-out hill.
These are your landscapes. And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious,
unthrifty cotton-planter who always spends his crop before he has made it,
borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year,
wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West.
Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person,
and you give its portrait with many touches of marvel and mystery
in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant
the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it
seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it
to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence
in the distant future."

A comparison of the first draft of `Corn', as sent Judge Bleckley,
with the final form shows that Lanier made many minute changes in the poem,
especially in the earlier part. Still this earlier draft agrees substantially
with the later, and was so fine in conception and execution
as to call forth this commendation of Judge Bleckley, which,
despite the shortcomings of `Corn', may with greater justice be applied
to the poem in its present form: "As an artist you seem to be Italian
in the first two pictures, and Dutch or Flemish in the latter two.
In your Italian vein you paint with the utmost delicacy and finish.
The drawing is scrupulously correct and the color soft and harmonious.
When you paint in Dutch or Flemish you are clear and strong,
but sometimes hard. There is less idealization and more of