save the little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us
clothed and fed in the meantime.

"I do not understand this."
==

Lanier's was an unknown name, and he would write only in obedience
to his own sense of art, and he did not fit his wares
to the taste of those who buy verse. It was to comfort his wife,
in this period of greatest uncertainty whether he had not erred
in launching in the sea of literature, that he wrote again
a letter of frankest confession:

==
"I will make to thee a little confession of faith, telling thee,
my dearer self, in words, what I do not say to my not-so-dear-self
except in more modest feeling.

"Know, then, that disappointments were inevitable, and will still come
until I have fought the battle which every great artist has had to fight
since time began. This -- dimly felt while I was doubtful
of my own vocation and powers -- is clear as the sun to me now that I KNOW,
through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be
in life and utterance, a great poet.

"The philosophy of my disappointments is, that there is so much CLEVERNESS
standing betwixt me and the public . . . Richard Wagner is
sixty years old and over, and one-half of the most cultivated artists
of the most cultivated art-land, quoad music, still think him an absurdity.
Says Schumann in one of his letters: `The publishers will not listen to me