Measure what space a violet stands above the ground;
'Tis no further climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that.'"
==

It was this quality, high and consecrate, as of a palmer with his vow,
this knightly valiance, this constant San Greal quest
after the lofty in character and aim, this passion for Good and Love,
which fellows him rather with Milton and Ruskin than with
the less sturdily built poets of his day, and which puts him
in sharpest contrast with the school led by Swinburne --
with Rossetti and Morris as his followers hard after him --
a school whose reed has a short gamut, and plays but two notes, Mors and Eros,
hopeless death and lawless love. But poetry is larger and finer
than they know. Its face is toward the world's future;
it does not maunder after the flower-decked nymphs and yellow-skirted fays
that have forever fled -- and good riddance -- their haunted springs
and tangled thickets. It can feed on its growing sweet and fresh faiths,
but will draw foul contagion from the rank mists that float
over old and cold fables. For all knowledge is food, as faith is wine,
to a genius like Lanier. A poet genius has great common sense.
He lives in to-day and to-morrow, not in yesterday.
Such men were Shakespeare and Goethe. The age of poetry is not past;
there is nothing in culture or science hostile to it.
Milton was one of the world's great poets, but he was
the most cultured and scholarly and statesmanlike man of his day.
He was no dreamer of dead dreams. Neither was Lanier a dreamer.
He came late to the opportunity he longed for, but when he came to it
he was a tremendous student, not of music alone, but of language,
of philosophy, and of science. He loved science. He was an inventor.
He had all the instincts and ambitions of this nineteenth century.