Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[216] Southern-born poets of this country except Lanier, even as to Hayne and Timrod, the question still remains whether they got actually beyond the poetic mind. In Ticknor's Little Giffen and Pinkney's I fill this Cup, they did. In Lanier's case alone was the artistic work so continuous and systematic, subject to such self-imposed laws and tried by so high a standard, as to make it safe, in spite of his premature death, to place him among those whom we may without hesitation treat as “master-singers.” Even among these, of course, there are grades; but as Lowell once said of Thoreau, “To be a master is to be a master.” With Lanier, music and poetry were in the blood. Music was at any rate his first passion. As a boy he taught himself to play the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar, and banjo; the firstnamed instrument was always his favorite, or, perhaps, that of his father, who “feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin.” But his parents rather dreaded his absorption in music, apparently thinking with Dr. Johnson that musicians were “amusing vagabonds.” The same thought caused a struggle in the boy's own mind, for he wrote