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

Whitman represented to Lanier a literary spirit alien to his own. There could be little in common between the fleshliness of Leaves of grass and the refined chivalry that could write in The Symphony lines like these:--

Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
We maids would far, far whiter be,
If that our eyes might sometimes see
Men maids in purity?

In Lanier's lectures before Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore upon The English novel and its development he has much to say upon what may be called the antikidglove literature, a product which is really no better than the kid-glove literature, at which it affects to protest. Lanier quotes the lines of Whitman, “Fear grace, fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse,” and again the passage in which the same poet rejoices in America because “here are the roughs, beards, . . . combativeness, and the like;” and Lanier shows how far were the founders of the Republic — Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams — from this theory that there can be no manhood in decent clothes or wellbred manners. He justly complains that this rougher school has really as much dandyism