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

[224] if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be; crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical,--so I call him the Modern Boy.

It remains to be said that in Lanier's poetry we find the working out of these ideas, but according to the free faith which he held. There is uniformly a wonderful beat and cadence in his poems,--a line of a dozen syllables mating with a line of a single syllable in as satisfactory a movement as can be found in his favorite Mother Goose or in the “patting Juba” of a plantation singer. The volume of his poetry is less than that of Hayne, but its wealth and depth are greater. Having spent so much of his life in playing the flute in an orchestra, he has also an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or a compensating note. In the poems that most arrest attention,as the Cantata at the opening of the Philadelphia Exposition,--this characteristic was so developed as to give an effect of exaggeration and almost of grotesqueness, which was, however, so relieved by the music that