Music gained a new hold on him during an enforced health trip to Texas in the winter of 1872-1873. He had reveled in the concerts he had heard in different visits to New York after the war, but in San Antonio he fell in with a group of musicians for whom he was a player as well as an auditor. Without any formal instruction in the flute he had achieved such a command of the instrument that it had become a second voice for him. In the autumn of '73 he met and played for Hamerick, Director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and in December he went in triumph to his initial rehearsal as first flutist in the newly organized Peabody Symphony Orchestra. For the rest of his life music was his most reliable means of support and a source of pleasure that amounted to little less than dissipation. As a performer he was in great demand for extra local engagements, from which he seemed to gain quite as much enjoyment as he gave--for he played in a kind of ecstasy; he "felt in his performance the superiority of the _momentary inspiration_, to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship." As an auditor, whether of his own music or that rendered by others, his appreciation was almost wholly sensuous, an experience of raptures, thrills, and swooning joys. "Divine lamentations, far-off blowings of great winds, flutterings of tree and flower leaves and airs troubled with wing-beats of birds or spirits; floatings hither and thither of strange incenses and odors and essences; warm floods of sunlight, cool gleams of moonlight, faint enchantments of twilight; delirious dances, noble marches, processional chants, hymns of joy and grief: Ah, midst all these I lived last night, in the first chair next to Theodore Thomas' orchestra." From such a comment one is prepared for frequent references to the more modern composers, few to Beethoven, and none at all to Bach and Brahms; and one is helped to understand also the mistakenly limited dictum--too often quoted--that "Music is love in search of a word." Music was immensely important in Lanier's emotional life; the kind that he most enjoyed, and the kind of enjoyment he derived from it, furnished the cue for an interpretation of much of his poetry--a cue which is the clearer when compared with what music meant to Browning.