In the development of artistic power the formative period is the most open to influence and the most likely to be formal and self-conscious. Early and full maturity bring the nicest balance between the thing said and the manner of saying it; and a later period often is marked by overcompression or over-elaboration, a neglect of form in favor of content. Lanier, who died on the approach to middle life, had just published "The Science of English Verse" and was studiously aware of poetic processes, from the ingenious conceits of the "Paradise of Dainty Devices" to the metrical experiments of Swinburne and his contemporaries. In the compound of factors which were blending into the matured Lanier there was still a good measure of Elizabethan ingenuity. He felt a pleasant thrill in riding a metaphor down the page. He played repeatedly, for example, with the concept of the passage of time. In the second sonnet of "Acknowledgment" this age is a comma, and all time a complex sentence (four lines); in "Clover" the course-of-things is a browsing ox (twenty-five lines); in "The Symphony" the leaves are dials on which time tells his hours (three lines); in the first of the "Sonnets on Columbus" prickly seconds and dull-blade minutes mark three hours of suspense (three lines); and in "The Stirrup-Cup" death is a cordial compounded by time from the reapings of poets long dead (twelve lines). These all are picturesquely suggestive, but they are rather imposed on the idea than derived from it. Other poets, to be sure, have erred in the same way and then perhaps redeemed themselves. Lanier, however, said nothing so fundamentally true and compact as Pope's "Years following years _steal something_ every day," or Shakespeare's "And that _old common arbitrator_, Time," or his "_whirligig_ of time." There is a similar reaching for effect in the rhythmical quality of many well-known passages. The twelve-line description of the velvet flute-note in "The Symphony" is more deft and intricate than convincing. The figures stumble on each other's heels, and the alliterations, assonances, and three- and five-fold rimes are intrusively gratuitous. In like manner the opening lines of "The Marshes of Glynn" illustrate the over-luxuriance of Lanier. He delighted in tropical exuberance; he rioted in his letters with less restraint than in his verse, and in one written to his wife in 1874 he confessed parenthetically: "In plain terms--sweet Heaven, how I do abhor these same plain terms--I have been playing 'Stradella.'" When he wrote this Lanier was thirty-two. Before his death he had approached the point of liking the plain term better and employing it oftener.