The turning point came in 1873. The poet's physical condition had become so alarming that he had been sent to spend the winter at San Antonio, Texas. He found what least he was looking for. The German Maennerchor of the city, an unusual circle of musicians, discovered him and asked him to play to them the flute, an instrument that had been his companion since boyhood. "To my utter astonishment," he wrote his wife, "I was master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have not practised; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never heert de flude accompany itself pefore."[125] Judging from contemporary testimony, we are compelled to rate Lanier as a musical genius. Though he never had had formal training in the art, from his childhood music had been with him a consuming passion. He had taken his flute to the war, he had smuggled it into the prison, and he had moved all his life amid a chorus of exclamations over the magic beauty of his improvisations. The masters were praising him now: he would be a master himself. He would toil no longer at the task he despised; he would live now for art. In November, 1873, he wrote to his father: How can I settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do something so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others, of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen. My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways--I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?[126]