From Baltimore drunk with loyalty and pity I appeal to Baltimore sober. What are really the characteristics of this amazing and unparalleled poetry of Lanier? Reading it again, and with every possible inclination to be pleased, I find a painful effort, a strain and rage, the most prominent qualities in everything he wrote. Never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza, always forcing the note, always concealing his barrenness and tameness by grotesque violence of image and preposterous storm of sound, Lanier appears to me to be as conclusively not a poet of genius as any ambitious man who ever lived, laboured, and failed. I will judge him by nothing less than those poems which his warmest admirers point to as his masterpieces; I take _Corn_, _Sunrise_, and _The Marshes of Glynn_. I persist in thinking that these are elaborate and learned experiments by an exceedingly clever man, and one who had read so much and felt so much that he could simulate poetical expression with extraordinary skill. But of the real thing, of the genuine traditional article, not a trace. _I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green_ _Dying to silent hints of kisses keen_ _As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen._ This exemplifies the sort of English, the sort of imagination, the sort of style which are to make Keats and Shelley--who have found Bryant and Landor, Rossetti and Emerson, unworthy of their company--comfortable with a mate at last. If these vapid and eccentric lines were exceptional, if they were even supported by a minority of sane and original verse, if Lanier were ever simple or genuine, I would seize on those exceptions and gladly forget the rest; but I find him on all occasions substituting vague, cloudy rhetoric for passion, and tortured fancy for imagination, always striving, against the grain, to say something prophetic and unparalleled, always grinding away with infinite labour and the sweat of his brow to get that expressed which a real poet murmurs, almost unconsciously, between a sigh and a whisper. _Wheresoe'er I turn my view,_ _All is strange, yet nothing new;_ _Endless labour all along,_ _Endless labour to be wrong._ Lanier must have been a charming man, and one who exercised a great fascination over those who knew him. But no reasonable critic can turn from what has been written about Lanier to what Lanier actually wrote, and still assert that he was the Great American Poet.