Every door is wide open. . . .
All the graces of poesy and art and music stand waiting by,
ready to welcome a bold new-comer. . . . Who will come forward and inaugurate
a new era of bold, electrical, impressive writing?"
With some such ambition as this in his mind, Lanier gave up
his work in Montgomery in the spring of 1867 and went to New York
with the completed manuscript of "Tiger Lilies".* He was there for more
than a month, finally arranging for its publication with Hurd & Houghton,
the predecessors of the present firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. He was
enabled to publish his book by the generous help of Mr. J. F. D. Lanier.
Some of his experiences on this, his first visit to the metropolis,
are significant. He is somewhat dazed by the life of the big city.
"I tell you," he writes to a friend, "the Heavens are alien to this town,
and if it were anybody else but the Infinite God that owned them,
he wouldn't let them bend so blue over here." In a letter
to his father, April 16, he describes the view of the city
from Trinity Church steeple and tells a characteristic incident:
"The grand array of houses and ships and rivers and distant hills
did not arrest my soul as did the long line of men and women,
which at that height seemed to writhe and contort itself
in its narrow bed of Broadway as in a premature grave. . . .
I have not seen here a single eye that knew itself to be in front of a heart
-- but one, and that was a blue one, and a child owned it.
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