And yet, for all I have said, how his music does burn in my soul!
It stretches me upon the very rack of delight; I know no musician
that fills me so full of heavenly anguish, and if I had to give up
all the writers of music save one, my one should be Robert Schumann.
-- Some of his experiences cover some of my own as aptly
as one half of an oyster shell does the other half.*
--
* `Letters', p. 103.
--
Chapter VII. The Beginning of a Literary Career
During the winter of 1873-74, the first winter in Baltimore,
Lanier had, as has been seen, given his entire time to music.
The only poetry he had written had been inspired by love for his absent wife,
-- poems breathing of the deepest and tenderest affection.
Scarcely less poetical were the letters written to her giving expression
to his joy in the large new world into which he was entering,
and at the same time to his sense of loneliness and pain at their separation.
To her and his boys he went as soon as his engagement
with the Peabody Orchestra was ended. In one of his letters
he had spoken of himself as "an exile from his dear Land,
which is always the land where my loved ones are." He found delight
during this summer, as in the following ones, in the renewal of home ties,
and in the enjoyment of the natural scenery of Macon and Brunswick,
to whose beauty he never ceased to be sensitive.
It was in August, 1874, that he received a fresh impulse towards poetry,
or, at least, towards the writing of more important poems
than those he had heretofore written.
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