And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word.
By this time Lanier was hard at work for the publishers.
Although he never lost his love for music -- he could not -- he began to see
that his must be a literary career. In a letter of March 20, 1876,
he says to Judge Bleckley that he has had a year of frightful overwork.
"I have been working at such a rate as, if I could keep it up,
would soon make me the proverb of fecundity that Lope de Vega now is."
He refers to the India papers written for "Lippincott's".
"The collection of the multitudinous particulars involved in them
cost me such a world of labor among the libraries of Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore as would take a long time to describe. . . .
In addition to these I have written a number of papers not yet published,
and a dozen small poems which have appeared here and there.
"Now, I don't work for bread; in truth, I suppose that any man who,
after many days and nights of tribulation and bloody sweat,
has finally emerged from all doubt into the quiet and yet joyful activity
of one who KNOWS exactly what his Great Passion is and what his God
desires him to do, will straightway lose all anxiety as to what
he is working FOR, in the simple glory of doing that which lies
immediately before him. As for me, life has resolved simply into a time
during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems
with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket.
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