"
He quotes from "that simple and powerful sonnet of dear old William Drummond
of Hawthornden": --
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,
But that, O me! -- I both must write and love.
He had to give much of his time, however, to hack work.
During the summer of 1875 he was engaged in writing a book on Florida
for the Lippincotts. It is, as he wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne,
"a sort of spiritualized guide-book" to a section which was then drawing
a large number of visitors. "The thing immediately began
to ramify and expand, until I quickly found I was in for
a long and very difficult job: so long, and so difficult,
that, after working day and night for the last three months
on the materials I had previously collected, I have just finished the book,
and am now up to my ears in proof-sheets and wood-cuts
which the publishers are rushing through in order to publish
at the earliest possible moment, the book having several features
designed to meet the wants of winter visitors to Florida." It is filled
with facts in regard to climate and scenery, practical hints for travelers,
and other things characteristic of a guide-book; but it is more than that.
Like everything else that Lanier ever did, -- even the dreariest hack work, --
he threw himself into it with great zest. It has suggestions to consumptives
born out of his own experience. There are allusions to music,
literature, and philosophy. There are descriptions and historical anecdotes
of the cities of South Carolina and Georgia; above all,
there are descriptions of the Florida country which only a poet could write.
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