--
* See `Letters'.
--
Soon after meeting Mr. Peacock and his wife, Lanier was sought out
by Charlotte Cushman on one of her trips to Baltimore.
She had been much interested in reading "Corn", and was so attracted
by the personality of the author (as he was by her),
that an intimate friendship sprang up between them, growing in intensity
until her death, February 18, 1876. She had but recently been greeted
with a great ovation in New York city, at a meeting in which Joseph Jefferson
had represented the stage and Bryant and Stoddard the realm of letters.
The ovation was repeated in the cities of Boston and Philadelphia.
"Though coming into the circle of her friendships during the latter years
of her life, when she had become famous throughout the English-speaking world,
Lanier won for himself there a warm and high place," says her biographer.
There was much to attract the two to each other. Both had
the highest ideals of their art; for to Miss Cushman as to Lanier,
art was a sacred thing. "I know," she said, "He does not fail
to set me his work to do and help me to do it and help others to help me."
Furthermore, they were both sufferers from an incurable malady,
and both victors over it in a certain serene spirit which
transcended suffering. Her words are paralleled by many of Lanier's:
"I know my enemy; he is ever before me and he must conquer,
but I cannot give up to him; I laugh in his face and try to be jolly --
and I am! I declare I am even when he presses me hardest.
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