"It is often asserted," he said,
"that ours is a materialistic age, and that romance is dead; but this is
marvelously untrue, and it may be counterasserted with perfect confidence
that there was never an age of the world when art was enthroned
by so many hearthstones and intimate in so many common houses as now."
He accepted the facts of his time, and sought to make them subservient
to the healthy idealism that reigned in his soul.
Furthermore, he was an absolutely open-minded man, eager for any new world
which he might enter. He had nothing of the provincialism
of the parish or of the period. One of the most striking illustrations
of this quality of mind is seen in comparing him with Poe, who was
irritable and prejudiced. Poe shared the ante-bellum Southerner's prejudice
against New England and all her writers. There is nowhere in Lanier
any indication that such a spirit found lodgment in his mind.
Emerson -- the transcendentalist -- was one of his "wise masters".
Another striking illustration of his breadth of view
was his profound reverence for science. That he had this so early was due,
as has been already seen, to the influence of Professor Woodrow at college.
In "Tiger Lilies" he said, in commenting on Macaulay's idea
of poetry declining as science grows: "How long a time intervened
between Humboldt and Goethe; how long between Agassiz and Tennyson?
One can scarcely tell whether Humboldt and Agassiz were not as good poets
as Goethe and Tennyson were certainly good philosophers.
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