Lanier is the finest flute-player you or I ever saw. It is perfectly
splendid--his playing. He is far-famed for it. His flute cost fifty
dollars, and he runs the notes as easily as any one on the piano."

The passionate love of his sensitive soul is revealed in this poetic
description of a visit to the opera:

"I have just come in from the _Tempest_ at the Grand Opera House ...
and my heart is so full.... In one interlude between the scenes we had
a violin solo, adagio, with soft accompaniment by orchestra. As the
fair tender notes came, they opened like flower-buds expanding into
flowers under the sweet rain of the accompaniment. Kind heavens! My
head fell on the seat in front, I was weighed down with great loves
and great ideas and divine inflowings and devout outflowings, and as
each note grew and budded, and became a bud again and died into a
fresh birth in the next bud tone, I also lived these flower-tone
lives, and grew and expanded, and folded back and died and was born
again, and partook of the unfathomable mysteries of flowers and
tones." And at another time he writes in the same vein,--"'Twas
opening night of Theodore Thomas' orchestra at Central Park Garden,
and I could not resist the temptation to go and bathe in the sweet
amber seas of this fine orchestra, and so I went, and tugged me
through a vast crowd, and, after standing some while, found a seat,
and the baton waved, and I plunged into the sea, and lay and floated.
Ah! the dear flutes and oboes and horns drifted me hither and thither,
and the great violins and small violins swayed me upon waves, and
overflowed me with strong lavations, and sprinkled glistening foam in
my face, and in among the clarinetti, as among waving water-lilies
with plexile stems, pushed my easy way, and so, even lying in the
music waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and
prostrate." Who has ever written more expressively of that ecstasy
that lays hold of the sensuous soul of the lover of fine music?

Lanier is one of the heroic souls of song. Like Stevenson he was
cheery enough to jest about his poverty. His contest with the demon of
Want seems to have been fiercer even than was the warfare waged by the
gay romancer. Lanier wishes to meet Charlotte Cushman, but he is not
sure that he can; he must sell a poem or two to get the price of a
suitable new dress coat. "Alas," he writes to the lady herself, in
that gay spirit of humor which is the strong defense of some