Sweetness of disposition, depth of emotion, and absolute purity of life are frequently regarded as feminine traits. These Lanier had, but they were fused with the qualities of a virile and healthy manhood. He attracted strong and intellectual men as well as refined and cultivated women. The bravery manifested during the Civil War and the fortitude that he displayed after the war became elemental qualities in his character. His admiration of the heroic deeds of the age of chivalry arose from a certain inherent knightliness in his own character. He had the combination of tenderness and strength to which he called attention in Sir Philip Sidney. His admiration for old English poetry was due to the "ruddiness in its cheek and the red corpuscles in its veins." There is in his later prose the "send and drive" of a vigorous soul. It was this elemental manhood that attracted him to Whitman, despite all his protests against the latter's carelessness of form and lack of grace. "Reading him," he says, "is like getting the salt sea spray into one's face."

He had some of the Southerner's resistance to anything like insult. A story is frequently told in Baltimore of the way in which Lanier resented the conductor's words to a young lady at a rehearsal of the Peabody Orchestra. "----, irritated in his undisciplined musician's nerves, vented that irritation in a rude outburst towards a timid young woman who was playing the piano, either with orchestra or voice or in solo. In an instant Lanier's tall, straight figure shot up from his seat and, taking the chair he occupied in his hand, he said: `Mr. ----, you must retract every word you have uttered and apologize to that young lady before you beat another bar.' There was no mistake of his resoluteness and determination, and Mr. ---- retracted and apologized; the orchestra went on only after the same had been done."

Another element that contributed to the admirable symmetry of Lanier's character was that of humor. One would misjudge him entirely if he took into account only the highly wrought letters on music or the great majority of his poems. From one standpoint he seems a burning flame. As a matter of fact, however, his enthusiasm for anything that was fine and the ecstatic rapture into which he passed under the spell of great music or nature or poetry, were balanced by humor that was playful and delicate and at times irresistible. His pranks as a college boy and as a soldier have already been noted. His enjoyment of the negro and of the Georgia "Cracker" may be seen in his dialect poems, "A Florida Ghost", "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn", "Jones's Private Argument", and others. With his children his spirit of fun-making knew no bounds. The point may still further be seen by any one who reads his lectures, and especially those letters to his friends in which he constantly indulged in playful conceits and fine humor. He even laughed at his poverty, and got off many a jest in the very face of death. In this respect, as in others, he was strikingly like Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lanier's modernness of mind has already been illustrated in his attitude to music and to scholarship. Asked one time what age he preferred, he said, "the Present," and the answer was typical of his whole attitude to things. He did not rail at his age. He was a close student of current events. He spoke strongly sometimes, as did Wordsworth and Ruskin, against the materialism of the nineteenth century; he delivered his protest against it in many of his poems; and yet he never lost his faith that all material progress would eventually contribute to the moral and artistic needs of man. "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".