Encouraged by the success of "Corn", Lanier, while giving a large part of his time to music during the winter of 1874-75, looked more and more in the direction of poetry. He writes again to Judge Bleckley, November 15, 1874: "Your encouraging words give me at once strength and pleasure. I hope hard and work hard to do something worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds to outline what is to be his first `magnum opus', "a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called `The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of THE PEOPLE appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness -- it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society. -- This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."*

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* Quoted in part in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 65.
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Lanier never finished this poem, but he was soon hard at work on another which was based on the same idea, "The Symphony". Writing to his newly acquired friend, Mr. Peacock, March 24, 1875, he says: "About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it `The Symphony': I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit." The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", June, 1875; and besides confirming the good opinion of Mr. Peacock, won the praise of Bayard Taylor, George H. Calvert, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charlotte Cushman, and was copied in full in Dwight's "Journal of Music".

As in his first poem Lanier had pointed out a defect in Southern life, so in his second long poem he struck at one of the evils of national life. In the South he felt that there was not enough of the spirit of industry; looking at the nation as a whole, however, he exclaims: --

    "O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
    The time needs heart -- 't is tired of head:
    We are all for love," the violins said.

The germ of this poem is found perhaps in a letter written from Wheeling, West Virginia, where he went with some of his fellow musicians to give a concert, April 16, 1874. It is a realistic picture of a city completely dominated by factory life. What he afterwards called "the hell-colored smoke of the factories" created within him a feeling of righteous indignation akin to that of Ruskin, although it must be said in justice to Lanier that, in combating the evils of industrial life, he never went to the extreme of eccentric passion displayed by the English writer. Nor, on the other hand, could he say with Walt Whitman: "I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism, of the current age. . . . I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States are parts of a melioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand."

Lanier's poem is more applicable to the conditions that prevail to-day than to those of his own time. He shows himself a prophet, the truth of whose words is realized by many of the finer minds of the country. He lets the various instruments of the orchestra utter their protest against the evils of modern trade. The violin, speaking for the poor who stand wedged by the pressing of trade's hand and "weave in the mills and heave in the kilns," protests against the spirit of competition that says even when human life is involved, "Trade is only war grown miserly."

    Alas, for the poor to have some part
    In yon sweet living lands of art.

Then the flute -- Lanier's own flute, summing up the voices of nature, "all fair forms, and sounds, and lights" -- echoes the words of the Master, "All men are neighbors." Trade, the king of the modern days, will not allow the poor a glimpse of "the outside hills of liberty". The clarionet is the voice of a lady who speaks of the merchandise of love and yearns for the old days of chivalry before trade had withered up love's sinewy prime: --

    If men loved larger, larger were our lives;
    And wooed they nobler, won they nobler wives.

To her the bold, straightforward horn answers, "like any knight in knighthood's morn." He would bring back the age of chivalry, when there would be "contempts of mean-got gain and hates of inward stain." He voices, too, the idea long ago expressed by Milton that men should be as pure as women: --

    Shall woman scorch for a single sin,
    That her betrayer may revel in,
    And she be burnt, and he but grin
     When that the flames begin,
        Fair lady?

    Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
    `We maids would far, far whiter be
    If that our eyes might sometimes see
     Men maids in purity.'

Then the hautboy sings, "like any large-eyed child," calling for simplicity and naturalness in this modern life. And all join at the last in a triumphant chant of the power of love to heal all the ills of life: --

    And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
    And ever Love hears the women's sighing,
    And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying,
    And ever wise childhood's deep implying,
    But never a trader's glozing and lying.

    And yet shall Love himself be heard,
    Though long deferred, though long deferred:
    O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
    Music is Love in search of a word.