SOURCE: Mims, Edwin. “The Achievement in Criticism and in Poetry.” In Sidney Lanier, pp. 340-75. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905.

In the following essay, Mims offers an enthusiastic, early twentieth-century assessment of Lanier's contributions to American poetry and literary criticism.

Speculations as to what Lanier might have done with fewer limitations and with a longer span of years inevitably arise in the mind of any one who studies his life. If, like the late Theodore Thomas, he had at an early age been able to develop his talent for music in the musical circles of New York; if, like Longfellow, he had gone from a small college to a German university, or, like Mr. Howells, from the provinces to Cambridge, where he would have come in contact with a group of men of letters; if, after the Civil War, he had, like Hayne, retired to a cabin and...