Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[220] what Lanier points out,--that all our nursery rhymes and folk-songs are written on the same principle. There is certainly nothing more interesting in Lanier's book than the passage in which he shows that, just as a Southern negro will improvise on the banjo daring variations, such as would, if Haydn employed them, be called high art, so Shakespeare often employed the simplest devices of sound such as are familiar in nursery songs, and thus produced effects which are metrically indistinguishable from those of Mother Goose.

Lanier was a critic of the best kind, for his criticism is such as a sculptor receives from a brother sculptor, not such as he gets from the purchaser on one side or the marbleworker on the other. What can be more admirable than his saying of Swinburne, “He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt;” or of William Morris, “He caught a crystal cupful of yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to deem it wine, drank it with a sort of smile.” Among the fullest and most suggestive of these criticisms is his estimate of Whitman.