SOURCE: Gabin, Jane S. “The Centennial Cantata.” In A Living Minstrelsy, pp. 89-104. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Gabin retraces both the negative critical reaction and the positive public response to Lanier's Centennial Meditation of Columbia, demonstrating that the verses read alone, without the musical accompaniment, warrant much of the negative critique.

In Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, seventy-five acres of frozen ground were being prepared for the construction of almost two hundred buildings, statues, and fountains. The land had been leveled, drained, marked into streets, and planted with utility poles since the end of 1873, but three years later only five half-finished buildings and a lot of mud were to be found on the site.¹ However, within five months, a special railroad line would link the city's center to the main entrance of the Centennial exhibition area, where broad avenues would lead hundreds of thousands of...