Literary Hearthstones of Dixie | Page 7

the hands of
the only being he ever met who would tear it to shreds and throw it into
the mire.

"THE SUNRISE POET"
SIDNEY LANIER
In my memory-gallery hangs a beautiful picture of the Lanier home as I
saw it years ago, on High Street in Macon, Georgia, upon a hillock with
greensward sloping down on all sides. It is a wide, roomy mansion,
with hospitality written all over its broad steps that lead up to a wide
veranda on which many windows look out and smile upon the visitor as
he enters. One tall dormer window, overarched with a high peak, comes
out to the very edge of the roof to welcome the guest. Two, smaller and
more retiring, stand upon the verge of the high-combed house-roof and
look down in friendly greeting. There are tall trees in the yard, bending
a little to touch the old house lovingly.
Far away stretched the old oaks that girdled Macon with greenery,
where Sidney Lanier and his brother Clifford used to spend their
schoolboy Saturdays among the birds and rabbits. Near by flows the
Ocmulgee, where the boys, inseparable in sport as well as in the more
serious aspects of life, were wont to fish. Here Sidney cut the reed with
which he took his first flute lesson from the birds in the woods. Above
the town were the hills for which the soul of the poet longed in after
life.
Macon was the "live" city of middle Georgia. She made no effort to
rival Richmond or Charleston as an educational or literary centre, but
she had an admirable commercial standing, and offered a generous
hospitality that kept her in fond remembrance. In the Macon post-office
Sidney Lanier had his first business experience, to offset the drowsy

influence of sleepy Midway, the seat of Oglethorpe College, where he
continued his studies after completing the course laid out in the
"'Cademy" under the oaks and hickories of Macon.
January 6, 1857, Lanier entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe,
where it was unlawful to purvey any commodity, except Calvinism,
"within a mile and a half of the University"--a sad regulation for
college boys, who, as a rule, have several tastes unconnected with
religious orthodoxy.
Lanier carried with him the "small, yellow, one-keyed flute" which had
superseded the musical reed provided by Nature, and practised upon it
so fervently that a college-mate said that he "would play upon his flute
like one inspired."
Montvale Springs, in the mountains of Tennessee, where Sidney's
grandfather, Sterling Lanier, built a hotel in which he gave his
twenty-five grandchildren a vacation one summer, still holds the
memory of that wondrous flute and yet more marvellous nature among
the "strong, sweet trees, like brawny men with virgins' hearts." From its
ferns and mosses and "reckless vines" and priestly oaks lifting yearning
arms toward the stars, Lanier returned to Oglethorpe as a tutor. Here
amid hard work and haunting suggestions of a coming poem, "The
Jacquerie," he tried to work out the problem of his life's expression.
* * * * *
When the guns of Fort Sumter thundered across Sidney Lanier's dreams
of music and poetry, he joined the Macon volunteers, the first company
to march from Georgia into Virginia. It was stationed near Norfolk,
camping in the fairgrounds in the time that Lanier describes as "the gay
days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James River."
Life there seems not to have been "all beer and skittles," or the poetic
substitutes therefor, for he goes on to say that their principal duties
were to picket the beach, their "pleasures and sweet rewards of toil
consisting in ague which played dice with our bones, and blue mass
pills that played the deuce with our livers."

In 1862, the Company went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they
indulged "for two or three months in what are called the 'dry shakes of
the sand-hills,' a sort of brilliant tremolo movement." The time not
required for the "tremolo movement" was spent in building Fort Fischer,
until they were ordered to Drewry's Bluff, and then to the
Chickahominy, where they took part in the Seven Days' fight.
Even war places were literary shrines for Lanier, for wherever he
chanced to be he was constantly dedicating himself anew to the work of
his life. In Petersburg he studied in the Public Library. In that old town
he first saw General R.E. Lee, and watched his calm face until he "felt
that the antique earth returned out of the past and some mystic god sat
on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a terrible, yet sublime,
contest of human passions"--perhaps the most poetic conception ever
awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an elderly gentleman
asleep under the influence of a