Literary Hearthstones of Dixie | Page 8

sermon on a drowsy mid-summer day.
Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him to "seize at any
price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, Tieck."
In the spring of 1863, on a visit to his old home in Macon, Lanier met
Miss Mary Day and promptly fell in love, a fortunate occurrence for
him, in that he secured an inspiring companion in his short and brilliant
life, and for us because it is to her loving care that we owe the
preservation of much of his finest work. On the return to Virginia, he
and his brother Clifford had as companions the charming Mrs. Clement
C. Clay and her sister, who wanted escorts from Macon to Virginia.
She claims to have bribed them with "broiled partridges, sho' 'nuf sugar,
and sho' 'nuf butter and spring chickens, 'quality size,'" to which
allurements the youthful poets are alleged to have succumbed with
grace and gallantry. I recall an evening that General Pickett and I spent
with Mrs. Clay at the Spotswood Hotel, when she told us of her trip
from Macon, and her two poet escorts. I remember that Senator Vest
was present and played the violin while Senator and Mrs. Clay danced.
Sidney Lanier said of his experience at Fort Boykin, on Burwell's Bay,
that it was in many respects "the most delicious period" of his life. It
may be that no other young soldier found so much of romance and

poetry in the service of Mars or put so much of it into the lives of those
around him. There are old men, now, who in their youth lived on the
James River, in whose hearts the melody of Sidney Lanier's flute yet
lingers in golden fire and dewy flowering. At Fort Boykin he decided
the question of his vocation, writing to his father so eloquent a letter
upon the desirability of pursuing his tastes, rather than trying to follow
the paternal footsteps in a profession for which he had no talent, that
his father relinquished all hope of making a lawyer of his gifted son.
In Wilmington, North Carolina, Lanier served as signal officer until he
was captured and taken to the prison camp at Point Lookout, in which
gloomy place was developed the disease which in a few years deprived
literature and music of a light that would have sparkled in beauty
through the mists of centuries. Imprisonment did not serve as an
interruption to the work of the student, for even a prison cell was a
shrine to the radiant gods of Lanier's vision. Probably Heine and Herder
were never before translated in surroundings so little congenial to those
masters of poesy. One of his fellow-prisoners said that Lanier's flute
"was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us." To the few
who are left to remember him at that time, the waves of the Chesapeake,
with the sandy beach sweeping down to kiss the waters, and the far-off
dusky pines, are still melodious with that music.
After his release he was taken to the Macon home, where he was
dangerously ill for two months, being there when General Wilson
captured the town and Mr. Jefferson Davis and Senator Clement C.
Clay were brought to the Lanier house on their gloomy journey to
Fortress Monroe. In that month Lanier's mother died of consumption,
and he spent the summer months at home with his father and sister. In
the autumn he taught on a large plantation nine miles from Macon,
where, with "mind fairly teeming with beautiful things," he was shut up
in the "tare and tret" of the school-room. He spent the winter at Point
Clear on Mobile Bay, breathing in health with the sea-breezes and the
air that drifted fragrantly through the pines.
As clerk in the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his
grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a

field for his "beautiful things" than in the Georgia school-room, but
even in that "dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town" there was some
life "late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and
shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later." But Lanier was as
patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and he
accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he had accepted the
romance and adventures of Fort Boykin, on Sundays playing the
pipe-organ in the Presbyterian Church, and spending his leisure in
finishing "Tiger Lilies," begun in the wild days of '63, on Burwell's Bay.
In 1867 he returned to Macon, where in September he read the proof of
his book, his one effort at romance-writing, chiefly noticeable for its
musical element. The fluting of the author is recalled by the description