Literary Hearthstones of Dixie | Page 9

of the hero's flute-playing: "It is like walking in the woods among wild
flowers just before you go into some vast cathedral."
* * * * *
The next winter Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a
town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes
said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the
earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the
hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was
about as appropriately placed there as Arion would have been in a
tin-shop, but he kept his humorous outlook on life, departing from his
serenity so far as to make his only attempts at expressing in verse his
political indignation, the results of which he did not regard as poetry,
and they do not appear in the collection of his poems. His muse was
better adapted to the harmonies than to the discords of life. Some lines
written then furnish a graphic picture of conditions in the South at that
time:
Young Trade is dead, And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern
And folds his arms that find no bread to earn, And bows his head.
In 1868, after Lanier's marriage, he took up the practice of law in his
father's office in Macon. In that town he made his eloquent Confederate
Memorial address, April 26, 1870.

Lanier, to whom "Home" meant all that was radiant and joyous in life,
wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne that he was "homeless as the ghost of
Judas Iscariot." He was thrust upon a wandering existence by the
always unsuccessful attempt to find strength enough to do his work. At
Brunswick he found the scene of his Marsh poems in "the length and
the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn," in which he
reaches his depth of poetic feeling and his height of poetic expression.
From Lookout Mountain he wrote Hayne that at about midnight he had
received his letter and poem, and had read the poem to some friends
sitting on the porch, among them Mr. Jefferson Davis. From Alleghany
Springs he wrote his wife that new strength and new serenity
"continually flash from out the gorges, the mountains, and the streams
into the heart and charge it as the lightnings charge the earth with
subtle and heavenly fires." Lanier's soul belonged to music more than
to any other form of art, and more than any other has he linked music
with poetry and the ever-varying phenomena of Nature. Of a perfect
day in Macon he wrote:
"If the year was an orchestra, to-day would be the calm, passionate,
even, intense, quiet, full, ineffable flute therein."
In November, 1872, Lanier went to San Antonio in quest of health,
which he did not find. Incidentally, he found hitherto unrevealed depths
of feeling in his "poor old flute" which caused the old leader of the
Maennerchor, who knew the whole world of music, to cry out with
enthusiasm that he had "never heard de flude accompany itself pefore."
That part of his musical life which Sidney Lanier gave to the world was
for the most part spent in Baltimore, where he played in the Peabody
Orchestra, the Germania Maennerchor, and other music societies. An
old German musician who used to play with him in the Orchestra told
me that Lanier was the finest flutist he had ever heard.
It was in Baltimore, too, that he gave the lectures which resulted in his
most important prose-writings, "The Science of English Verse," "The
English Novel," "Shakespeare and His Forerunners."

In August, 1874, at Sunnyside, Georgia, amid the loneliness of
abandoned farms, the glory of cornfields, and the mysterious beauty of
forest, he wrote "Corn," the first of his poems to attract the attention of
the country. It was published in _Lippincott's_ in 1875. Charlotte
Cushman was so charmed by it that she sought out the author in
Baltimore, and the two became good friends.
At 64 Centre Street, Baltimore, Lanier wrote "The Symphony," which
he said took hold of him "about four days ago like a real James River
ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night,
ever since," which is the only way that a real poem or real music or a
real picture ever can get into the world. He says that he "will be
rejoiced when it is finished, for it verily racks all the bones of my
spirit." It appeared in _Lippincott's_, June, 1875.
Lanier was at 66 Centre Street, Baltimore, when he wrote the words of
the Centennial Cantata, which he said he "tried to make as simple and
candid as a melody of Beethoven." He wrote to a friend that he was not
disturbed