Selected Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 4

from us that it seems desirable
briefly to recount the chief incidents of his life. This task is much
lightened by Dr. Wm. Hayes Ward's `Memorial',* upon which, as
stated in the Preface, is based this section of my essay. Born at Macon,

Ga., February 3, 1842, Sidney Lanier came of a family noted for their
love and cultivation of the fine arts.
From the time of Queen
Elizabeth to the Restoration,
several of his paternal ancestors were
connected with the English court as musical composers and as painters.
The father of the poet, however, Robert S. Lanier, was a most
industrious lawyer, who,
after a lingering illness of three years,
recently** answered `Adsum' to the summons of the supreme tribunal.
The poet's mother, Mary Anderson, a Virginian of Scotch descent,
likewise sprang from a family distinguished for their love of oratory,
music, and poetry.
--
* For the full title of works cited see `Bibliography'.
** October
20, 1893, at Macon, Ga.
--
With such an ancestry we are not surprised to learn that
Sidney's
earliest passion was for music, and that in boyhood he could, although
untutored, play on almost every kind of instrument. He preferred the
violin, in playing which he sometimes sank into a deep trance, but in
deference to his father's view gave it up for the flute, his power over
which we shall hear of farther on. At first, strange to say, he considered
music unworthy of one's sole attention, but later he came to rank it as
his fullest expression of worship.
At fourteen Sidney entered the Sophomore Class of Oglethorpe College,
near Macon, Ga., and, with a year's intermission, graduated with first
honor in 1860, when just eighteen. To Professor James Woodrow, of
Oglethorpe, now President of South Carolina College, Lanier declared

that he owed "the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his youth."
On graduating he was given a tutorship in his Alma Mater,
a position
that he held until the outbreak of the Civil War.
The lecture-room was now exchanged for the battle-field;
in April,
1861, Lanier entered the Confederate Army as a private in the Macon
Volunteers of the Second Georgia Battalion,
an organization among
the first to reach Norfolk and that still keeps up its corporate existence.
In the spring of 1862 Lanier was joined by his young brother, Clifford;

and throughout the war
each seemed to vie with the other in brotherly
love;
for, while both were offered promotion, neither would accept it,
since to do so would have entailed separation from the other. The
leisure time of his first year's service Sidney spent
in the study of
music and the modern languages. He was engaged in several battles in
Virginia, but afterward was transferred, with Clifford, to the Signal
Service, with head-quarters at Petersburg. Here he had access to a small
library, of which he made sedulous use. In 1863 his company was
mounted, and served in Virginia and North Carolina. In the spring of
1864 both brothers were transferred to Wilmington, the head-quarters
of the Marine Signal Service, in which they remained to the end of the
war. Finally the two brothers were separated, each becoming signal
officer* of a blockade-runner. Sidney's vessel was captured, and for
five months he was a prisoner at Point Lookout, Md., with nothing but
his flute to solace him. It was the exposure of prison-life, no doubt, that
first led to decline of health by developing the seeds of consumption, a
disease that was to carry off his mother and that he was to struggle with
the last fifteen years of his life. Released from prison in February, 1865,
he returned to Georgia, for the most part afoot, and reached home
March 15th.
An account of his war-life is given in his novel,
`Tiger-lilies', treated below.
--
* It is sometimes erroneously stated that each was put in charge of
a blockade-runner.
--
During the succeeding nine years (1865-73) his life was checkered
indeed. Seriously ill for six weeks, he arose from his bed to see
his
mother carried off by consumption and to find himself suffering with
congestion of the lungs. Slightly relieved, Lanier turned his hand to
various projects for making a living: clerking in a hotel in Montgomery,
Ala., for two years; writing* and publishing his novel, `Tiger-lilies';
teaching at Prattville, Ala., one year, during which time** he married
Miss Mary Day, of Macon, Ga.; studying and then practising law with
his father at Macon, Ga., for five years; now, in the winter of 1872-73,
trying to recuperate at San Antonio, Texas, for hemorrhages had begun
in 1868, and a cough had set in two years later; and, finally, settling in

Baltimore, December, 1873, to devote himself to music and literature.
--
* April, 1867.
** December 19, 1867.
--
Against the son's devotion of his life to music and literature the father
protested, chiefly on business grounds, and begged