Sidney Lanier | Page 8

Meeting of the Georgia Bar Association', Atlanta, 1894. --
He was just such a lawyer as Lanier would have become had he remained in that profession; indeed, son and father were very much alike. The father was a man of "considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste." He was fond of Shakspere, Addison, and Sir Walter Scott, having the literary taste of the gentlemen of the old South. The letters written to his son show decided cultivation. They show also that he was in thorough sympathy with his son's intellectual life. The letter written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career, but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In the earlier years, Lanier sent his poems to his father, and valued highly his criticism, and in later years he received from him financial aid and counsel.
While Robert Sampson Lanier was at college in Virginia he met Mary Jane Anderson, the daughter of Hezekiah Anderson, a Virginia planter who attained success in the political life of that State. They were married in 1840, and Sidney was their first-born. The poet thus inherited on his mother's side Scotch-Irish blood, an element in Southern life which has been often underestimated. She proved to be a hard-working woman, caring little for social life, but thoroughly interested in the religious training of her children. Her husband, although nominally a Methodist, was not actively identified with the church, but willingly acquiesced in the somewhat rigid Presbyterian discipline that prevailed in the home. The children -- Sidney, Clifford, and Gertrude -- were taught the strictest tenets of the Calvinistic creed. When Lanier afterwards, in Baltimore, lived a somewhat more liberal life -- both as to creed and conduct -- he wrote: "If the constituents and guardians of my childhood -- those good Presbyterians who believed me a model for the Sunday-school children of all times -- could have witnessed my acts and doings this day, I know not what groans of sorrowful regret would arise in my behalf."
The seriousness of this life was broken, however, on week days. Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular melodies. Between the two brothers there was from the first the most beautiful relation, as throughout the rest of their lives: comrades in boyhood, comrades during the War, comrades in their first literary work, and to the end. On Saturdays they went to "the boys' hunting fields -- happy hunting grounds, redolent of hickory nuts, scaly barks, and rose-blushing, luscious, haw apples. . . . Into these woods, across yon marsh, we plunged every permissible Saturday for a day among doves, blackbirds, robins, plovers, snipes, or rabbits."* Sometimes they enjoyed fishing in the near-by brook or the larger river. The two brothers were devoted to their sister Gertrude, to whom Sidney referred in later years as his "vestal sister, who had, more perfectly than all the men or women of the earth, nay, more perfectly than any star or any dream," represented to him "the simple majesty and the serene purity of the Winged Folk up Yonder."
-- * Clifford Lanier, `The Chautauquan', July, 1895. --
The beauty of this simple home life cannot well be overestimated in its influence on Lanier's later life. He had nothing of the Bohemian in his nature. He was throughout his life fully alive to all human ties, fulfilling every relationship, whether of son, brother, father, husband, or friend. His other relatives -- uncles, aunts, and cousins, -- filled a large place in his early life, especially his mother's brother, Judge Clifford Anderson, who was the law partner of Lanier's father and afterwards Attorney-General of Georgia; and his father's sister, Mrs. Watt, who from much travel and by association with leading men and women of the South brought into Lanier's life the atmosphere of a larger social world than that in which he was born.
Nor did Lanier live apart from the life in Macon. Although in later years he felt strongly the contrast between himself and his environment, he always spoke of his native place with the greatest affection, and it was among Macon people that he found some of his best friends in his adopted city. Its natural beauty appealed to him from the beginning -- the river Ocmulgee, the large forests of oak-trees stretching in every direction, the hills above the city, for which he