The Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 6

of the remote hope of resurrection, forever
and ever, no matter in whose granary they are cherished!" Through
those four years, though earnestly devoted to the cause, and fulfilling
his duties with zeal, his horror of war grew to the end. He had entered it
in a "crack" regiment, with a dandy uniform, and was first encamped
near Norfolk, where the gardens,
with the Northern market hopelessly

cut off, were given freely to the soldiers, who lived in every luxury; and
every man had his sweetheart in Norfolk. But the tyranny and
Christlessness of war oppressed him, though he loved the free life in
the saddle and under the stars.
In February, 1865, he was released from Point Lookout
and
undertook the weary return on foot to his home in Georgia, with the
twenty-dollar gold piece which he had in his pocket when captured, and
which was returned to him, with his other little effects, when he was
released. Of course he had the flute, which he had hidden in his sleeve
when he entered the prison, and which had earned him some comforts.
He reached home March 15th, with his strength utterly exhausted.
There followed six weeks of desperate illness, and just as he began to
recover from it his beloved mother died of consumption.
He himself
arose from his sick-bed with pronounced congestion of one lung, but
found relief in two months of out-of-door life with an uncle at Point
Clear, Mobile Bay. From December, 1865, to April, 1867, he filled a
clerkship in Montgomery, Ala., and in the next month made his first
visit to New York on the business of publishing his "Tiger Lilies",
written in April. In September, 1867, he took charge of a country
academy of nearly a hundred pupils in Prattville, Ala., and was married
in December of the same year to Miss Mary Day, daughter of Charles
Day, of Macon.
To the years before Mr. Lanier's marriage belong a dozen poems
included in this volume. Two of them are translations from the German
made during the war; the others are songs and miscellaneous poems,
full of flush and force, but not yet moulded by those laws of art of
whose authority he had hardly become conscious. His access to books
was limited, and he expressed himself more with music than with
literature, taking down the notes of birds, and writing music to his own
songs or those of Tennyson.
In January, 1868, the next month after his marriage,
he suffered his
first hemorrhage from the lungs, and returned in May to Macon, in very
low health. Here he remained, studying and afterward practising law
with his father, until December, 1872. During this period there came, in

the spring and summer of 1870, a more alarming decline with settled
cough. He went for treatment to New York, where he remained two
months, returning in October greatly improved and strong in hope;

but again at home he lost ground steadily. He was now fairly engaged
in the brave struggle against consumption, which could have but one
end. So precarious already was his health that a change of residence
was determined on, and in December, 1872, he went to San Antonio,
Texas, in search of a permanent home there, leaving his wife and
children meanwhile at Macon. But the climate did not prove favorable
and he returned in April, 1873.
During these five years a sense of holy obligation, based on the
conviction that special talents had been given him, and that the time
might be short, rested upon Lanier, until it was impossible to resist it
longer. He felt himself called to something other than a country
attorney's practice. It was the compulsion of waiting utterance, not yet
enfranchised. From Texas he wrote to his wife:
==
"Were it not for some circumstances which make such a
proposition seem absurd in the highest degree, I would think that I am
shortly to die, and that my spirit hath been singing its swan-song before
dissolution. All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great
space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of
heavenly melody. The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs,
bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs,
soul-songs and body-songs hath blown upon me in quick gusts like the
breath of passion, and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each
wave is at once a vision and a melody."
==
Now fully determined to give himself to music and literature so long as
he could keep death at bay, he sought a land of books. Taking his flute
and his pen for sword and staff, he turned his face northward. After
visiting New York he made his home in Baltimore, December, 1873,
under engagement as first flute for the Peabody Symphony Concerts.
With his