The Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 7

settlement in Baltimore begins a story of as brave and sad a
struggle as the history of genius records. On the one hand was the

opportunity for study, and the full consciousness of power, and a will
never subdued; and on the other a body wasting with consumption, that
must be forced to task beyond its strength not merely to express the
thoughts of beauty which strove for utterance, but from the necessity of
providing bread for his babes. His father would have had him return to
Macon, and settle down with him in business and share his income,

but that would have been the suicide of every duty and ambition. So he
wrote from Baltimore to his father, November 29, 1873:
==
"I have given your last letter the fullest and most careful
consideration. After doing so I feel sure that Macon is not the place for
me. If you could taste the delicious crystalline air, and the champagne
breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure
that in
point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten
times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I,
nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling
lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty
almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better? Several
persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal,
have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the
world; and several others, of equally authoritative judgment,
have
given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen. (Of
course I protest against the necessity which makes me write such things
about myself. I only do so because I so appreciate the love and
tenderness which prompt you to desire me with you that I will make the
fullest explanation possible of my course, out of reciprocal honor and
respect for the motives which lead you to think differently from me.)
My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through
pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial
atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an
exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly
unacquainted with literary people and literary ways -- I say, think how,
in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more
which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and of poetry have
steadily kept in my heart
so that I could not banish them. Does it not
seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself
among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed

them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?"
==
What could his father do but yield? And what could he do
during the
following years of his son's fight for standing-room on the planet but
help? But for that help, generously given by his father and brother, as
their ability allowed, at the critical times of utter prostration, the end
would not have been long delayed. For the little
that was necessary to
give his household a humble support
it was not easy for the most
strenuous young author to win by his pen in the intervals between his
hemorrhages. He asked for very little, only the supply of absolute
necessities, what it would be easy for a well man to earn, but what it
was very hard for a man to earn scarce able to leave his bed, dependent
on the chance income had from poems and articles in magazines that
would take them, or from courses of lectures in schools. Often for
months together he could do no work. He was driven to Texas, to
Florida, to Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, to try to recover health
from pine breaths and clover blossoms. Supported by the implicit faith
of one heart, which fully believed in his genius, and was willing to wait
if he could only find his opportunity, his courage never failed. He still
kept before himself first his ideal and his mission, and he longed to live
that he might accomplish them. It must have been in such a mood that,
soon after coming to Baltimore, he wrote to his wife, who was detained
in the South:
==
"So many great ideas for Art are born to me each day, I am swept
away into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind;
and I find within myself such entire, yet humble, confidence of
possessing every single element of power to carry them all out, save the
little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us clothed and fed
in