He wrote "Corn," "Clover," "The Marshes of Glynn," and other poems; "The Science of English Verse," "The Boys' Froissart," and other books. Read "The Marshes of Glynn," and some of the other poems; "The Boys' Froissart," and the biography in the "Poems." "A man of genius with a rare gift for the happy word." LOWELL "His poems in their swift surprises of beauty, their secrets of sweet sound, their 'Faith that smiles immortally,' rank close upon the best achievements of American song." — BATES LEE FIFTH RDR. - 2 To a Southern home there came sixty years ago a child at whose cradle all the fairies of the old tale seem to have met. The boy was gifted with beauty, talent, a sweet nature, and a noble character. But one jealous fairy decreed that adversity should follow him and should make difficult all his chosen paths. No hint of this evil decree, however, darkened the boyhood of Sidney Lanier. His school tasks were easily mastered by his quick intellect, and, these done, he roamed the fields and woods with his brother Clifford. Together the loving, inseparable companions hunted birds and squirrels, or sought berries, nuts, and grapes, wandering far and wide on slight pretext to gratify their love of outdoor life. The musical talent of many far-off ancestors early showed itself in Sidney. Before he could write legibly he could play on several instruments. While he was still of an age to believe in Santa Claus, the patron saint of Christmas brought him a flute, and he devoted himself to its mastery. With little instruction he learned to play, and play well, the flute, banjo, guitar, violin, piano, and organ. He loved best the violin; but his father, who did not wish him to make music his profession, persuaded him to devote himself to the flute, a less fascinating in strument. Sidney was the leader of a children's minstrel band. He was, also, the captain of a military company of boys whom he armed, like his favorite heroes in Froissart's "Chronicles," with bows and arrows. With books, music, and outdoor sports passed his happy, care-free childhood. At fifteen he went to Oglethorpe College. He proved a faithful student, taking "all learning" as his field. He connected himself with the Presbyterian Church in his college days, and he never outgrew this early consecration of spirit. As soon as he was graduated he was made tutor in Oglethorpe College, and returned in the fall to his duties there. But, to quote his own vivid words in " Tiger Lilies" "The early spring of 1861 brought to bloom, besides innumerable violets and jasmines, a strange, enormous, and terrible flower. This was the blood-red flower of war which grows amid thunders; a flower whose freshening dews are blood and hot tears, whose shadow chills a land, whose odors strangle a people, whose giant petals droop downward, and whose roots are in hell." But this was the thought of later years. In 1861, like so many other high-spirited Southern boys, Sidney Lanier obeyed the first call to arms and hurried away to Virginia battlefields. Here he was joined a few months later by his brother Clifford. The two boys-they were hardly were in battles, but remained unhurt and tomany gether. Each refused offered promotion because it would necessitate their separation. more In the last year of the war, however, each was made signal officer of a blockade runner. Sidney Lanier's vessel was captured. His fellow officers, who were Englishmen, wished him to don their clothes and call himself a foreigner, but he refused to do so. He was sent a prisoner to Point Lookout, and in the hardships of captivity he contracted the disease which was to burden and shorten his days. The prison gloom was cheered by the companionship of the poet-priest, Father Tabb, and by the flute which he carried concealed in his shabby gray sleeve. He was released after five months' imprisonment by an exchange of prisoners. Ill and on foot he set out in the winter of '65 for his far-off Georgia home, and reached it utterly exhausted. There followed weeks of desperate illness. He rose from his sick bed to begin the lifestruggle which was to try his courage and endurance more than did ever a battlefield. "Perhaps you know," he wrote in later days to a friend, "that with us of the younger generation in the South since the war pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying." Sidney Lanier taught, he clerked in a hotel, he studied law with his father and practiced it as long as his health would permit. In his intervals of leisure he finished the novel, "Tiger Lilies," which he had begun as a boy in the Virginia camp. In 1867 he married Miss Mary Day, a woman whose gifts of heart and intellect made her his fit helpmeet. Some of his finest poems were inspired by her. "O Love, O Wife, thine eyes are they, My springs, from out whose shining gray That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams." In 1873 Lanier went to Baltimore as first flute in the Peabody Symphony Concerts. "With his settlement in Baltimore," says a biographer, "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 tasks 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." And now, realizing that the time allotted him on earth was short, Lanier determined to devote it to his two loves, music and poetry. To his father, who would have had him again attempt the practice of law, he wrote a noble letter justifying his choice. "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 a bare army, and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragements 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? - His poem, "Corn," published in 1875, received appreciative notice from brother poets and brought him “a little of the wine of success and of praise, without which," as he said of another, "no man ever does the very best he might." Four years later he was appointed to a lectureship on English literature in Johns Hopkins University. This |