From his dreams of music and poetry and from the ideal he had formed of study at Heidelberg, Lanier was awakened by the guns of Fort Sumter and by the agitation everywhere in Georgia. At Milledgeville he heard some of the great speeches made for and against secession, for, from November to January, the conflict throughout the State and especially in the capital was a severe one. He himself, like his father, hoped that the Union might be preserved, but the forces of discord could not be stayed. The people of Macon, on November 8, 1860, passed a declaration of independence, setting forth their grievances against the North. When secession was declared in Charleston on December 1, a hundred guns were fired amidst the ringing of bells and the shouts of the people. At night there was a procession of fifteen hundred people with banners and transparencies.* When on January 16 the Georgia convention voted to secede from the Union, Milledgeville was in "rapturous commotion". "Tears of joy fell from many eyes, and words of congratulation were uttered by every tongue. The artillery from the capitol square thundered forth the glad tidings, and the bells of the city pealed forth the joyous welcome to the new-born Republic."
--
* Butler's `History of Macon'.
--
Lanier afterwards, in "Tiger Lilies", described the war fever as it swept over the South. "An afflatus of war was breathed upon us. Like a great wind it drew on, and blew upon men, women, and children. Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts, conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeals of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms. This wind blew upon all vanes of all the churches of the country and turned them one way, -- toward war. It blew, and shook out as if by magic a flag whose device was unknown to soldier or sailor before, but whose every flap and flutter made the blood bound in our veins. . . . It arrayed the sanctity of a righteous cause in the brilliant trappings of military display. . . . It offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties, -- of church, of state; of private loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity, of social ties."*
--
* `Tiger Lilies', p. 119.
--
It does not fall within the province of this book to discuss the issues that led to the Civil War, -- the questions of secession and slavery. In 1861 they had ceased to be debated in the halls of Congress; all the Southern people were being merged into a unit. Ardent opponents of secession, like Alexander H. Stephens, threw in their lot with the new Confederacy; States like Virginia, which hesitated to disrupt a Union with which they had had so much to do, were as enthusiastic as the more ardent Southern States; old men vied with young men in their military ardor. Scotch-Irish opponents of slavery marched side by side with the Cavaliers, to whom slavery was the very corner-stone of a feudal aristocracy. The fact is, the whole South was animated by a passion for war. To young men like Lanier the Southern cause was one of liberty, of resistance to despotism and fanaticism, of the protection of homes. He who would understand their point of view must read such war lyrics as "Maryland, My Maryland" and Timrod's "Ethnogenesis", or enter sympathetically into the lives of that youthful band of Confederate soldiers all of whom were afterwards to become distinguished in the field of letters, -- Timrod, Hayne, Cable, Maurice Thompson, and Lanier.
It was not given to many men on either side to divine the true issues of the war. Lanier afterwards rejoiced in the overthrow of slavery, and knew that it was the belief in the soundness and greatness of the American Union among the millions of the North and of the great Northwest which really conquered the South. "As soon as we invaded the North," he said, "and arrayed this sentiment against us, our swift destruction followed." In a note-book of 1867 he pointed out with touches of humor the folly of many of the ideas formerly held by himself and other Southerners. He is writing an essay on the Devil's Bombs, "some half-dozen of which were exploded between the years 1861 and 1865 over the Southern portion of North America with widespread and somewhat sad results: namely, a million of men slain and maimed; a million of widows and orphans created; several billions of money destroyed; several hundred thousand of ignorant schoolboys who could not study on account of the noise made by the shells; and a large miscellaneous mass of poverty, starvation, recklessness, and ruin precipitated so suddenly upon the country that many were buried beneath it beyond hope of being extricated." This universal tragedy he attributes in part to the conceit of the Southern people. He himself became "convinced of his ability to whip at least five Yankees. The author does not know now and did not then, by what course of reasoning he arrived at this said conviction; in the best of the author's judgment he did not reason it out at all, rather absorbed it, from the press of surrounding similar convictions. The author, however, was also confident, not only that he personally could whip five Yankees, but ANY Southern boy could do it. The whole South was satisfied it could whip five Norths. The newspapers said we could do it; the preachers pronounced anathemas against the man that didn't believe we could do it; our old men said at the street corners, if they were young they could do it, and by the Eternal, they believed they could do it anyhow (whereat great applause and `Hurrah for ole Harris!'); the young men said they'd be blanked if they couldn't do it, and the young ladies said they wouldn't marry a man who couldn't do it. This arrogant perpetual invitation to draw and come on, this idea which possessed the whole section, which originated no one knows when, grew no one knows how, was a devil's own bombshell, the fuse of which sparkled when Mr. Brooks struck Mr. Sumner upon the head with a cane.
"Of course we laugh at it NOW, -- laugh in the hope that our neighbors will attribute the redness of our cheeks to that and not to our shame. . . . The conceit of an individual is ridiculous because it is powerless. . . . The conceit of a whole people is terrible, it is a devil's bombshell, surcharged with death, plethoric with all foul despairs and disasters."
So Lanier spoke in the sober maturity of his manhood of the great tragedy through which he with his section passed. But during the war there was but one idea in his mind, and that was that he might take part in the establishment of a Confederacy. He dreamed with his people of a nation that might be the embodiment of all that was fine in government and in society, that the "new Confederacy was to enter upon an era of prosperity such as no other nation, ancient or modern, had ever enjoyed, and that the city of Macon, his birthplace and home, was to become a great art centre." In this hope, soon after finishing the year's work at Oglethorpe,* he volunteered for service and went to Virginia to join the Macon Volunteers, who had left Georgia early in April -- the first company that went out of the State to Virginia. It was an old company that had won distinction in the Mexican War, and was the special pride of the city of Macon. The company was stationed for several months near Norfolk, where Lanier experienced some of the joys of city life in those early days when war was largely a picnic -- a holiday time it was -- "the gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James River."
--
* The faculty and students almost to a man enlisted in the army; and the college buildings were afterwards used for barracks and hospitals. President Talmage lost his mind by reason of the conflict between his affection for his native and for his adopted section.
--
In the main, however, they played "Marsh-Divers and Meadow-Crakes", their principal duties being to picket the beach, and their "pleasures and sweet rewards-of-toil consisting in agues which played dice with our bones, and blue-mass pills that played the deuce with our livers."* The company was sent in 1862 to Wilmington, N.C., where they experienced a pleasant change in the style of fever, "indulging for two or three months," continues Lanier, "in what are called the `dry shakes of the sand hills', a sort of brilliant, tremolo movement, brilliantly executed upon `that pan-pipe, man', by an invisible but very powerful performer." From here, where they were engaged in building Fort Fisher, they were called to Drewry's Bluff; and from there to the Chickahominy, participating in the seven days' fighting around Richmond. Just before the battle of Malvern Hill they marched all night through drenching rain, over torn and swampy roads. These were the only important battles in which Lanier took part. Soon afterwards he was in a little gunboat fight or two on the south bank of the James River. On August 26 they were sent to Petersburg to rest. While there he enjoyed the use of the city library. He and his brother and two friends were transferred to the signal corps, which was considered at that time the most efficient in the Southern army, and, becoming soon proficient in the system, attracted the attention of the commanding officer, who formed them into a mounted field squad and attached them to the staff of Major-General French. "Often Lanier and a friend," says the latter officer, "would come to my quarters and pass the evenings with us, where the `alarums of war' were lost in the soft notes of their flutes, for Lanier was an excellent musician."** Lanier tells in a letter written to his father at that time of four Georgia privates with one general, six captains, and one lieutenant, serenading the city.
--
* The account of Lanier's war experiences is based on the poet's letters to Northrup, the reminiscences of Clifford Lanier, Lanier's unpublished letters to his father, `Tiger Lilies', and the `Official Records of the War of the Rebellion'.
** `A History of Two Wars', by Samuel G. French.
--
One of the most precious memories of Lanier's war career was that of General Lee attending religious services in Petersburg. The height of every Confederate soldier's ambition was to get a glimpse of the beloved general, who was the idol of his soldiers. Lanier reverenced him as one of the greatest of men. In later years he gave his ideal of what a great musician ought to be. "A great artist," he said, "should have the sensibility and expressive genius of Schumann, the calm grandeur of Lee, and the human breadth of Shakespeare, all in one." In his "Confederate Memorial Address" he speaks of Lee as "stately in victory, stately in defeat; stately among the cannon, stately among the books; stately in solitude, stately in society; stately in form, in soul, in character, and in action." Fortunately he had the chance to see him under specially interesting circumstances. He afterwards related the incident to the Confederate veterans in Macon: "The last time that I saw with mortal eyes -- for, with spiritual eyes, many, many times have I contemplated him since -- the scene was so beautiful, the surroundings were so rare, nay, time and circumstance did so fitly frame him, as it were, that I think the picture should not be lost. . . . It was at fateful Petersburg, on one glorious Sunday morning, whilst the armies of Grant and Butler were investing our last stronghold there. It had been announced, to those who happened to be stationed in the neighborhood of General Lee's headquarters, that religious services would be conducted on that morning by Major-General Pendleton. At the appointed time I strolled over to Dunn's Hill, where General Lee's tent was pitched, and found General Pendleton ensconced under a magnificent tree, and a small party of soldiers, with a few ladies from the dwelling near by, collected about him. In a few moments, General Lee appeared with his camp chair, and sat down. The services began. That terrible battery, Number Five, was firing, very slowly, each report of the great guns making the otherwise profound silence still more profound. I sat down on the grass and gazed, with such reverence as I had never given to mortal man before, upon the grand face of General Lee. He had been greatly fatigued by loss of sleep.
"As the sermon progressed, and the immortal words of Christian doctrine came to our hearts and comforted us, sweet influences born of the liberal sunlight which lay warm upon the grass, of the moving leaves and trembling flowers, seemed to steal over the General's soul. Presently his eyelids gradually closed, and he fell gently asleep. Not a muscle of him stirred, not a nerve of his grand countenance twitched; there was no drooping of the head, nor bowing of the figure. . . . As he slumbered so, sitting erect, with arms folded upon his chest, in an attitude of majestic repose, such as I never saw assumed by mortal man before; as the large and comfortable word fell from the preacher's lips; as the lazy cannon of the enemy anon hurled a screaming shell to within a few hundred yards of where we sat, as finally a bird flew into a tree overhead and sat and piped small blissful notes in unearthly contrast with the roar of the war engines; it seemed to me as if the present earth floated off through the sunlight, and the antique earth returned out of the past, and some majestic god sat on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a terrible yet sublime contest of human passion."
A pleasant interlude in Lanier's soldier life was a two weeks' visit to Macon in the spring of 1863. The city had not yet felt any of the calamities of war, although high prices prevailed. Mrs. Clay, wife of Senator Clement C. Clay, was a visitor in the city at that time, waiting for a summons to join her husband in Richmond. She writes, in recalling those days: "Spring was in its precious beauty. Gardens glowed with brilliant blossoms. Thousands of fragrant odors mingled in the air, the voices of myriad birds sang about the foliaged avenues."* It was then that Lanier met Miss Mary Day, at the home of their friend, Miss Lamar. Her father was a prominent business man in Macon. She had lived for the first few years of her life in Macon, but had been since 1851 studying music in New York, and living with cultivated people at Saratoga and West Point. In an atmosphere of romance, music, and love Lanier spent his vacation.
--
* `A Belle of the Fifties', p. 194.
--
On their return to the Virginia battlefields the two brothers were accompanied by Mrs. Clay and her sister-in-law. Mrs. Clay had been a popular belle in Washington in the fifties, and was well acquainted with leading men and women throughout the country. She had heard and met in social circles Charlotte Cushman, Jenny Lind, Thackeray, Lord Napier, and other notabilities. Lanier, eager always to hear of the larger world outside of his own limited life, was much attracted by her reminiscences of well-known men and women. Returning to Suffolk, Va., Clifford Lanier wrote to her: "What a transition is this -- from the spring and peace of Macon to this muddy and war-distracted country! Going to sleep in the moonlight and soft air of Italy, I seem to have waked embedded in Lapland snow." Sidney wrote: "Have you ever wandered, in an all night's dream, through exquisite flowery mosses, through labyrinthine grottoes, `full of all sparkling and sparry loveliness', over mountains of unknown height, by abysses of unfathomable depth, all beneath skies of an infinite brightness caused by no sun; strangest of all, -- wandered about in wonder, as if you had lived an eternity in the familiar contemplation of such things? If you have dreamed, thought, and felt so, you can realize the imbecile stare with which I gaze on all of this life which goes on around me here. Macon was my two weeks' dream."*
--
* `A Belle of the Fifties', p. 200.
--
During 1863 and a large part of 1864 the two brothers served as scouts in Milligan's Corps along the James River. The duties were unusually dangerous and onerous, from the fact that their movements had to be concealed, and that they were in constant danger of being captured. In this work of hard riding Lanier displayed a cool and collected courage; he was untiring in his energy, prudent and cautious. Notwithstanding the dangers and hardships, he looked upon the period of life at Fort Boykin on Burwell's Bay -- their headquarters -- as "the most delicious period of his life in many respects." Writing of it later he said: "Our life was as full of romance as heart could desire. We had a flute and a guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid residences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty of hairbreadth 'scapes from the roving bands of Federals who were continually visiting that Debatable Land. . . . Cliff and I never cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades, the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair Burwell's Bay, and the spirited brushes of our little force with the enemy."*
--
* Letter to Northrup, June 11, 1866.
--
This is the period of his life which he describes in the second part of "Tiger Lilies". His brother Clifford also made it the basis of his novel, "Thorn-Fruit". The effect produced by the young poet and musician on the people who lived in the stately mansions along the James River has been told by one who knew him well at this time: "The two brothers were inseparable; slender, gray-eyed youths, full of enthusiasm, Clifford grave and quiet, Sidney, the elder, playful with a dainty mirthfulness. . . . How often did we sit on the moonlight nights enthralled by the entranced melodies of his flute! Always the longing for the very highest pervaded his life, and child though I was, in listening to him as he paced the long galleries of my old home, or as we rode in the sweet green wood, I felt even then that we sat `in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.'"*
--
* `Southern Bivouac', May, 1887.
--
This period of his army life is important also from the fact that here at Fort Boykin he definitely began to contemplate a literary life as his probable vocation. He was studying hard, reading English poetry, and writing to his father to "seize at any price" editions of the German poets, Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, and Tieck. Thus at a time when other Southerners were, as Professor Gildersleeve has said, getting out their classics to reread them, Lanier was voyaging into strange fields of thought alone. Once, when the little camp was captured, he lost several of his choicest treasures, -- a volume containing the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, a German glossary, Heine's poems, and "Aurora Leigh". In a letter to his father, January 18, 1864, he says: "Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation." He sends his father a number of poems, that they may be criticised. He has a sense of his own deficiencies as a writer, -- deficiencies which he never fully overcame, -- for he writes: "I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a CONCEIT rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk."
The tendency is seen in a poem written at Boykin's Bluff on, perhaps, his twenty-first birthday. Notable also is the sense of the dawn of manhood: --
So Boyhood sets: comes Youth,
A painful night of mists and dreams,
That broods till Love's exquisite truth,
The star of a morn-clear manhood, beams.
In this dawn of his manhood -- not yet morn-clear, however, -- he began "Tiger Lilies", writing those parts having to do with his experience in the mountains, some passages of which have already been quoted.
But Lanier's literary career was not to be begun as soon as he hoped. He was, in August, 1864, transferred to Wilmington, N.C., where he became a signal officer on the blockaderunners. Wilmington was the port which, late in the war, was the scene of the most brilliant successes of these swift vessels and the most strenuous efforts of the blockaders. "Long after every other port was closed, desperate, but wary sea pigeons would evade the big and surly watchers on the coast . . . and ho! for the open sea." This was a service of keen excitement and constant danger, demanding a clear head and iron nerves. In the latter part of 1864 it became more and more difficult for the blockade-runners to make their way to Bermuda. On November 2, a stormy night, Lanier was a signal officer on the Lucy, which made its way out of the harbor, but fourteen hours later was captured in the Gulf Stream by the Federal cruiser Santiago-de-Cuba. He was taken to Point Lookout prison, where he spent four months of dreary and distressing life. To this prison life Lanier always attributed his breakdown in health. In "Tiger Lilies" he afterwards attempted to give a description of the prison and the life led by prisoners, but turned with disgust from the harrowing memories. The few pages he did write serve as a counterpart to Walt Whitman's strictures on Southern prisons in his "Specimen Days in America".
And yet, under these loathsome conditions he read German poetry, translating Heine's "The Palm and the Pine" and Herder's "Spring Greeting". Here, too, he found comfort for himself and his companions in the flute which he had carried with him during the entire war. One of his comrades gives the following account of Lanier's playing: "Late one evening I heard from our tent the clear sweet notes of a flute in the distance, and I was told that the player was a young man from Georgia who had just come among us. I forthwith hastened to find him out, and from that hour the flute of Sidney Lanier was our daily delight. It was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us. Well I remember his improvisations, and how the young artist stood there in the twilight. (It was his custom to stand while he played.) Many a stern eye moistened to hear him, many a homesick heart for a time forgot its captivity. The night sky, clear as a dewdrop above us, the waters of the Chesapeake far to the east, the long gray beach and the distant pines, seemed all to have found an interpreter in him.
"In all those dreary months of imprisonment, under the keenest privations of life, exposed to the daily manifestations of want and depravity, sickness and death, his was the clearhearted, hopeful voice that sang what he uttered in after years."
The purity of Lanier's soul was never better attested than in a letter written by a fellowprisoner, Mr. John B. Tabb, to Charles Day Lanier, the oldest son of the poet, trying to impress upon his mind the character of his father as exhibited in this prison life at Point Lookout:
"To realize what our surroundings were, one must have lived in a prison camp. There was no room for pretense or disguise. Men appeared what they really were, noble or lowminded, pure or depraved; and there did one trait of your father's character single him out. In all our intercourse I can remember no conversation or word of his that an angel might not have uttered or listened to. Set this down in your memory. . . . It will throw light upon other points, and prove the truth of Sir Galahad's words, `My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.'"
Lanier secured his release from prison through some gold which a friend of his had smuggled into the prison in his mouth. He came out "emaciated to a skeleton, downhearted for want of news from home, down-headed for weariness." On his voyage to Fortress Monroe an incident occurred which, although told in somewhat overwrought language, is a fitting climax to his career as a soldier.
The story of his rescue from death, says Baskervill, is graphically told by the lady herself who was the good Samaritan on this occasion. "She was an old friend from Montgomery, Ala., returning from New York to Richmond; and her little daughter, who had learned to call him Brother Sid, chanced to hear that he was down in the hold of the vessel dying. On application to the colonel in command permission was promptly given to her to minister to his necessity, and she made haste to go below. `Now my friends in New York,' continued she, `had given me a supply of medicines, for we had few such things in Dixie, and among the remedies were quinine and brandy. I hastily took a flask of brandy, and we went below, where we were led to the rude stalls provided for cattle, but now crowded with poor human wretches. There in that horrible place dear Sidney Lanier lay wrapped in an old quilt, his thin hands tightly clenched, his face drawn and pinched, his eyes fixed and staring, his poor body shivering now and then in a spasm of pain. Lilla fell at his side, kissing him and calling: `Brother Sid, don't you know me? Don't you know your little sister?' But no recognition or response came from the sunken eyes. I poured some brandy into a spoon and gave it to him. It gurgled down his throat at first with no effort from him to swallow it. I repeated the stimulant several times before he finally revived. At last he turned his eyes slowly about until he saw Lilla, and murmured: `Am I dead? Is this Lilla? Is this heaven?' . . . To make a long story short, the colonel assisted us to get him above to our cabin. I can see his fellow prisoners now as they crouched and assisted to pass him along over their heads, for they were so packed that they could not make room to carry him through. Along over their heads they tenderly passed the poor, emaciated body, so shrunken with prison life and benumbed with cold. We got him into clean blankets, but at first he could not endure the pain from the fire, he was so nearly frozen. We gave him some hot soup and more brandy, and he lay quiet till after midnight. Then he asked for his flute and began playing. As he played the first few notes, you should have heard the yell of joy that came up from the shivering wretches down below, who knew that their comrade was alive. And there we sat entranced about him, the colonel and his wife, Lilla and I, weeping at the tender music, as the tones of new warmth and color and hope came like liquid melody from his magic flute."*
--
* `Southern Writers', p. 169.
--
Thus closes his war period. His name does not appear in any of the official records, but no private soldier had a more varied experience.* One scarcely knows which to admire most, -- the soldier, brave and knightly, the poet, preparing his wings for a flight, or the musician, inspiriting his fellow-soldiers in camp and in prison.
--
* It is said that he refused promotion several times in order to be with his brother. In a memorandum on the photograph herewith presented he refers to himself as "captain" in the late Confederate army. I have been unable to reconcile these statements. [Photograph not included in this ASCII edition. -- A. L.]
--