sIDney lAnIer

1. SIDNEY LANIER was born at Macon, Georgia, on the 3d of February, 1842. From childhood he showed love for books and music, and he learned, almost without instruction, to play on the flute, organ, piano, violin, and guitar. The violin was his favorite instrument; but in deference to the wishes of his father, who feared for him the fascination of the violin, he devoted himself especially to the flute.

2. At the age of fourteen Sidney Lanier entered Oglethorpe College, from which he was graduated four years later. He was offered a tutorship in the college, and he held that position until the beginning of the war between the states.

3. In April, 1861, Lanier enlisted with the Macon Volunteers in the Confederate army, and remained in service till the last year of the war. In 1864, he was put in charge of a vessel which was to run the blockade. The vessel being captured, Lanier was for five months a prisoner at Point Lookout. This period of hislife is described in his novel, “Tiger Lilies.”

4. In February, 1865, Lanier was released by an exchange of prisoners, and he returned on foot to his Georgia home, carrying with him his one possession, —his flute,— which he had concealedin his sleeve when he entered the prison. He reached home utterly exhausted, and for weeks was desperately ill.

5. He was married. in 1867, to Miss Mary Day, and for several years he filled clerical positions, taught in a country academy, and practiced law. During the spring and summer of 1870 he was very ill, and the next eleven years were a struggle with illness, want, and care, ending only with death. Years brought a sense of obligation for the use of his talents,—the deeper because he felt his time short, — and he resolved to devote himself to an artistic life.

6. “For twenty years,” he said, “through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through thedevotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly and through so much bitterness?”

7. In 1873, he made his home in Baltimore under engagement as first flute for the Peabody Symphony ConcertsThe remaining years of his life were at once happy and sad. “On the one hand, was the opportunity for study, and the full consciousness of power, and a will never subdued; and on the other hand, 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 children.”

8. Lanier’s poem, “Corn,” published in 1875, made him known to appreciative readers, and led to his being chosen to write thecantata for the opening of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia.

9. In 1879, he was appointed lecturer on English literature at Johns Hopkins University, and for the first time had an assured income. During the next two years some of his finest poems were written, including the “Song of the Chattahoochee,” “A Song of Love,” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” Some of his University lectures were published in the volumes entitled, “The Science of English Verse” and “ The Novel and its Development.” He also edited for young people several volumes of hero tales,— “The Boy’sPercy .”

10. The winter of 1880 brought a struggle for life itself, but no cessation of work. When too weak to leave his bed, with a fever temperature of a hundred and four degrees, he penciled his last poem, “Sunrise,” one of a projected series of “Hymns of the Marshes,” which he was not to live to finish. In the summer of 1881 he went with his wife to Lynn, North Carolina, and there he died, September 7, 1881.

11. By virtue of originality, lyrical beauty, and nobility of subject and treatment, Lanier’s poems are being more and more recognized as ranking high among the best work yet produced in America.