* * * * *

When the guns of Fort Sumter thundered across Sidney Lanier’s dreams of music and poetry, he joined the Macon volunteers, the first company to march from Georgia into Virginia.  It was stationed near Norfolk, camping in the fairgrounds in the time that Lanier describes as “the gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James River.”  Life there seems not to have been “all beer and skittles,” or the poetic substitutes therefor, for he goes on to say that their principal duties were to picket the beach, their “pleasures and sweet rewards of toil consisting in ague which played dice with our bones, and blue mass pills that played the deuce with our livers.”

In 1862, the Company went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they indulged “for two or three months in what are called the ’dry shakes of the sand-hills,’ a sort of brilliant tremolo movement.”  The time not required for the “tremolo movement” was spent in building Fort Fischer, until they were ordered to Drewry’s Bluff, and then to the Chickahominy, where they took part in the Seven Days’ fight.

Even war places were literary shrines for Lanier, for wherever he chanced to be he was constantly dedicating himself anew to the work of his life.  In Petersburg he studied in the Public Library.  In that old town he first saw General R.E.  Lee, and watched his calm face until he “felt that the antique earth returned out of the past and some mystic god sat on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a terrible, yet sublime, contest of human passions”—­perhaps the most poetic conception ever awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an elderly gentleman asleep under the influence of a sermon on a drowsy mid-summer day.  Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him to “seize at any price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, Tieck.”

In the spring of 1863, on a visit to his old home in Macon, Lanier met Miss Mary Day and promptly fell in love, a fortunate occurrence for him, in that he secured an inspiring companion in his short and brilliant life, and for us because it is to her loving care that we owe the preservation of much of his finest work.  On the return to Virginia, he and his brother Clifford had as companions the charming Mrs. Clement C. Clay and her sister, who wanted escorts from Macon to Virginia.  She claims to have bribed them with “broiled partridges, sho’ ‘nuf sugar, and sho’ ’nuf butter and spring chickens, ’quality size,’” to which allurements the youthful poets are alleged to have succumbed with grace and gallantry.  I recall an evening that General Pickett and I spent with Mrs. Clay at the Spotswood Hotel, when she told us of her trip from Macon, and her two poet escorts.  I remember that Senator Vest was present and played the violin while Senator and Mrs. Clay danced.