Sidney Lanier said of his experience at Fort Boykin, on Burwell’s Bay, that it was in many respects “the most delicious period” of his life.  It may be that no other young soldier found so much of romance and poetry in the service of Mars or put so much of it into the lives of those around him.  There are old men, now, who in their youth lived on the James River, in whose hearts the melody of Sidney Lanier’s flute yet lingers in golden fire and dewy flowering.  At Fort Boykin he decided the question of his vocation, writing to his father so eloquent a letter upon the desirability of pursuing his tastes, rather than trying to follow the paternal footsteps in a profession for which he had no talent, that his father relinquished all hope of making a lawyer of his gifted son.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Lanier served as signal officer until he was captured and taken to the prison camp at Point Lookout, in which gloomy place was developed the disease which in a few years deprived literature and music of a light that would have sparkled in beauty through the mists of centuries.  Imprisonment did not serve as an interruption to the work of the student, for even a prison cell was a shrine to the radiant gods of Lanier’s vision.  Probably Heine and Herder were never before translated in surroundings so little congenial to those masters of poesy.  One of his fellow-prisoners said that Lanier’s flute “was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us.”  To the few who are left to remember him at that time, the waves of the Chesapeake, with the sandy beach sweeping down to kiss the waters, and the far-off dusky pines, are still melodious with that music.

After his release he was taken to the Macon home, where he was dangerously ill for two months, being there when General Wilson captured the town and Mr. Jefferson Davis and Senator Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier house on their gloomy journey to Fortress Monroe.  In that month Lanier’s mother died of consumption, and he spent the summer months at home with his father and sister.  In the autumn he taught on a large plantation nine miles from Macon, where, with “mind fairly teeming with beautiful things,” he was shut up in the “tare and tret” of the school-room.  He spent the winter at Point Clear on Mobile Bay, breathing in health with the sea-breezes and the air that drifted fragrantly through the pines.

As clerk in the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a field for his “beautiful things” than in the Georgia school-room, but even in that “dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town” there was some life “late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later.”  But Lanier was as patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and he accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he had accepted the romance and adventures of Fort Boykin, on Sundays playing the