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Into this strange new world -- "the unfamiliar avenue of a new era" -- Lanier passed with unfaltering courage. He was to show that "fortitude is more manly than bravery, for noble and long endurance wins the shining love of God; whereas brilliant bravery is momentary, is easy to the enthusiastic, and only dazzles the admiration of the weak-eyed." Did any young man ever have to begin life under more disadvantageous circumstances? Cherishing in his heart the ideal long since formed of the scholar's or the artist's life, he looked around on the blankest world one could imagine. It is perhaps in a later letter to Bayard Taylor that Lanier came nearest to expressing the situation that confronted him at the end of the war. "Perhaps you know that with us of the younger generation of the South, since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."

Added to his own poverty and sickness, was that of his family. His grandfather had been compelled to leave his estate in East Tennessee in 1863, and was now in old age deprived of his negroes and much of his land and money. His father, weighed down with sorrow, had to take up the practice of law from the start. Some members of his family, "who used to roll in wealth, are every day," he writes, "with their own hands plowing the little patch of ground which the war has left them, while their wives do their cooking and washing."

Wandering between two worlds -- one dead, The other powerless to be born.

Even States like Georgia, which soon showed signs of recuperation and rejuvenation, suffered with their more unfortunate sisters, South Carolina and Louisiana, where the ravages of war were terrific. There was confusion in the public mind -- uncertainty as to the future. The memories of these days are suggested here, not for the purpose of awakening in any mind bitter memories, but that some idea may be given of the tremendous obstacles that confronted a young man like Lanier.

Many Southerners were ready, like Lee, to forget the bitterness and prejudice of the war -- all but the hallowed memories. Lanier, at the close of a fanciful passage on the blood-red flower of war which blossomed in 1861, said: --

In this spirit Lanier began his work in Montgomery, Ala. As has been seen, he had extended the hand of fellowship to his Northern friend, thus laying the basis for the spirit of reconciliation afterwards so dominant in his poetry. Uncongenial as was his work, he went about it with a new sense of the "dignity of labor". His aunt, Mrs. Watt, who had in the more prosperous times before the war traveled much in the North, and had graced the brilliant scenes of the opening of the Confederate Congress in Montgomery, becoming the intimate friend of Jefferson Davis and Stephens, now threw around her nephews -- Clifford was also working in the hotel -- the charm of the olden days. They found pleasure in social life: close to Montgomery lived the Cloptons and Ligons, who on their plantations enjoyed the gifts of "Santa Claus Cotton", just after the war. Lanier writes to his sister, September 26, 1866: "I have just returned from Tuskegee, where I spent a pleasant week. . . . They feted me to death, nearly. . . . Indeed, they were all so good and so kind to me, and the fair cousins were so beautiful, that I came back feeling as if I had been in a week's dream of fairyland." The two brothers, eager for more intellectual companionship, organized a literary club, for the meetings of which Sidney prepared his first literary exercises after the war. He played the pipe-organ in the Presbyterian church in Montgomery. He writes to a friend about some one who was in a state of melancholy: "She is right to cultivate music, to cling to it; it is the only REALITY left in the world for her and many like her. It will revolutionize the world, and that not long hence. Let her study it intensely, give herself to it, enter the very innermost temple and sanctuary of it. . . . The altar steps are wide enough for all the world." To another friend he writes at the same time: "Study Chopin as soon as you become able to play his music; and get his life by Liszt. 'T is the most enjoyable book you could read."

In order to find out what was going on in the world of letters, Lanier subscribed to the "Round Table", which was then an important weekly paper of New York -- indeed, it was more like the London "Spectator" than any paper ever published on this side the water -- a journal, said the New York "Times", which "has the genius and learning and brilliancy of the higher order of London weeklies, and which at the same time has the spirit and instincts of America." Moncure D. Conway was at that time writing letters of much interest from England and Justin Winsor from Cambridge, while Howells, Aldrich, Stedman, and Stoddard were regular contributors. The reviews of books were thoroughly cosmopolitan, and the editorials setting forth the interpretation of contemporary events were characterized by sanity and breadth.

In discussing literary questions the "Round Table" showed the same national spirit, manifesting a healthy interest in those few Southern writers who were left after the deluge. The words found in two editorials, calling for a more vigorous and original class of writers, must have appealed to Lanier. An editorial, May 12, 1866, entitled a "Plain Talk with American Writers", said: "In fact the literary field was never so barren, never so utterly without hope or life. . . . The era of genius and vigor that seemed ready to burst upon us only a few months ago has not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old. . . . We have very little strong, original writing. Who will waken us from this sleep? Who will first show us the first signs of a genuine literary reviving?" And again, July 14, 1866, "We look to see young men coming forward who shall inaugurate a better literature. . . . If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened to young aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is wide open. . . . All the graces of poesy and art and music stand waiting by, ready to welcome a bold new-comer. . . . Who will come forward and inaugurate a new era of bold, electrical, impressive writing?"

"`Poor fellow!' says little Katie, `and how did the rebels treat you?'

"`Rebels,' said I, `I am a rebel myself, Kate!'

"`What!' she exclaimed, and lifted up her little lilies , and peered at me curiously with all her blue eyes astare. `A live Reb!'

"This phrase in Katie's nursery had taken the time-honored place of bugaboos, and hobgoblins, and men under the bed. She could not realize that I, a smooth-faced, slender, ordinary mortal, in all respects like a common man, should be a live reb. She was inclined to hate me, as in duty bound.

"I will not describe the manner of the siege I laid to her: suffice it that when I rose to take leave, Katie stood up before , and half blushed, and paused a minute.

"With a coquetry I never saw executed more prettily, `I know,' said she, `that you are dying for a kiss, and you're ashamed to ask for it. You may take one.' . . . And so in triumph, and singing poems to all blue eyes, I said good night."

With this review the reader of "Tiger Lilies" at the present time must agree. It is seldom that one finds a bit of contemporary criticism that hits the mark so well as this. As a story it is a failure -- the plot is badly managed and the work is strikingly uneven. Lanier was aware of its defects, and yet pointed out its value to any student of his life. In a letter to his father from Montgomery, July 13, 1866, he says: "I have in the last part adopted almost exclusively the dramatic, rather than the descriptive, style which reigns in the earlier portions, interspersed with much high talk. Indeed, the book which I commenced to write in 1863 and have touched at intervals until now, represents in its change of style almost precisely the change of tone which has gradually been taking place in me all the time. So much so, that it has become highly interesting to me: I seem to see portions of my old self, otherwise forgotten, here preserved."

The note sounded in the preface is characteristic. He professes "a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in God's Nature and in man's Art." He utters a plea against "the horrible piquancies of quaint crimes and of white-handed criminals, with which so many books have recently stimulated the pruriency of men; and begs that the following pages may be judged only as registering a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists to happier lands that own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art, more virtuous women and fewer Lydian Guelts, more household sweetness and less Bohemian despair, clearer chords and fewer suspensions, broader quiet skies and shorter grotesque storms; since there are those, even here in the South, who still love beautiful things with sincere passion."

The story may be briefly indicated. The background of the first book is, as has been seen, the mountain scenery of East Tennessee. A party of hunters -- including Philip Sterling and Paul Ruebetsahl, two young transcendentalists -- are on a stand waiting for deer. Philip Sterling -- with "large gray poet's eyes, with a dream in each and a sparkle behind it" -- is living in the mountains with his father John Sterling and his sister Felix -- their home a veritable palace of art. Ruebetsahl is from Frankfort, Germany, whence he brings an enthusiasm for music and philosophy, into which he inducts his newly found friends. Another companion is John Cranston, a Northerner who had also lived in Frankfort, where he had often been compared to Goethe in his youth. He had Lucifer eyes, he spoke French and German; he "walked like a young god, he played people mad with his violin." These lovers of music and poetry furnish much amusement to the native mountaineers, one of whom, Cain Smallin, becomes one of the prominent characters in the latter part of the book. It is worthy of note that in this character and his brother, who turns out to be a villain, Lanier anticipated some of the sketches by Charles Egbert Craddock. The merry party of hunters retire to Sterling's house, where they enjoy the blessings of good friendship and of music and high thought. They, with other friends from all parts of the South, plan a masquerade party, in which they represent the various characters of Shakespeare's plays and the knights of the Round Table. After a scene of much merriment and good humor, Cranston and Ruebetsahl fight a duel -- both of them being in love with Felix Sterling, each knowing the other's history at Frankfort. In the mean time Ottilie with her maid comes from Germany to Chilhowee. She was formerly the lover of Ruebetsahl, and was betrayed by Cranston. She becomes identified with the Sterling family, she herself being a musician, and naturally finding her place among these music-loving people.

The coming of gunboats up the river scatters the party in all directions, some to prison and others to the final scenes around Richmond, with the burning of which the story closes, not, however, before the palace in the mountains -- where John Sterling and his wife, Felix and Ottilie, have spent the intervening time -- is set fire to by Gorm Smallin. The story is scarcely significant enough to follow all the threads.

"Tiger Lilies" has the same place in Lanier's life that "Hyperion" has in Longfellow's. They are both failures as novels or romances, but they are valuable as autobiographies. Instead of laying the scene in Germany, which he had never seen and yet yearned for, Lanier brings Germany to America. There are long disquisitions on the place of music and science in the modern world, many crude fancies, some striking descriptions of nature, some of which have already been quoted. Above all, there is Lanier's idea of what a musician or a poet ought to be, -- a study, therefore, of himself.

Two passages may be cited to show the author's tendency to use personifications and his insight into the "burthen of the mystery of all this unintelligible world": --

"Nature has no politics. She'll grow a rose as well for York as Lancaster, and mayhap beat both down next minute with a storm!

"She has no heart; else she never had rained on Lear's head.

"She has no eyes; for, seeing, she could never have drowned that dainty girl, Ophelia.

"She has no ears; or she would hear the wild Sabian hymns to Night and prayers to Day that men are uttering evermore.

Lanier was not destined, however, to begin his literary career as yet, nor was the South to have such an easy way out of her disaster as he had hoped. He had made only one reference to politics in his romance, and that was his manly utterance in behalf of Jefferson Davis, who was then confined in prison under rather disagreeable circumstances at Fortress Monroe. He said, "If there was guilt in any, there was guilt in nigh all of us, between Maryland and Mexico; Mr. Davis, if he be termed the ringleader of the Rebellion, was so, not by virtue of any instigating act of his, but purely by the unanimous will and appointment of the Southern people; and the hearts of the Southern people bleed to see how their own act has resulted in the chaining of Mr. Davis, who was as innocent as they, and in the pardon of those who were guilty as he."

Again it must be said, as was said of the effect of the war on the South, that reconstruction was something more than excessive taxation, grinding and unjust as that was, something more than the fear of black domination, as unthinkable as that is. There was the uncertainty of the situation, the sense of despair that rankled in the hearts of men, with the knowledge that nothing the South could do could have any influence in deciding its fate. It was the closing of institutions of learning, or running them under such circumstances that the better element of the South could have nothing to do with them. Lanier, writing about a position in the University of Alabama which he very much desired, said: "The trustees, who are appointees of the State, are so hampered by the expected change of State government that nothing can be certainly predicated as to their action."

Lanier felt the effect of reconstruction at every point, -- he was baptized with the baptism of the Southern people. The weight of that sad time bore heavily upon him. As he had during the war touched the experience of his people at every point, so now he went down with them into the Valley of Humiliation.

Under these circumstances his friend Northrup wrote him, inviting him to go to Germany with him. He replied: "Indeed, indeed, y'r trip-to-Europe invitation finds me all THIRSTY to go with you; but, alas, how little do you know of our wretched poverties and distresses here, -- that you ask me such a thing. . . . It spoils our dreams of Germany, ruthlessly. I've been presiding over eighty-six scholars, in a large Academy at Prattville, Ala., having two assistants under me; 't is terrible work, and the labor difficulties, with the recent poor price of cotton, conspire to make the pay very slim. I think y'r people can have no idea of the slow terrors with which this winter has invested our life in the South. Some time I'm going to give you a few simple details, which you must publish in your paper."

Prattville, where he spent the winter of 1867-68, was a small manufacturing town, with all the crudeness of a new industrial order and without any of the refinement to which Lanier had been accustomed in Macon and elsewhere. Perhaps there was never a time when drudgery so weighed upon him, although his usual playfulness is seen in the remark: "There is but one man in my school who could lick me in a fair fight, and he thinks me at once a Samson and a Solomon." He worked for people who thought that he was defrauding them if he did not work from "sun up to sun down", as one of his patrons expressed it. It was here, too, that he suffered from his first hemorrhages. His poetry written at this time was an expression of the despair which prevailed throughout the South. He whom the Civil War had not inspired to speech, and who had kept silent under the suffering of the days after the war, now gave expression to his disgust and his indignation. It is not great poetry, for Lanier was not adapted to that kind of poetry, and consequently neither he nor his wife ever collected all the poems. "Laughter in the Senate", published in the "Round Table", is typical of a group, several of which he left in an old ledger: --

Comes now the Peace, so long delayed? Is it the cheerful voice of aid? Begins the time, his heart has prayed, When men may reap and sow?

Ah, God! back to the cold earth's breast! The sages chuckle o'er their jest! Must they, to give a people rest, Their dainty wit forego?

The tyrants sit in a stately hall; They gibe at a wretched people's fall; The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall Over their dead and ours.

Look how the senators ape the clown, And don the motley and hide the gown, But yonder a fast rising frown On the people's forehead lowers.

To the same effect he wrote in unpublished poems, "Steel in Soft Hands" and "To Our Hills": --

We mourn your fall into daintier hands Of senators, rosy fingered, That wrote while you fought, And afar from the battles lingered.

And again in "Raven Days" and "Tyranny": --

Oh, Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow, Will ever any warm light come again? Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?

Young Trade is dead, And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern And folds his arms that find no bread to earn, And bows his head.

He recognized the need of some great man.

A pilot, God, a pilot! for the helm is left awry.

This state of affairs here set forth in Lanier's words caused many to leave the South in absolute despair of its future. It drove Maurice Thompson from Georgia to Indiana, and the Le Conte brothers from Columbia to California. It caused the middle-aged Lamar to stand sorrowfully at his gate in the afternoons in Oxford, Mississippi, gazing wistfully into the west, while young men like Henry Grady -- naturally optimistic and buoyant -- wondered what could be the future for them. There is no better evidence of the heroism of Lanier than the way in which he met the situation that confronted him. He found refuge in intellectual work. In a letter to his father he urges him to send him the latest magazines and books. June 1, 1868, he writes from Prattville: "I shall go to work on my essays, and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study." In another letter he said: "I have been deeply engaged in working out some metaphysical ideas for some time, -- an application which goes on all the time, whether I sit at desk or walk the streets." The volume of essays referred to was never published, but we have some of them in the essays "Retrospects and Prospects", "Nature-Metaphors", and some unpublished ones in an old ledger in which he wrote at this time, such as "The Oversight of Modern Philosophy", "Cause and Effect", "Time and Space", "The Solecisms of Mathematics", "Devil's Bombs", and other essays, which reveal Lanier's tendency to speculative philosophy and his exuberant fancy. In this same ledger he wrote down many quotations, which show that at the time he was not only keeping up with contemporary literature, but continuing his reading in German poetry.

In the meantime, December 21, 1867, Lanier had married Miss Mary Day. "Not even the wide-mouthed, villainous-nosed, tallow-faced drudgeries of my eighty-fold life," he wrote his father, "can squeeze the sentiment out of me." From the worldly standpoint it was a serious mistake to marry, with no prospect of position and in the general upheaval of society about them. But to the two lovers no such considerations could appeal, and with his marriage to this accomplished woman came one of the greatest blessings of Lanier's life. It was "an idyllic marriage, which the poet thought a rich compensation for all the other perfect gifts which Providence denied him." She was a sufferer like himself, but her accuracy and alertness of mind, her rare appreciation of music, and her deep divining of his own powers, made her the ideal wife of the poet. Those who know "My Springs" and the series of sonnets which he wrote to her during their separation when he was spending the winters in Baltimore, need not be told of the part that this love played in his life. Perhaps there are no two single lines in American poetry which express better the deeper meaning of love than these: --

I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns 't is then ye shine.

Unable to secure a position in a Southern college or to make a living by literary work, Lanier decided at the end of 1868 to take up the profession of law. He was led to do so by the earnest solicitation of his father. With his mind once made up in that direction, he went to the work with characteristic zeal. He displayed a business-like and methodical spirit which at once attracted attention. On November 19, 1869, he wrote to his brother, who was urging him to go into the cotton-mill business: "I have a far more feasible project, which I have been long incubating: let us go to Brunswick. We know something of the law, and are rapidly knowing more; it is a business which is far better than that of any salaried officer could possibly be. . . . It is best that you and I make up our minds immediately to be lawyers, NOTHING BUT LAWYERS, GOOD lawyers, and SUCCESSFUL lawyers; and direct all our energies to this end. We are too far in life to change our course now; it would be greatly disadvantageous to both of us. Therefore, to the law, Boy. It is your vocation; stick to it: It will presently reward you for your devotion." The scheme did not materialize, however; he remained at Macon in the office of Lanier and Anderson. He writes to Northrup, who has again held out to him a plan for going to Germany: --

Lanier's work as a lawyer was that of the office, as he never practiced in the courts. To the accuracy and fidelity of this work the words of his successor, Chancellor Walter B. Hill of the University of Georgia, bear testimony: --

The most significant passage, however, is his appeal to the men and women of the South to rise to the plane of tranquillity and magnanimity: --

"I spoke next of the tranquillity of the over-spanning heavens. This, too, is a noble quality which your Association tends to keep alive. Who in all the world needs tranquillity more than we? I know not a deeper question in our Southern life at this present time, than how we shall bear our load of wrong and injury with the calmness and tranquil dignity that become men and women who would be great in misfortune; and believe me, I know not where we will draw deeper inspirations of calm strength for this great emergency than in this place where we now stand, in the midst of departed heroes who fought against these things to death. Why, yonder lies my brave, brilliant friend, Lamar; and yonder, genial Robert Smith; and yonder, generous Tracy, -- gallant men, all, good knights and stainless gentlemen. How calmly they sleep in the midst of it! Unto this calmness shall we come, at last. If so, why should we disquiet our souls for the petty stings of our conquerors? There comes a time when conqueror and conquered shall alike descend into the grave. In that time, O my countrymen, in that time the conqueror shall be ashamed of his lash, and the conquered shall be proud of his calm endurance; in that time the conqueror shall hide his face, and the conquered shall lift his head with an exultation in his tranquil fortitude which God shall surely pardon!

"For the contemplation of this tranquillity, my friends of this Association, in the name of a land stung half to madness, I thank you.

. . . . .

"To-day we are here for love and not for hate. To-day we are here for harmony and not for discord. To-day we are risen immeasurably above all vengeance. To-day, standing upon the serene heights of forgiveness, our souls choir together the enchanting music of harmonious Christian civilization. To-day we will not disturb the peaceful slumbers of these sleepers with music less sweet than the serenade of loving remembrances, breathing upon our hearts as the winds of heaven breathe upon these swaying leaves above us."

Lanier did not abandon altogether his ideal of doing literary work. He was much encouraged at this time by a sympathetic correspondence with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who, after the Civil War, had settled in a little cottage near Augusta. His beautiful home in Charleston had been burned to the ground and his large, handsome library utterly lost. With heroic spirit at a time when, as Lanier said of him, "the war of secession had left the South in a condition which appeared to render an exclusively literary life a hopeless impossibility, he immured himself in the woods of Georgia and gave himself wholly to his pen." When Simms visited him here in 1866, the poet had for supplies "a box of hard tack, two sides of bacon, and fourscore, more or less, of smoked herring, a frying-pan and a grid-iron." He and his wife lived as simply as the Hawthornes did in the Old Manse. His writing desk was a carpenter's work-bench. He wrote continually for the magazines, corresponded with the poets of England and New England, received visitors, with whom he talked about the old days in Charleston when he and Timrod and Simms had projected "Russell's Magazine", and held out to young Southern writers the encouragement of an older brother.

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