A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 4

"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 clear-hearted, 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 fellow-prisoner, 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, n.o.ble or low-minded, 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, down-hearted 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 a.s.sisted us to get him above to our cabin. I can see his fellow prisoners now as they crouched and a.s.sisted to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.]

Chapter IV. Seeking a Vocation

Lanier reached Macon March 15, after a long and painful journey through the Carolinas. Immediately upon his arrival, losing the stimulus which had kept him going so long, he fell dangerously ill, and remained so for nearly two months. Early in May, just as he was convalescing, General Wilson captured Macon, and Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier House, whence they were to start on their way as prisoners to Fortress Monroe.

Clifford Lanier reached home May 19. He had, after the blockade was closed at Wilmington, gone to Cuba. From there he sailed to Galveston and walked thence to Macon. He arrived just in time to see his mother, who a few days after died of consumption. She had kept herself alive for months by "a strong conviction, which she expressed again and again, that G.o.d would bring both her boys to her before she died." Sidney spent the summer months with his father and his sister, ministering to them in their sorrow. In September he began to tutor on a large plantation nine miles from Macon. With thirty cla.s.ses a day and failing health, he whose brain was "fairly teeming with beautiful things"

was shut up to the horrible monotony of the "tear and tret" of the schoolroom.

He spent the winter at Point Clear on Mobile Bay, where he was greatly invigorated by the sea breezes and the air of the pine forests.

After these months of sorrow and struggle he settled in Montgomery, Ala., as clerk in the Exchange Hotel, the property of his grandfather and his uncles. His first feeling as he faces the new conditions which he is trying to explain to Northrup, his Northern friend, is one of bewilderment, -- the immense distance between the beginning and the end of the war: --

"So wild and high are the big war-waves dashing between '61 and '66, as between two sh.o.r.es, that, looking across their 'rude, imperious surge', I can scarcely discern any sight or sound of those old peaceful days that you and I pa.s.sed on the 'sacred soil' of M----.

The sweet, half-pastoral tones that SHOULD come from out that golden time, float to me mixed with battle cries and groans. It was our glorious spring: but, my G.o.d, the flowers of it send up sulphurous odors, and their petals are dabbled with blood.

"These things being so, I thank you, more than I can well express, for your kind letter. It comes to me, like a welcome sail, from that old world to this new one, through the war-storms.

It takes away the sulphur and the blood-flecks, and drowns out the harsh noises of battle. The two margins of the great gulf which has divided you from me seem approaching each other: I stretch out my hand across the narrowing fissure, to grasp yours on the other side. And I wish, with all my heart, that you and I could spend this ineffable May afternoon under that old oak at Whittaker's and 'talk it all over'."*

-- * This and the following letter were printed in 'Lippincott's Magazine', March, 1905. A few changes are made to conform to the original copies.

In another letter (June 29, 1866) he encloses a photograph and comments on the life in Montgomery: --

"The cadaverous enclosed is supposed to represent the face of your friend, together with a small portion of the Confederate gray coat in which enwrapped he did breast the big wars.

"I have one favor to entreat; and that is, that you will hold in consideration the very primitive state of the photographic art in this section, and believe that my mouth is not so large, by some inches, as this villainous artist portrays it.

"I despair of giving you any idea of the mortal stagnation which paralyzes all business here. On our streets, Monday is very like Sunday: they show no life, save late in the afternoon, when the girls come out, one by one, and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later.

I don't think there's a man in town who could be induced to go into his neighbor's store and ask him how's trade; for he would have to atone for such an insult with his life.

Everything is dreamy, and drowsy, and drone-y. The trees stand like statues; and even when a breeze comes, the leaves flutter and dangle idly about, as if with a languid protest against all disturbance of their perfect rest.

The mocking-birds absolutely refuse to sing before twelve o'clock at night, when the air is somewhat cooled: and the fireflies flicker more slowly than I ever saw them before. Our whole world here yawns, in a vast and sultry spell of laziness. An 'exposition of sleep'

is come over us, as over Sweet Bully Bottom; we won't wake till winter.

Himmel, my dear Boy, you are all so alive up there, and we are all so dead down here! I begin to have serious thoughts of emigrating to your country, so that I may live a little. There's not enough attrition of mind on mind here, to bring out any sparks from a man."

Into this strange new world -- "the unfamiliar avenue of a new era" -- Lanier pa.s.sed with unfaltering courage. He was to show that "fort.i.tude is more manly than bravery, for n.o.ble and long endurance wins the shining love of G.o.d; 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 circ.u.mstances? 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."

Moreover, the entire South -- and to those who had shared the hopes of a Southern republic it was still the land they loved -- was in a state of despair. Middle Georgia had lost through Sherman's march to the sea $100,000,000.* In the wake of Sherman's armies Richard Malcom Johnston had lost his estate of $50,000, Maurice Thompson's home was in ashes, and Joel Chandler Harris, who had begun life on the old Turner plantation under such favorable auspices, was forced to seek an occupation in New Orleans. Only those who lived through that period or who have imaginatively reproduced it, can realize the truth of E. L. G.o.dkin's statement: "I doubt much if any community in the modern world was ever so ruthlessly brought face to face with what is sternest and hardest in human life."

It was not simply the material losses of the war, -- these have often been commented on and statistics given, -- it was the loss of libraries like those of Simms and Hayne, the burning of inst.i.tutions of learning like the University of Alabama, the closing of colleges, like Lanier's own alma mater. It was the pa.s.sing away of a civilization which, with all its faults, had many attractive qualities -- a loss all the more apparent at a time when a more democratic civilization had not yet taken its place. The South was

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.

-- * Rhodes's 'History of the United States', v, 22.