A pilot, God, a pilot! for the helm is left awry.
Years later, when the end of the reconstruction period had come, he described a type of man that was needed for this emergency: whether he realized it or not, it was a wish that Abraham Lincoln might have been spared to meet the situation. "I have been wondering where we are going to get a GREAT MAN, that will be tall enough to see over the whole country, and to direct that vast undoing of things which has got to be accomplished in a few years. It is a situation in which mere cleverness will not begin to work. The horizon of cleverness is too limited; it does not embrace enough of the heart of man, to enable a merely clever politician, such as those in which we abound, to lead matters properly in this juncture. The vast generosities which whirl a small revenge out of the way, as the winds whirl a leaf; the awful integrities which will pay a debt twice rather than allow the faintest flicker of suspicion about it; the splendid indignations which are also tender compassions, and will in one moment be hustling the money-changers out of the Temple, and in the next be preaching Love to them from the steps of it, — where are we to find these? It is time for a man to arise who is a man."*
— * Letter to Judge Logan E. Bleckley, Nov. 15, 1874. —
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.
In his later lectures at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, contrasting the heroines of epic poetry with the lyric woman of modern times, — the patient wife in the secure home, — he said: "But the daily grandeurs which every good wife, no matter how uneventful her lot, must achieve, the secret endurances which not only have no poet to sing them, but no human eye even to see them, the heroism which is as fine and bright at two o'clock in the morning as it is at noonday, all those prodigious fortitudes under sorrows which one is scarcely willing to whisper even to God Almighty, and of which probably every delicate-souled woman knows, either by intuition or actual experience, — this lyric heroism, altogether great and beautiful as it is, does not appear, save by one or two brief glimpses, in the early poetry of our ancestors."* He could not have described better his own wife and all that she was to be in the years to come. Her fame is linked with his as is Clara Schumann's with that of the great German musician.
— * `Shakspere and his Forerunners', i, 99. —
Chapter V. Lawyer and Traveler
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: —