"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.
It was this man who, at a critical time in Lanier's life, inspired him to believe that he might succeed in a literary career. "I have had constantly in mind the kindly help and encouragement which your cheering words used to bring me when I was even more obscure than I am now," wrote the younger poet at a later time. He did not have time, however, to act on this encouragement. He wrote now and then a dialect poem which was printed in the Georgia dailies and attracted attention by its humor and its insight into contemporary life, and occasionally an exquisite lyric like "Nirvana". In the main he had to say: —
"I have not put pen to paper in a literary way in a long time. How I thirst to do so, — how I long to sing a thousand various songs that oppress me, unsung, — is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings me bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this is a sorrowful thing. Nobody likes my poems except two or three friends, — who are themselves poets, and can supply themselves!" And yet he writes, "It gives me great encouragement that you think I might succeed in the literary life; for I take it that you are in earnest in saying so, believing that you love Art with too genuine affection to trifle with her by bringing to her service, through mere politeness, an unworthy worker."*
— * `Letters', passim. —
Hayne was impressed with Lanier's intimate knowledge of Elizabethan and older English literature, as displayed in his letters of this period. He says: —
"He had steeped his imagination from boyhood in the writings of the earlier English annalists and poets, — Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Gower, Chaucer, and the whole bead-roll of such ancient English worthies. I was of course a little surprised during our earlier epistolary communion to perceive, not only his unusually thorough knowledge of Chaucer, for example, whose couplets flowed as trippingly from his pen as if `The Canterbury Tales' and `The Romaunt of the Rose' were his daily mental food, but to find him quoting as naturally and easily from `Piers Plowman' and scores of the half-obsolete ballads of the English and Scottish borders.