A pleasant interlude in Lanier's soldier life was a two weeks' visit to Macon in the spring of 1863. The city had not yet felt any of the calamities of war, although high prices prevailed. Mrs. Clay, wife of Senator Clement C. Clay, was a visitor in the city at that time, waiting for a summons to join her husband in Richmond. She writes, in recalling those days: "Spring was in its precious beauty. Gardens glowed with brilliant blossoms. Thousands of fragrant odors mingled in the air, the voices of myriad birds sang about the foliaged avenues."* It was then that Lanier met Miss Mary Day, at the home of their friend, Miss Lamar. Her father was a prominent business man in Macon. She had lived for the first few years of her life in Macon, but had been since 1851 studying music in New York, and living with cultivated people at Saratoga and West Point. In an atmosphere of romance, music, and love Lanier spent his vacation.
— * `A Belle of the Fifties', p. 194. —
On their return to the Virginia battlefields the two brothers were accompanied by Mrs. Clay and her sister-in-law. Mrs. Clay had been a popular belle in Washington in the fifties, and was well acquainted with leading men and women throughout the country. She had heard and met in social circles Charlotte Cushman, Jenny Lind, Thackeray, Lord Napier, and other notabilities. Lanier, eager always to hear of the larger world outside of his own limited life, was much attracted by her reminiscences of well-known men and women. Returning to Suffolk, Va., Clifford Lanier wrote to her: "What a transition is this — from the spring and peace of Macon to this muddy and war-distracted country! Going to sleep in the moonlight and soft air of Italy, I seem to have waked embedded in Lapland snow." Sidney wrote: "Have you ever wandered, in an all night's dream, through exquisite flowery mosses, through labyrinthine grottoes, `full of all sparkling and sparry loveliness', over mountains of unknown height, by abysses of unfathomable depth, all beneath skies of an infinite brightness caused by no sun; strangest of all, — wandered about in wonder, as if you had lived an eternity in the familiar contemplation of such things? If you have dreamed, thought, and felt so, you can realize the imbecile stare with which I gaze on all of this life which goes on around me here. Macon was my two weeks' dream."*
— * `A Belle of the Fifties', p. 200. —
During 1863 and a large part of 1864 the two brothers served as scouts in Milligan's Corps along the James River. The duties were unusually dangerous and onerous, from the fact that their movements had to be concealed, and that they were in constant danger of being captured. In this work of hard riding Lanier displayed a cool and collected courage; he was untiring in his energy, prudent and cautious. Notwithstanding the dangers and hardships, he looked upon the period of life at Fort Boykin on Burwell's Bay — their headquarters — as "the most delicious period of his life in many respects." Writing of it later he said: "Our life was as full of romance as heart could desire. We had a flute and a guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid residences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty of hairbreadth 'scapes from the roving bands of Federals who were continually visiting that Debatable Land. . . . Cliff and I never cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades, the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair Burwell's Bay, and the spirited brushes of our little force with the enemy."*
— * Letter to Northrup, June 11, 1866. —
This is the period of his life which he describes in the second part of "Tiger Lilies". His brother Clifford also made it the basis of his novel, "Thorn-Fruit". The effect produced by the young poet and musician on the people who lived in the stately mansions along the James River has been told by one who knew him well at this time: "The two brothers were inseparable; slender, gray-eyed youths, full of enthusiasm, Clifford grave and quiet, Sidney, the elder, playful with a dainty mirthfulness. . . . How often did we sit on the moonlight nights enthralled by the entranced melodies of his flute! Always the longing for the very highest pervaded his life, and child though I was, in listening to him as he paced the long galleries of my old home, or as we rode in the sweet green wood, I felt even then that we sat `in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.'"*
— * `Southern Bivouac', May, 1887. —
This period of his army life is important also from the fact that here at Fort Boykin he definitely began to contemplate a literary life as his probable vocation. He was studying hard, reading English poetry, and writing to his father to "seize at any price" editions of the German poets, Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, and Tieck. Thus at a time when other Southerners were, as Professor Gildersleeve has said, getting out their classics to reread them, Lanier was voyaging into strange fields of thought alone. Once, when the little camp was captured, he lost several of his choicest treasures, — a volume containing the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, a German glossary, Heine's poems, and "Aurora Leigh". In a letter to his father, January 18, 1864, he says: "Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation." He sends his father a number of poems, that they may be criticised. He has a sense of his own deficiencies as a writer, — deficiencies which he never fully overcame, — for he writes: "I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a CONCEIT rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk."
The tendency is seen in a poem written at Boykin's Bluff on, perhaps, his twenty-first birthday. Notable also is the sense of the dawn of manhood: —