Born in Macon, Ga., in 1842, he had hardly graduated, with the first honor, at Oglethorpe College, before the Civil War drew him, a youth of eighteen, into the Macon Volunteers, the first Georgia troops that went to the front.
At the end of the war,—in which he had been in several battles and had spent months in prison—he returned on foot to Georgia.
After a long and desperate illness, he went to Alabama, where he clerked in a store in Montgomery, and then became a school teacher.
He married in 1868 and soon afterwards had the first hemorrhage from the lungs.
Returning to Macon, he studied law and began its practice, with his father.
The lung trouble was a fixture, however, and he went to New York for treatment. The remainder of his life presents the distressing spectacle of pursuer and pursued—the Disease in chase of the victim. We find him now in Texas, then in Florida, now in Pennsylvania, then in North Carolina,—with his remorseless enemy on his trail, always.
In the occasional improvements in his health, in the temporary respites from the implacable foe, was done the literary work which gives Sidney Lanier his place in the hall of fame. A born musician, he played organ, piano, flute, violin, banjo and guitar, but his preference was the violin and his specialty the flute.
It was his exquisite music on the flute which secured and held for him the leadership of the Peabody Symphony Concerts, in Baltimore. To this city he went to live in 1873, and Baltimore was his home during the few years that were left to him.
There is no record of a braver struggle with poverty and disease than that made by the Georgia poet during these last tragical years.
Fugitive writings for the magazines, lecture courses to private classes, books in prose and books in verse, first-flute in an orchestra, public lectures at the Peabody Institute, and then the final scene in North Carolina where the long, hideous battle comes to its pitiful close. (Aug. 1881.)