[Sidenote: WAR'S AFTERMATH]
Lanier was at sea, as signal officer on a blockade runner, when his ship was captured by a Federal cruiser and he was sent to the military prison at Point Lookout (1864). A hard and bitter experience it was, and his only comfort was the flute which he had hidden in his ragged sleeve. When released the following year he set out on foot for his home, five hundred miles away, and reached it more dead than alive; for consumption had laid a heavy hand upon him. For weeks he was desperately ill, and during the illness his mother died of the same wasting disease; then he rose and set out bravely to earn a living,—no easy matter in a place that had suffered as Georgia had during the war.
[Sidenote: THE GLEAM]
We shall not enter into his struggle for bread, or into his wanderings in search of a place where he could breathe without pain. He was a law clerk in his father's office at Macon when, knowing that he had but a slender lease of life, he made his resolve. To the remonstrances of his father he closed his ears, saying that music and poetry were calling him and he must follow the call. The superb climax of Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam" was in his soul:
O young mariner,
Down to the haven
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam!
Thus bravely he went northward to Baltimore, taking his flute with him. He was evidently a wonderful artist, playing not by the score but making his instrument his voice, so that his audience seemed to hear a soul speaking in melody. His was a magic flute. Soon he was supporting himself by playing in the Peabody Orchestra, living joyously meanwhile in an atmosphere of music and poetry and books; for he was always a student, determined to understand as well as to practice his art. He wrote poems, stories, anything to earn an honest dollar; he gave lectures on music and literature; he planned a score of books that he did not and could not write, for he was living in a fever of mind and body. Music and poetry were surging within him for expression; but his strength was failing, his time short.
[Sidenote: THE STRUGGLE]
In 1879 he was appointed lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and for the first time he had an assured income, small, indeed, but very heartening since it was enough to support his family. He began teaching with immense enthusiasm; but presently he was speaking in a whisper from an invalid's chair. Under such circumstances were uttered some of our most cheering words on art and poetry. Two years later he died in a tent among the hills, near Asheville, North Carolina, whither he had gone in a vain search for health.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF McGAHEYSVILLE, VIRGINIA
Near here Lanier spent his summers during the last years of his life]
There is in all Lanier's verse a fragmentariness, a sense of something left unsaid, which we may understand better if we remember that his heart was filled with the noblest emotions, but that when he strove to write them his pen failed for weariness. Read the daily miracle of dawn in "Sunrise," for example, and find there the waiting oaks, the stars, the tide, the marsh with its dreaming pools, light, color, fragrance, melody,—everything except that the hand which wrote the poem was too weak to guide the pencil. The rush of impressions and memories in "Sunrise," its tender beauty and vague incompleteness, as of something left unsaid, may be explained by the fact that it was Lanier's last song.