The Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 4

court of Charles II. A portrait of the elder Nicholas
Lanier, by his friend Van Dyck, was sold, with other pictures belonging
to Charles I., after his execution. The younger Nicholas was the first

Marshal, or presiding officer, of the Society of Musicians, incorporated
at the Restoration, "for the improvement of the science and the interest
of its professors;" and it is remarkable that four others of the name of
Lanier were among the few incorporators, one of them, John Lanier,
very likely father of the Sir John Lanier who fought as Major-General
at the Battle of the Boyne, and fell gloriously at Steinkirk along with
the brave Douglas.
The American branch of the family originated as early as 1716 with the
immigration of Thomas Lanier, who settled with other colonists on a
grant of land ten miles square, which includes the present city of
Richmond, Va. One of the family, a Thomas Lanier, married an aunt of
George Washington. The family is somewhat widely scattered, chiefly
in the Southern States.
The father of our poet was Robert S. Lanier, a lawyer still living in
Macon, Ga. His mother was Mary Anderson, a Virginian of Scotch
descent, from a family that supplied members of the House of
Burgesses of Virginia for many years and in more than one generation,
and was gifted in poetry, music, and oratory.
His earliest passion was for music. As a child he learned to play, almost
without instruction, on every kind of instrument he could find; and
while yet a boy he played the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar, and
banjo, especially devoting himself to the flute in deference to his father,
who feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin. For it was the
violin-voice that, above all others, commanded his soul. He has related
that during his college days it would sometimes so exalt him in rapture,
that presently he would sink from his solitary music-worship into a
deep trance, thence to awake, alone, on the floor of his room, sorely
shaken in nerve.
In after years more than one listener remarked the strange violin effects
which he conquered from the flute. His devotion to music
rather
alarmed than pleased his friends, and while it was here that he first
discovered that he possessed decided genius,
he for some time shared
the early notion of his parents,
that it was an unworthy pursuit, and he

rather repressed his taste. He did not then know by what inheritance it
had come to him, nor how worthy is the art.
At the age of fourteen he entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe
College, an institution under Presbyterian control near Midway, Ga.,
which had not vitality enough to survive the war. He graduated in 1860,
at the age of eighteen, with the first honors of his class, having lost a
year during which he took a clerkship in the Macon post-office. At least
one genuine impulse was received in this college life, and that
proceeded from Professor James Woodrow, who was then one of
Sidney's teachers, and who has since been connected with the
University and Theological Seminary in Columbia, S. C.
During the
last weeks of his life Mr. Lanier stated
that he owed to Professor
Woodrow the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his youth.
Immediately on his graduation he was called to a tutorship in the
college, which position he held until the outbreak of the war.
And here, with some hesitation, I record, as a true biography requires,
the development of his consciousness of possessing real genius. One
with this gift has a right to know it, just as others know if they possess
talent or shiftiness of resource. While we do not talk so much of genius
now as we did a generation ago, we can yet recognize the difference
between the fervor of that divine birth and the cantering of the livery
Pegasus forth and back, along the vulgar boulevards over which facile
talent rides his daily hack. Only once or twice, in his own private
note-book, or in a letter to his wife when it was needful, in sickness and
loneliness, to strengthen her will and his by testifying his own deepest
consciousness of power, did he whisper the assurance of his strength.

But he knew it, and she knew it, and it gave his will a peace in toil, a
sun-lit peace, notwithstanding sickness, or want, or misapprehension,
calm above the zone of clouds.
As I have said, his genius he first fully discovered in music. I copy
from his pencilled college note-book what cannot have been written
after he was eighteen years old. The boy had been discussing the
question with himself how far his inclinations were to be regarded as
indicating his best capacities and his duties. He says:

==
"The point which I wish