Sidney Lanier | Page 6

the modern
orchestra. Lanier influenced to some extent the minor poets of his era:
who knows but that in some era of creative art -- which let us hope is
not far off -- his subtle investigations and experiments in the domain

where music and verse converge may prove the starting point of some
greater poet's work? To the South, with which he was identified by
birth and temperament, and in whose tremendous upheaval he bore a
heroic part, the cosmopolitanism and modernness of his mind should be
a constant protest against those things that have hindered her in the past
and an incentive in that brilliant future to which she now so steadfastly
and surely moves. To all men everywhere who care for whatsoever
things are excellent and lovely and of good report his life is a priceless
heritage.
Chapter I.
Ancestry and Boyhood

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Ga., February 3, 1842. His parents,
Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary J. Anderson, were at that time living
in a small cottage on High street, the father a struggling young lawyer,
and the mother a woman of much thrift and piety. There were on both
sides traditions of gentility which went back to the older States of
Virginia and North Carolina, and in the case of the Laniers to southern
France and England. Lanier became very much interested in the study
of his genealogy. He was convinced by evidence gathered from the
many widely scattered branches of the family that a single family of
Laniers originally lived in France, and that the fact of the name alone
might with perfect security be taken as a proof of kinship. On account
of their nomadic habits, due to their continual movement from place to
place during two hundred years, he found it difficult to make out a
complete family history. He was not, nor have his relatives and later
investigators been, able to find material for the study of the Laniers in
their original home. At one time he expressed a wish that President
Hayes would appoint him consul to southern France. Certainly he was
at home there in imagination and spirit from the time when as a boy he
felt the fascination of Froissart's "Chronicles".
One of the keenest pleasures he had in later life was to discover in the
Peabody Library at Baltimore a full record of the Lanier family in

England. In investigating the state of art in Elizabeth's time he came
across in Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting" references to Jerome and
Nicholas Lanier, whose careers he followed with his accustomed zeal
and industry through the first-hand sources which the library afforded.
There is no more characteristic letter of Lanier's than that written in
1879 to Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, giving the result of this investigation. He
there tells the story of ten Laniers who enjoyed the personal favor of
four consecutive English monarchs. Jerome Lanier, he believed, had on
account of religious persecution fled from France to England during the
last quarter of the sixteenth century and "availed himself of his
accomplishments in music to secure a place in Queen Elizabeth's
household." His son Nicholas Lanier -- "musician, painter, engraver" --
was patronized successively by James I, Charles I, and Charles II,
wrote music for the masks of Ben Jonson and Campion and for the
lyrics of Herrick, and was the first marshal of a society of musicians
organized by Charles I in 1626. He also wrote a cantata called "Hero
and Leander". He was the friend of Van Dyck, who painted a portrait of
Lanier which attracted the attention of Charles I and eventually led to
that painter's accession to the court. He was sent by King Charles to
Italy to make purchases for the royal gallery. He and other members of
his family lived at Greenwich and were known as amateur artists as
well as musicians. After the Restoration five Laniers -- Nicholas,
Jerome, Clement, Andrewe, and John -- were charter members of an
organization of musicians established by the king "to exert their
authority for the improvement of the science and the interest of its
professors." It was a great pleasure to Sidney Lanier to find in the diary
of Pepys many passages telling of his associations with these
music-loving Laniers. "Here the best company for musique I ever was
in my life," says the quaint old annalist, "and I wish I could live and die
in it. . . . I spent the night in an exstasy almost; and having invited them
to my house a day or two hence, we broke up."
The study of these distant relatives enjoying the favor of successive
English kings must have suggested the contrast of his own life; but he
was pleased with the fancy that