Sidney Lanier | Page 8

the wide extent of his business. . . . As
a lawyer, while not aspiring to be a brilliant advocate, he was a most
profound and able reasoner, thoroughly versed and grounded in the

knowledge of the common law, well prepared with a knowledge of
current decisions and in the learning that grows out of them. . . . In his
social intercourse he was a gentleman of the purest and most refined
type. . . . At his own home, at the homes of others, in casual meetings,
in travel, everywhere, he always exhibited toward those who met him
an unbroken front of courtesy, gentleness, and refinement."*
-- * `Report of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Georgia Bar
Association', Atlanta, 1894. --
He was just such a lawyer as Lanier would have become had he
remained in that profession; indeed, son and father were very much
alike. The father was a man of "considerable literary acquirements and
exquisite taste." He was fond of Shakspere, Addison, and Sir Walter
Scott, having the literary taste of the gentlemen of the old South. The
letters written to his son show decided cultivation. They show also that
he was in thorough sympathy with his son's intellectual life. The letter
written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to
think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of
his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career,
but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many
from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of
the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In the earlier years,
Lanier sent his poems to his father, and valued highly his criticism, and
in later years he received from him financial aid and counsel.
While Robert Sampson Lanier was at college in Virginia he met Mary
Jane Anderson, the daughter of Hezekiah Anderson, a Virginia planter
who attained success in the political life of that State. They were
married in 1840, and Sidney was their first-born. The poet thus
inherited on his mother's side Scotch-Irish blood, an element in
Southern life which has been often underestimated. She proved to be a
hard-working woman, caring little for social life, but thoroughly
interested in the religious training of her children. Her husband,
although nominally a Methodist, was not actively identified with the
church, but willingly acquiesced in the somewhat rigid Presbyterian
discipline that prevailed in the home. The children -- Sidney, Clifford,

and Gertrude -- were taught the strictest tenets of the Calvinistic creed.
When Lanier afterwards, in Baltimore, lived a somewhat more liberal
life -- both as to creed and conduct -- he wrote: "If the constituents and
guardians of my childhood -- those good Presbyterians who believed
me a model for the Sunday-school children of all times -- could have
witnessed my acts and doings this day, I know not what groans of
sorrowful regret would arise in my behalf."
The seriousness of this life was broken, however, on week days.
Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism
in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well
on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular
melodies. Between the two brothers there was from the first the most
beautiful relation, as throughout the rest of their lives: comrades in
boyhood, comrades during the War, comrades in their first literary
work, and to the end. On Saturdays they went to "the boys' hunting
fields -- happy hunting grounds, redolent of hickory nuts, scaly barks,
and rose-blushing, luscious, haw apples. . . . Into these woods, across
yon marsh, we plunged every permissible Saturday for a day among
doves, blackbirds, robins, plovers, snipes, or rabbits."* Sometimes they
enjoyed fishing in the near-by brook or the larger river. The two
brothers were devoted to their sister Gertrude, to whom Sidney referred
in later years as his "vestal sister, who had, more perfectly than all the
men or women of the earth, nay, more perfectly than any star or any
dream," represented to him "the simple majesty and the serene purity of
the Winged Folk up Yonder."
-- * Clifford Lanier, `The Chautauquan', July, 1895. --
The beauty of this simple home life cannot well be overestimated in its
influence on Lanier's later life. He had nothing of the Bohemian in his
nature. He was throughout his life fully alive to all human ties,
fulfilling every relationship, whether of son, brother, father, husband,
or friend. His other relatives -- uncles, aunts, and cousins, -- filled a
large place in his early life, especially his mother's brother, Judge
Clifford Anderson, who was the law partner of Lanier's father and
afterwards Attorney-General of Georgia; and his father's