had ever enjoyed, and that the city of Macon, his birthplace and home,
was to become a great art centre." In this hope, soon after finishing
the year's work at Oglethorpe,* he volunteered for service
and went to Virginia to join the Macon Volunteers, who had left Georgia
early in April -- the first company that went out of the State to Virginia.
It was an old company that had won distinction in the Mexican War,
and was the special pride of the city of Macon. The company was
stationed for several months near Norfolk, where Lanier experienced
some of the joys of city life in those early days when war was largely
a picnic -- a holiday time it was -- "the gay days of mandolin and guitar
and moonlight sails on the James River."

--
* The faculty and students almost to a man enlisted in the army;
and the college buildings were afterwards used for barracks and hospitals.
President Talmage lost his mind by reason of the conflict between
his affection for his native and for his adopted section.
--

In the main, however, they played "Marsh-Divers and Meadow-Crakes",
their principal duties being to picket the beach, and their
"pleasures and sweet rewards-of-toil consisting in agues which played dice
with our bones, and blue-mass pills that played the deuce with our livers."*
The company was sent in 1862 to Wilmington, N.C., where they experienced
a pleasant change in the style of fever, "indulging for two or three months,"
continues Lanier, "in what are called the `dry shakes of the sand hills',
a sort of brilliant, tremolo movement, brilliantly executed upon
`that pan-pipe, man', by an invisible but very powerful performer."
From here, where they were engaged in building Fort Fisher,
they were called to Drewry's Bluff; and from there to the Chickahominy,