"Thorn-Fruit". The effect produced by the young poet and musician
on the people who lived in the stately mansions along the James River
has been told by one who knew him well at this time: "The two brothers
were inseparable; slender, gray-eyed youths, full of enthusiasm,
Clifford grave and quiet, Sidney, the elder, playful with
a dainty mirthfulness. . . . How often did we sit on the moonlight nights
enthralled by the entranced melodies of his flute! Always the longing
for the very highest pervaded his life, and child though I was,
in listening to him as he paced the long galleries of my old home,
or as we rode in the sweet green wood, I felt even then that we sat
`in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.'"*

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* `Southern Bivouac', May, 1887.
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This period of his army life is important also from the fact
that here at Fort Boykin he definitely began to contemplate
a literary life as his probable vocation. He was studying hard,
reading English poetry, and writing to his father to "seize at any price"
editions of the German poets, Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, and Tieck.
Thus at a time when other Southerners were, as Professor Gildersleeve
has said, getting out their classics to reread them, Lanier was voyaging into
strange fields of thought alone. Once, when the little camp was captured,
he lost several of his choicest treasures, -- a volume containing
the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, a German glossary, Heine's poems,
and "Aurora Leigh". In a letter to his father, January 18, 1864,
he says: "Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself
into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry.
I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know,