the awful question whether it is my vocation." He sends his father
a number of poems, that they may be criticised. He has a sense of his own
deficiencies as a writer, -- deficiencies which he never fully overcame, --
for he writes: "I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency
to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far,
employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image,
and so making of it a CONCEIT rather than a metaphor,
a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne,
and others of that ilk."

The tendency is seen in a poem written at Boykin's Bluff
on, perhaps, his twenty-first birthday. Notable also
is the sense of the dawn of manhood: --

So Boyhood sets: comes Youth,
A painful night of mists and dreams,
That broods till Love's exquisite truth,
The star of a morn-clear manhood, beams.

In this dawn of his manhood -- not yet morn-clear, however, --
he began "Tiger Lilies", writing those parts having to do with his experience
in the mountains, some passages of which have already been quoted.

But Lanier's literary career was not to be begun as soon as he hoped.
He was, in August, 1864, transferred to Wilmington, N.C., where he became
a signal officer on the blockade-runners. Wilmington was the port which,
late in the war, was the scene of the most brilliant successes
of these swift vessels and the most strenuous efforts of the blockaders.
"Long after every other port was closed, desperate, but wary sea pigeons
would evade the big and surly watchers on the coast . . . and ho!