wins the shining love of God; whereas brilliant bravery is momentary,
is easy to the enthusiastic, and only dazzles the admiration
of the weak-eyed." Did any young man ever have to begin life
under more disadvantageous circumstances? Cherishing in his heart
the ideal long since formed of the scholar's or the artist's life,
he looked around on the blankest world one could imagine.
It is perhaps in a later letter to Bayard Taylor that Lanier came nearest
to expressing the situation that confronted him at the end of the war.
"Perhaps you know that with us of the younger generation of the South,
since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."

Added to his own poverty and sickness, was that of his family.
His grandfather had been compelled to leave his estate in East Tennessee
in 1863, and was now in old age deprived of his negroes and much of
his land and money. His father, weighed down with sorrow, had to take up
the practice of law from the start. Some members of his family,
"who used to roll in wealth, are every day," he writes, "with their own hands
plowing the little patch of ground which the war has left them,
while their wives do their cooking and washing."

Moreover, the entire South -- and to those who had shared
the hopes of a Southern republic it was still the land they loved --
was in a state of despair. Middle Georgia had lost through Sherman's
march to the sea $100,000,000.* In the wake of Sherman's armies
Richard Malcom Johnston had lost his estate of $50,000,
Maurice Thompson's home was in ashes, and Joel Chandler Harris,
who had begun life on the old Turner plantation under such favorable auspices,
was forced to seek an occupation in New Orleans. Only those
who lived through that period or who have imaginatively reproduced it,
can realize the truth of E. L. Godkin's statement: "I doubt much