With such an ancestry we are not surprised to learn that
Sidney's earliest passion was for music, and that in boyhood he could,
although untutored, play on almost every kind of instrument. He preferred
the violin, in playing which he sometimes sank into a deep trance,
but in deference to his father's view gave it up for the flute,
his power over which we shall hear of farther on. At first,
strange to say, he considered music unworthy of one's sole attention,
but later he came to rank it as his fullest expression of worship.

At fourteen Sidney entered the Sophomore Class of Oglethorpe College,
near Macon, Ga., and, with a year's intermission, graduated with first honor
in 1860, when just eighteen. To Professor James Woodrow, of Oglethorpe,
now President of South Carolina College, Lanier declared
that he owed "the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his youth."
On graduating he was given a tutorship in his Alma Mater,
a position that he held until the outbreak of the Civil War.

The lecture-room was now exchanged for the battle-field;
in April, 1861, Lanier entered the Confederate Army as a private
in the Macon Volunteers of the Second Georgia Battalion,
an organization among the first to reach Norfolk and that still keeps up
its corporate existence. In the spring of 1862 Lanier was joined
by his young brother, Clifford; and throughout the war
each seemed to vie with the other in brotherly love;
for, while both were offered promotion, neither would accept it,
since to do so would have entailed separation from the other.
The leisure time of his first year's service Sidney spent
in the study of music and the modern languages. He was engaged
in several battles in Virginia, but afterward was transferred,
with Clifford, to the Signal Service, with head-quarters at Petersburg.