trying to recuperate at San Antonio, Texas, for hemorrhages had begun in 1868,
and a cough had set in two years later; and, finally, settling in Baltimore,
December, 1873, to devote himself to music and literature.

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* April, 1867.
** December 19, 1867.
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Against the son's devotion of his life to music and literature
the father protested, chiefly on business grounds, and begged him
to rejoin himself in the practice of the law. Thanking his father
for his thoughtfulness, Lanier justified his own course
in these earnest words: "My dear father, think how, for twenty years,
through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness,
through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college
and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life,
through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted
with literary people and literary ways -- I say, think how,
in spite of all these depressing circumstances and of a thousand more
which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry
have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them.
Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right
to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts,
after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through
so much bitterness?"*1* Of course, the father yielded and did all
that his slender means would allow toward keeping up his son,
who henceforth devoted every energy to music and literature.
Despite continued ill-health, which now and again necessitated
visits of months' duration to Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia,