Montvale Springs, in the mountains of Tennessee, where Sidney's
grandfather, Sterling Lanier, built a hotel in which he gave his
twenty-five grandchildren a vacation one summer, still holds the
memory of that wondrous flute and yet more marvellous nature among the
"strong, sweet trees, like brawny men with virgins' hearts." From its
ferns and mosses and "reckless vines" and priestly oaks lifting
yearning arms toward the stars, Lanier returned to Oglethorpe as a
tutor. Here amid hard work and haunting suggestions of a coming poem,
"The Jacquerie," he tried to work out the problem of his life's
expression.

* * * * *

When the guns of Fort Sumter thundered across Sidney Lanier's dreams
of music and poetry, he joined the Macon volunteers, the first company
to march from Georgia into Virginia. It was stationed near Norfolk,
camping in the fairgrounds in the time that Lanier describes as "the
gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James
River." Life there seems not to have been "all beer and skittles," or
the poetic substitutes therefor, for he goes on to say that their
principal duties were to picket the beach, their "pleasures and sweet
rewards of toil consisting in ague which played dice with our bones,
and blue mass pills that played the deuce with our livers."

In 1862, the Company went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they
indulged "for two or three months in what are called the 'dry shakes
of the sand-hills,' a sort of brilliant tremolo movement." The time
not required for the "tremolo movement" was spent in building Fort
Fischer, until they were ordered to Drewry's Bluff, and then to the