Sidney Lanier said of his experience at Fort Boykin, on Burwell's Bay,
that it was in many respects "the most delicious period" of his life.
It may be that no other young soldier found so much of romance and
poetry in the service of Mars or put so much of it into the lives of
those around him. There are old men, now, who in their youth lived on
the James River, in whose hearts the melody of Sidney Lanier's flute
yet lingers in golden fire and dewy flowering. At Fort Boykin he
decided the question of his vocation, writing to his father so
eloquent a letter upon the desirability of pursuing his tastes, rather
than trying to follow the paternal footsteps in a profession for which
he had no talent, that his father relinquished all hope of making a
lawyer of his gifted son.

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Lanier served as signal officer until
he was captured and taken to the prison camp at Point Lookout, in
which gloomy place was developed the disease which in a few years
deprived literature and music of a light that would have sparkled in
beauty through the mists of centuries. Imprisonment did not serve as
an interruption to the work of the student, for even a prison cell was
a shrine to the radiant gods of Lanier's vision. Probably Heine and
Herder were never before translated in surroundings so little
congenial to those masters of poesy. One of his fellow-prisoners said
that Lanier's flute "was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and
console us." To the few who are left to remember him at that time, the
waves of the Chesapeake, with the sandy beach sweeping down to kiss
the waters, and the far-off dusky pines, are still melodious with that
music.

After his release he was taken to the Macon home, where he was
dangerously ill for two months, being there when General Wilson