captured the town and Mr. Jefferson Davis and Senator Clement C. Clay
were brought to the Lanier house on their gloomy journey to Fortress
Monroe. In that month Lanier's mother died of consumption, and he
spent the summer months at home with his father and sister. In the
autumn he taught on a large plantation nine miles from Macon, where,
with "mind fairly teeming with beautiful things," he was shut up in
the "tare and tret" of the school-room. He spent the winter at Point
Clear on Mobile Bay, breathing in health with the sea-breezes and the
air that drifted fragrantly through the pines.

As clerk in the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his
grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a
field for his "beautiful things" than in the Georgia school-room, but
even in that "dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town" there was some life
"late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and shine
and move, just as the stars do an hour later." But Lanier was as
patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and
he accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he had accepted the
romance and adventures of Fort Boykin, on Sundays playing the
pipe-organ in the Presbyterian Church, and spending his leisure in
finishing "Tiger Lilies," begun in the wild days of '63, on Burwell's
Bay. In 1867 he returned to Macon, where in September he read the
proof of his book, his one effort at romance-writing, chiefly
noticeable for its musical element. The fluting of the author is
recalled by the description of the hero's flute-playing: "It is like
walking in the woods among wild flowers just before you go into some
vast cathedral."

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