The next winter Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a
town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes
said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the
earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the
hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was
about as appropriately placed there as Arion would have been in a
tin-shop, but he kept his humorous outlook on life, departing from his
serenity so far as to make his only attempts at expressing in verse
his political indignation, the results of which he did not regard as
poetry, and they do not appear in the collection of his poems. His
muse was better adapted to the harmonies than to the discords of life.
Some lines written then furnish a graphic picture of conditions in the
South at that time:

Young Trade is dead,
And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern
And folds his arms that find no bread to earn,
And bows his head.

In 1868, after Lanier's marriage, he took up the practice of law in
his father's office in Macon. In that town he made his eloquent
Confederate Memorial address, April 26, 1870.

Lanier, to whom "Home" meant all that was radiant and joyous in life,
wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne that he was "homeless as the ghost of
Judas Iscariot." He was thrust upon a wandering existence by the
always unsuccessful attempt to find strength enough to do his work. At
Brunswick he found the scene of his Marsh poems in "the length and the
breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn," in which he reaches
his depth of poetic feeling and his height of poetic expression.