From Lookout Mountain he wrote Hayne that at about midnight he had
received his letter and poem, and had read the poem to some friends
sitting on the porch, among them Mr. Jefferson Davis. From Alleghany
Springs he wrote his wife that new strength and new serenity
"continually flash from out the gorges, the mountains, and the streams
into the heart and charge it as the lightnings charge the earth with
subtle and heavenly fires." Lanier's soul belonged to music more than
to any other form of art, and more than any other has he linked music
with poetry and the ever-varying phenomena of Nature. Of a perfect day
in Macon he wrote:

"If the year was an orchestra, to-day would be the calm, passionate,
even, intense, quiet, full, ineffable flute therein."

In November, 1872, Lanier went to San Antonio in quest of health,
which he did not find. Incidentally, he found hitherto unrevealed
depths of feeling in his "poor old flute" which caused the old leader
of the Maennerchor, who knew the whole world of music, to cry out with
enthusiasm that he had "never heard de flude accompany itself pefore."

That part of his musical life which Sidney Lanier gave to the world
was for the most part spent in Baltimore, where he played in the
Peabody Orchestra, the Germania Maennerchor, and other music
societies. An old German musician who used to play with him in the
Orchestra told me that Lanier was the finest flutist he had ever
heard.

It was in Baltimore, too, that he gave the lectures which resulted in
his most important prose-writings, "The Science of English Verse,"