of that fatal disease, consumption, against which he battled
for fifteen years. The regular full inspirations required by the flute
probably prolonged his life. In 1863 his detachment was mounted
and did service in Virginia and North Carolina. At last the two brothers
were separated, it coming in the duty of each to take charge of a vessel
which was to run the blockade. Sidney's vessel was captured,
and he was for five months in Point Lookout prison, until he was exchanged
(with his flute, for he never lost it), near the close of the war.
Those were very hard days for him, and a picture of them is given
in his "Tiger Lilies", the novel which he wrote two years afterward.
It is a luxuriant, unpruned work, written in haste for the press
within the space of three weeks, but one which gave rich promise of the poet.
A chapter in the middle of the book, introducing the scenes
of those four years of struggle, is wholly devoted to a remarkable metaphor,
which becomes an allegory and a sermon, in which war is pictured
as "a strange, enormous, terrible flower," which "the early spring of 1861
brought to bloom besides innumerable violets and jessamines."
He tells how the plant is grown; what arguments the horticulturists give
for cultivating it; how Christ inveighed against it,
and how its shades are damp and its odors unhealthy;
and what a fine specimen was grown the other day in North America
by "two wealthy landed proprietors, who combined all their resources
of money, of blood, of bones, of tears, of sulphur, and what not,
to make this the grandest specimen of modern horticulture."
"It is supposed by some," says he, "that seed of this American specimen
(now dead) yet remains in the land; but as for this author
(who, with many friends, suffered from the unhealthy odors of the plant),
he could find it in his heart to wish fervently that this seed,
if there be verily any, might perish in the germ, utterly out of sight
and life and memory, and out of the remote hope of resurrection,