forever and ever, no matter in whose granary they are cherished!"
Through those four years, though earnestly devoted to the cause,
and fulfilling his duties with zeal, his horror of war grew to the end.
He had entered it in a "crack" regiment, with a dandy uniform,
and was first encamped near Norfolk, where the gardens,
with the Northern market hopelessly cut off, were given freely
to the soldiers, who lived in every luxury; and every man had his sweetheart
in Norfolk. But the tyranny and Christlessness of war oppressed him,
though he loved the free life in the saddle and under the stars.

In February, 1865, he was released from Point Lookout
and undertook the weary return on foot to his home in Georgia,
with the twenty-dollar gold piece which he had in his pocket when captured,
and which was returned to him, with his other little effects, when he
was released. Of course he had the flute, which he had hidden in his sleeve
when he entered the prison, and which had earned him some comforts.
He reached home March 15th, with his strength utterly exhausted.
There followed six weeks of desperate illness, and just as he began
to recover from it his beloved mother died of consumption.
He himself arose from his sick-bed with pronounced congestion of one lung,
but found relief in two months of out-of-door life with an uncle
at Point Clear, Mobile Bay. From December, 1865, to April, 1867,
he filled a clerkship in Montgomery, Ala., and in the next month
made his first visit to New York on the business of publishing
his "Tiger Lilies", written in April. In September, 1867, he took charge
of a country academy of nearly a hundred pupils in Prattville, Ala.,
and was married in December of the same year to Miss Mary Day,
daughter of Charles Day, of Macon.

To the years before Mr. Lanier's marriage belong a dozen poems