included in this volume. Two of them are translations from the German
made during the war; the others are songs and miscellaneous poems,
full of flush and force, but not yet moulded by those laws of art
of whose authority he had hardly become conscious. His access to books
was limited, and he expressed himself more with music than with literature,
taking down the notes of birds, and writing music to his own songs
or those of Tennyson.

In January, 1868, the next month after his marriage,
he suffered his first hemorrhage from the lungs, and returned in May to Macon,
in very low health. Here he remained, studying and afterward practising law
with his father, until December, 1872. During this period there came,
in the spring and summer of 1870, a more alarming decline with settled cough.
He went for treatment to New York, where he remained two months,
returning in October greatly improved and strong in hope;
but again at home he lost ground steadily. He was now fairly engaged
in the brave struggle against consumption, which could have but one end.
So precarious already was his health that a change of residence
was determined on, and in December, 1872, he went to San Antonio, Texas,
in search of a permanent home there, leaving his wife and children meanwhile
at Macon. But the climate did not prove favorable and he returned
in April, 1873.

During these five years a sense of holy obligation, based on the conviction
that special talents had been given him, and that the time might be short,
rested upon Lanier, until it was impossible to resist it longer.
He felt himself called to something other than a country attorney's practice.
It was the compulsion of waiting utterance, not yet enfranchised.
From Texas he wrote to his wife: