scribes as "the
gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James
River." Life there seems not to have been "all beer and skittles," or
the poetic substitutes therefor, for he goes on to say that their
principal duties were to picket the beach, their "pleasures and sweet
rewards of toil consisting in ague which played dice with our bones,
and blue mass pills that played the deuce with our livers."

In 1862, the Company went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they
indulged "for two or three months in what are called the 'dry shakes
of the sand-hills,' a sort of brilliant tremolo movement." The time
not required for the "tremolo movement" was spent in building Fort
Fischer, until they were ordered to Drewry's Bluff, and then to the
Chickahominy, where they took part in the Seven Days' fight.

Even war places were literary shrines for Lanier, for wherever he
chanced to be he was constantly dedicating himself anew to the work
of his life. In Petersburg he studied in the Public Library. In that
old town he first saw General R.E. Lee, and watched his calm face
until he "felt that the antique earth returned out of the past and
some mystic god sat on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a
terrible, yet sublime, contest of human passions"--perhaps the most
poetic conception ever awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an
elderly gentleman asleep under the influence of a sermon on a drowsy
mid-summer day. Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him
to "seize at any price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, Tieck."

In the spring of 1863, on a visit to his old home in Macon, Lanier met
Miss Mary Day and promptly fell in love, a fortunate occurrence for
him, in that he secured an inspiring companion in his short and
brilliant life, and for us because it is to her loving care that we
owe the preservation of much of his finest work. On the return to
Virginia, he and his brother Clifford had as companions the charming
Mrs. Clement C. Clay and her sister, who wanted escorts from Macon to
Virginia. She claims to have bribed them with "broiled partridges,
sho' 'nuf sugar, and sho' 'nuf butter and spring chickens, 'quality
size,'" to which allurements the youthful poets are alleged to have
succumbed with grace and gallantry. I recall an evening that General
Pickett and I spent with Mrs. Clay at the Spotswood Hotel, when she
told us of her trip from Macon, and her two poet escorts. I remember
that Se