through the pines.

As clerk in the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his
grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a
field for his "beautiful things" than in the Georgia school-room, but
even in that "dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town" there was some life
"late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and shine
and move, just as the stars do an hour later." But Lanier was as
patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and
he accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he had accepted the
romance and adventures of Fort Boykin, on Sundays playing the
pipe-organ in the Presbyterian Church, and spending his leisure in
finishing "Tiger Lilies," begun in the wild days of '63, on Burwell's
Bay. In 1867 he returned to Macon, where in September he read the
proof of his book, his one effort at romance-writing, chiefly
noticeable for its musical element. The fluting of the author is
recalled by the description of the hero's flute-playing: "It is like
walking in the woods among wild flowers just before you go into some
vast cathedral."

* * * * *

The next winter Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a
town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes
said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the
earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the
hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was
about as appropriately placed there as Arion would have been in a
tin-shop, but he kept his humorous outlook on life, departing from his
serenity so far as to make his only attempts at expressing in verse
his political indignation, the results of which he did not regard as
poetry, and they do not appear in the collection of his poems. His
muse was better adapted to the harmonies than to the discords of life.
Some lines written then furnish a graphic picture of conditions in the
South at that time:

Young Trade is dead,
And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern
And folds his arms that find no bread to earn,
And bows his head.

In 1868, after Lanier's marriage, he took up the practice of law in
his father's office in Macon. In that town he made his eloquent
Confederate Memorial address, April 26, 1870.

Lanier, to whom "Home" meant all that was radiant and joyous in life,
wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne