LANIER, Sidney, American poet : b. Macon, Ga., 3 Feb. 1842; d. Lynn, N. C., 7 Sept. 1881. His father, Robert Lanier, a law yer of Macon, came from a family noted for a love of music and art. An ancestor, Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee, was well known at the court of Queen Elizabeth as a musical composer; another forebear, Nicholas Lanier, was director of music at the court of James I and Charles I, and first marshal of the Society of Musicians incorporated at the Restoration. Sidney Lanier's mother, Mary Anderson, be longed to a prominent Virginia family also noted for decided talent for music and poetry. The poet's artistic temperament was therefore a direct inheritance. As a child Lanier was passionately fond of music and without any instruction learned to play on the guitar, piano, flute and violin. A critic said of him in later years: °In his hands the flute was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration .° This passion for music also showed itself in his keen sensitiveness to rhythmic effect. At 14 he entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe College, Georgia, and after three years graduated with distinction. He was tutor in the college until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he joined the Confederate army as a private soldier. He fought in sev eral important battles, was transferred to the signal service and finally became signal officer of a blockade runner. In the autumn of 1864 he was captured and confined in Point Look Prison. He had taken advantage of every leisure moment to pursue his studies in litera ture, modern languages and music, and during his long idle hours in prison he gained a com plete mastery of the technique of the flute. He was released in February 1865 and made his way on foot to Macon, but the fatigue of the journey added to the previous hardships of camp and prison caused a severe illness which did irreparable damage to his lungs. The years that followed were years of hand-to-hand fight for a subsistence. For two years he was Berk in a hotel in Montgomery, and there wrote his novel Lilies,' a book of power and promise, but hastily written and poorly sustained; he taught at Prattville, Ala.,
and studied and practised law with his father for five years in Macon. In December 1867 he married Miss Mary Day of Macon, and her be lief in his genius, her willingness to endure with him privation and hardship made possible the valiant struggle and the achievement of the next 14 years. In the autumn of 1873, after an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish his health by a winter in Texas, he determined to move to Baltimore, where he could find greater oppor tunities for culture. He played the flute in the Peabody orchestM; in the intervals of hemor rhage he wrote articles for magazines; he gave lectures on literature in private schools; and thus, with the generous aid of his father, he sup plied the necessities of his family. His study of languages, of Anglo-Saxon and early Eng lish texts, of English and of foreign literature, was incessant and systematic. In February 1879 he was appointed lecturer on English lit erature at the Johns Hopkins University, and this position be held until his death. His two principal courses of lectures at the university are embodied in his of English Verse> (1879), a thorough and suggestive treatise on English metre, declaring that English verse de pends on stress, not accent, and that it is based on certain easily recognized musical rhythms, and English Novel,' a masterly treatment of the development of the idea of personality and its place in the modern novel. Again and again Lanier was driven by illness to Texas, to Florida, to North Carolina, but he was never idle; he studied much, he thought largely on all vital subjects, on love, life, art, economics, re ligion, and now and then he gave to the world poems of exquisite truth and beauty. In the spring of 1881 it became evident that the un equal fight was nearing its end, and as a last resort he tried tent life in the mountains of North Carolina. The last illness came at Lynn, in Polk County, and on a morning of early September he passed away.