HARVARD C BY EXIMANGE (Y. PUBLIC LIBRARY) COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS A INTRODUCTION THE LIFE OF LANIER I. BOYHOOD-COLLEGE DAYS 1842-1860 A FEW years before the Civil War there was living in the town of Macon, Ga., a boy named Sidney Lanier. He was a slender fellow, with large gray eyes which harbored dreams yet easily flashed into quick humor or set to an almost fierce intentnesseyes that could look unblinking into the full blaze of the sun. He joined enthusiastically in the games of Macon boys, from marbles to the all-year-round coasting down steep Pine Hill with barrel-stave sleds, on which one sped over the slippery pine needles almost as fast as a Canada boy covers the toboggan slide; with his brother or other companions he spent many a Saturday in the woods, marshes, and "old fields" near the river, looking for Indian arrow-heads, picking haws and hickory nuts, hunting doves, snipe, and rabbits; but every now and then he liked to get off alone on a fishing trip, frequently stealing out of the house by dawn with his lunch in his pocket, to spend a solitary day on the banks of the Ocmulgee. He brought home fish from these excursions, but he brought also pictures vii of placid river and starry water-lilies and tangled thicket and clambering jessamine vines, and vague young dreams that nestled in these coverts. He was a favorite with other boys. To begin with, he was quick, electric, flashing, full of jokes and gaiety, full of ideas. He could mimic to the life a travelling showman, the slow "Crackers," some negro fun-maker; with his flute he could imitate the birds' calls with bewildering exactness. When he was only six, his first circus incited him to get up a home performance with his brother and sister. At twelve, after reading Froissart and Scott, he had organized a military company, uniformed in white and blue, which was armed first with bows and arrows, then with wooden guns. And so faithfully were they drilled that on one memorable Fourth of July, when the Floyd Rifles and Macon Volunteers, many of them veterans of the Mexican and Indian Wars, paraded in state, the boys' company turned out too, and made such a creditable showing that they were all invited to the big dinner, and their leader was called on to answer to a toast. Then he was at once brave and gentle: a striking mixture of sensitiveness with a spirit that stopped at nothing when aroused. Fifty years after it happened, a boyhood friend told of his wonder at the way in which Sidney, then just a little fellow, stood the pain of an accident, when a window fell on his finger and took the end right off; and in the only fight his school fellows remember a formal challenge to meet and settle matters in the alley after school-the other fellow, finding himself get |