He reached home March 15th, with his strength utterly exhausted.
There followed six weeks of desperate illness, and just as he began
to recover from it his beloved mother died of consumption.
He himself arose from his sick-bed with pronounced congestion of one lung,
but found relief in two months of out-of-door life with an uncle
at Point Clear, Mobile Bay. From December, 1865, to April, 1867,
he filled a clerkship in Montgomery, Ala., and in the next month
made his first visit to New York on the business of publishing
his "Tiger Lilies", written in April. In September, 1867, he took charge
of a country academy of nearly a hundred pupils in Prattville, Ala.,
and was married in December of the same year to Miss Mary Day,
daughter of Charles Day, of Macon.
To the years before Mr. Lanier's marriage belong a dozen poems
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.
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