They fought as tyrants fight, or slaves; God gave the dastards to our hands; Their bones are bleaching on the sands, Or moldering slow in shallow graves. But it was like pouring molten bullet lead from Satsuma vase. The fragile, beautiful life that should have known nothing harsher than the music of poets and the laughter of children and lovers, broke under the strain of war and poverty and neglect, and his life went out miserably at thirty-eight. II Sidney Lanier's life was as brief as Timrod's and as full of harshness and poverty, but the end of the war found him young enough to have resiliency and the ability to adapt himself to the new régime of which willy-nilly he found himself a part. He was thirteen years younger than Timrod and twelve years younger than Hayne. His temperament was different: he was broader in his sympathies--no man ever threw himself more completely into the cause of the Confederacy, yet a decade after the war we find him with a nation-wide vision of the new era; he was more democratic of soul than Hayne or Timrod--he could worship beauty as passionately as they and he could also write ballads of the Pike County order; he suffered just as acutely from the war as did Timrod, yet one may search long through his poems or his letters for a single despondent note. He was buoyant and impetuous: his winning of literary recognition in the face of physical disabilities seemingly insuperable places him beside Parkman. In point of time Lanier was the first of what may be called the Georgia school of writers. It is notable that the State most harshly dealt with by the war was the first to arise from its ruins, the first to receive the vision of a new South, and the first to catch the new national spirit. Macon, Lanier's birthplace, had about it all the best elements of the Old South. It was the seat of an influential college for women, it possessed a cultured society, and it had an art atmosphere--music, poetry, literary conversation--unusual in that period outside of New England and some of the larger cities. Lanier's home was in every way ideal: his father, a lawyer of the old Southern type, was "a man of considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste," and, moreover, like most Southerners of his class, he had a library stocked with the older classics, a treasure-house of which his son, bookish from his earliest childhood, made the fullest use. "Sir Walter Scott, the romances of Froissart, the adventures of Gil Bias," all the older poets--he read them until he seemed to his boyish companions as one who lived apart in a different world from theirs.