His formal schooling was meager, yet at fifteen he was able to enter the sophomore class of Oglethorpe University, a small denominational college at Midway, Georgia, and in 1860 he was ready for graduation with the highest honors of his class. Compared with the larger Northern institutions, the college was pitifully primitive; Lanier in later years could even call it "farcical," nevertheless it is doubtful if any university could have done more for the young poet. It brought him in contact with a man, James Woodrow of the department of science, a man who was to become later the president of the University of South Carolina and the author of the famous book, _An Examination of Certain Recent Assaults on Physical Science_ (1873). "Such a man," says his biographer, "coming into the life of Lanier at a formative period, influenced him profoundly. He set his mind going in the direction which he afterwards followed with great zest, the value of science in modern life and its relation to poetry and religion. He also revealed to him the meaning of genuine scholarship."[124] This influence it may have been which made Lanier in later years so tolerant and so broad of view. The attraction between pupil and teacher seems to have been mutual. Through Woodrow it was that Lanier received his appointment as tutor in the college, a position which he held during the year that followed. It was a year of close study and of wide reading. Throughout his undergraduate period he had read enormously: often in unusual books: Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Jeremy Taylor, Keats's _Endymion_, Chatterton, Christopher North, Tennyson, whose _Maud_ he learned by heart, Carlyle, and a long list of others. "Without a doubt it was Carlyle who first enkindled in Lanier a love of German literature and a desire to know more of that language." He studied with eagerness. His dream now was to enter a German university and do scholarly work as Basil Gildersleeve had just done, and Thomas R. Price, two other young men of the new South, but suddenly as he dreamed all his life plans fell in ruins about him. The crash of war resounded in his ears. All in a moment he found himself in an atmosphere of fierce excitement. The college became an armed camp; Macon became a military center. Before he had fairly realized it the young tutor, just turned twenty, had enlisted in the first company to leave the State, and was marching away to the front.