His career as a soldier need not detain us. It was varied and it was four years long and it ended dramatically on the stormy night of November 2, 1864, when the Federal cruiser _Santiago-de-Cuba_ picked up the blockade runner _Lucy_ off Wilmington, North Carolina, and sent her crew, among them signal officer Lanier, to Point Lookout prison. A fellow prisoner and a close friend during the hard days that followed was another Southern poet, John Bannister Tabb (1845-1909), whose brief lyrics as we know them to-day possess beauty and finish and often distinction. Lanier was released in March, 1865, and after incredible hardships succeeded in reaching his home in Macon more dead than alive to find his mother dying of consumption. The poet's tendency to the disease was congenital; the prison hardships and exposure had broken down his physical vigor; and two years later while teaching a small country school in Prattville, Alabama, as he was forced to do by the poverty of the South and his own lack of money or profession, hemorrhages from the lungs began, and the rest of his life, like Stevenson's under the same conditions, was a fight with tuberculosis, a perpetual changing from place to place that he might find some climate that would afford relief. With unparalleled heroism he fought off the disease for fifteen years, and under physical weakness that would have sent the average man to his bed and his grave he made himself recognized as the leading poetic voice of the new South, and one of the few poetic voices of his era. His life divides itself into three periods: the first one his time of dreaming, as he himself styled it--his boyhood, ending with the call to arms in 1861; the second his period of storm and stress, his period of struggle and uncertainty and final adjustment, ending in 1873 with his determination to devote his life to music and poetry; and finally the seven or eight years in which eagerly and unremittingly, with failing health and long periods of total incapacity, he wrote all those books and poems for which he is now known. III Lanier's work more than that of any other writer of his time illustrates the difference between the mid-century literature and that of the later national period. He is distinctively a transition figure: he heard both voices and he obeyed both. Until after the war he was what Hayne and Timrod had been, and Taylor and Stoddard--a disciple of Keats, a poet of merely sensuous beauty. But for the war he would have been a Longfellow bringing from Germany _Hyperions_ and _Voices of the Night_. The four vital years in the camps, on the blockade runner, in the military prison, with their close contact with life in its elemental conditions, was a university course far different from any that he had dreamed of in his college days. It was this that differentiates him from Hayne and Timrod and that brings him into our period.