_Sidney Lanier._--Among the representatives of the “New South,” Sidney Lanier (1842-81), musician, poet, teacher of English, is easily foremost. He was born in Macon, Georgia, and received his education at Oglethorpe College, where, on graduating, he became a tutor; he volunteered in the Confederate Army (1860), toward the end of the war was captured, and perhaps owed his subsequent ill-health to his imprisonment of five months at Point Lookout. When the war was over, he taught again, in Alabama, read law, supported himself by his music--he was an adept on the flute--wrote for magazines, and by private study in Baltimore eventually fitted himself to take a lectureship in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. Courageous in his struggle with adverse circumstances, buoyant and energetic in spite of his long battle with disease, Lanier greatly resembles Timrod. Like Timrod, too, dying early, he left but a slender volume of poetry, uneven in excellence, an earnest of what he might have accomplished, hardly a standard by which to appraise him. Lanier’s was a delicate and sensuous rather than a profound imagination; however, both in his observation of external nature and in the thoroughness and extent of his acquaintance with general literature, he was unusually well prepared for the office of poet. His interest in science fortified and disciplined his contemplation of the outer world; his poetical instinct was nurtured through industrious and select reading; and he brought to bear upon his own literary craftsmanship, and upon the literary work of others, the ear of a trained musician. His musical ear helped him greatly in his studies on metre, where his contributions to scholarship are distinctly more valuable than in his lectures on the English novel. Deeply sympathetic and generous and sane in all relations of life, Lanier had a subtle understanding for the realm that lies outside the haunts of men--for the domain of wild fauna and flora, for the seldom heeded and the escaping phenomena of the woods and the marsh and the sea. The poor reception given to his “Tiger Lilies” (1867), a novel based on experiences in the army, did not dishearten him. In 1875 he definitely announced himself by his poem entitled “Corn,” published in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, a vision of the South restored through agriculture. This brought him the opportunity of writing the “Centennial Cantata” for the Philadelphia Exposition, where he expressed the faith he now had in the future of the reunited nation. The Cantata finished, he immediately began a much longer centennial ode, his “Psalm of the West” (1876), which appeared in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, and which, with “Corn” and “The Symphony,” made part of a small volume published in the autumn of 1876. Lanier’s important critical works were the product of the years between 1876 and his death. Some three years after he died, his poems were collected and edited by his wife.