With such an ancestry we are not surprised to learn that Sidney's earliest passion was for music, and that in boyhood he could, although untutored, play on almost every kind of instrument. He preferred the violin, in playing which he sometimes sank into a deep trance, but in deference to his father's view gave it up for the flute, his power over which we shall hear of farther on. At first, strange to say, he considered music unworthy of one's sole attention, but later he came to rank it as his fullest expression of worship. At fourteen Sidney entered the Sophomore Class of Oglethorpe College, near Macon, Ga., and, with a year's intermission, graduated with first honor in 1860, when just eighteen. To Professor James Woodrow, of Oglethorpe, now President of South Carolina College, Lanier declared that he owed "the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his youth." On graduating he was given a tutorship in his Alma Mater, a position that he held until the outbreak of the Civil War. The lecture-room was now exchanged for the battle-field; in April, 1861, Lanier entered the Confederate Army as a private in the Macon Volunteers of the Second Georgia Battalion, an organization among the first to reach Norfolk and that still keeps up its corporate existence. In the spring of 1862 Lanier was joined by his young brother, Clifford; and throughout the war each seemed to vie with the other in brotherly love; for, while both were offered promotion, neither would accept it, since to do so would have entailed separation from the other. The leisure time of his first year's service Sidney spent in the study of music and the modern languages. He was engaged in several battles in Virginia, but afterward was transferred, with Clifford, to the Signal Service, with head-quarters at Petersburg. Here he had access to a small library, of which he made sedulous use. In 1863 his company was mounted, and served in Virginia and North Carolina. In the spring of 1864 both brothers were transferred to Wilmington, the head-quarters of the Marine Signal Service, in which they remained to the end of the war. Finally the two brothers were separated, each becoming signal officer* of a blockade-runner. Sidney's vessel was captured, and for five months he was a prisoner at Point Lookout, Md., with nothing but his flute to solace him. It was the exposure of prison-life, no doubt, that first led to decline of health by developing the seeds of consumption, a disease that was to carry off his mother and that he was to struggle with the last fifteen years of his life. Released from prison in February, 1865, he returned to Georgia, for the most part afoot, and reached home March 15th. An account of his war-life is given in his novel, `Tiger-lilies', treated below. -- * It is sometimes erroneously stated that each was put in charge of a blockade-runner. --