"
The tendency is seen in a poem written at Boykin's Bluff
on, perhaps, his twenty-first birthday. Notable also
is the sense of the dawn of manhood: --
So Boyhood sets: comes Youth,
A painful night of mists and dreams,
That broods till Love's exquisite truth,
The star of a morn-clear manhood, beams.
In this dawn of his manhood -- not yet morn-clear, however, --
he began "Tiger Lilies", writing those parts having to do with his experience
in the mountains, some passages of which have already been quoted.
But Lanier's literary career was not to be begun as soon as he hoped.
He was, in August, 1864, transferred to Wilmington, N.C., where he became
a signal officer on the blockade-runners. Wilmington was the port which,
late in the war, was the scene of the most brilliant successes
of these swift vessels and the most strenuous efforts of the blockaders.
"Long after every other port was closed, desperate, but wary sea pigeons
would evade the big and surly watchers on the coast . . . and ho!
for the open sea." This was a service of keen excitement and constant danger,
demanding a clear head and iron nerves. In the latter part of 1864
it became more and more difficult for the blockade-runners to make their way
to Bermuda. On November 2, a stormy night, Lanier was a signal officer
on the Lucy, which made its way out of the harbor, but fourteen hours later
was captured in the Gulf Stream by the Federal cruiser Santiago-de-Cuba.
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