It drove Maurice Thompson from Georgia to Indiana, and the Le Conte brothers
from Columbia to California. It caused the middle-aged Lamar
to stand sorrowfully at his gate in the afternoons in Oxford, Mississippi,
gazing wistfully into the west, while young men like Henry Grady
-- naturally optimistic and buoyant -- wondered what could be
the future for them. There is no better evidence of the heroism of Lanier
than the way in which he met the situation that confronted him.
He found refuge in intellectual work. In a letter to his father
he urges him to send him the latest magazines and books. June 1, 1868,
he writes from Prattville: "I shall go to work on my essays,
and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius,
whom I have long desired to study." In another letter he said:
"I have been deeply engaged in working out some metaphysical ideas
for some time, -- an application which goes on all the time,
whether I sit at desk or walk the streets." The volume of essays
referred to was never published, but we have some of them
in the essays "Retrospects and Prospects", "Nature-Metaphors",
and some unpublished ones in an old ledger in which he wrote at this time,
such as "The Oversight of Modern Philosophy", "Cause and Effect",
"Time and Space", "The Solecisms of Mathematics", "Devil's Bombs",
and other essays, which reveal Lanier's tendency to speculative philosophy
and his exuberant fancy. In this same ledger he wrote down many quotations,
which show that at the time he was not only keeping up
with contemporary literature, but continuing his reading in German poetry.
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