In the meantime, December 21, 1867, Lanier had married Miss Mary Day.
"Not even the wide-mouthed, villainous-nosed, tallow-faced drudgeries
of my eighty-fold life," he wrote his father, "can squeeze the sentiment
out of me." From the worldly standpoint it was a serious mistake to marry,
with no prospect of position and in the general upheaval of society
about them. But to the two lovers no such considerations could appeal,
and with his marriage to this accomplished woman came
one of the greatest blessings of Lanier's life. It was "an idyllic marriage,
which the poet thought a rich compensation for all the other perfect gifts
which Providence denied him." She was a sufferer like himself,
but her accuracy and alertness of mind, her rare appreciation of music,
and her deep divining of his own powers, made her the ideal wife of the poet.
Those who know "My Springs" and the series of sonnets which he wrote to her
during their separation when he was spending the winters in Baltimore,
need not be told of the part that this love played in his life.
Perhaps there are no two single lines in American poetry which express better
the deeper meaning of love than these: --
I marvel that God made you mine,
For when He frowns 't is then ye shine.
In his later lectures at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore,
contrasting the heroines of epic poetry with the lyric woman of modern times,
-- the patient wife in the secure home, -- he said: "But the daily grandeurs
which every good wife, no matter how uneventful her lot, must achieve,
the secret endurances which not only have no poet to sing them,
but no human eye even to see them, the heroism which is
as fine and bright at two o'clock in the morning as it is at noonday,
all those prodigious fortitudes under sorrows which one
is scarcely willing to whisper even to God Almighty,
and of which probably every delicate-souled woman knows,
either by intuition or actual experience, -- this lyric heroism,
altogether great and beautiful as it is, does not appear,
save by one or two brief glimpses, in the early poetry of our ancestors.
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