On August 4 the party started across the mountains to Lynn, Polk County, North Carolina. On the way they stopped with a friend in whose house Lanier gave one more exhibition of his love of music. "It was in this house," says Miss Spann, "the meeting-place of all sweet nobility with nature and with the human spirit, that he uttered his last music on earth. At the close of the day Lanier came in and passed down the long drawing-room until he reached a western window. In the distance were the far-reaching Alleghany hills, with Mt. Pisgah supreme among them, and the intervening valley bathed in sunset beauty. Absorbed away from those around him, he watched the sunset glow deepen into twilight, then sat down to the piano, facing the window. Sorrow and joy and pain and hope and triumph his soul poured forth. They felt that in that twilight hour he had risen to an angel's song."*

--
* `Independent', June 28, 1894.
--

Lynn is in a sheltered valley among the mountains of Polk County, whose "climate is tempered by a curious current of warm air along the slope of Tryon Mountain, its northern boundary, a sort of ethereal Gulf Stream." Here death came soon than was anticipated by the brother, who had gone back to Montgomery, preceded already by his father. Mrs. Lanier's own words tell the story of the end in simplicity and love: "We are left alone (August 29) with one another. On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of God." His death before the open window was a realization of Matthew Arnold's wish with regard to dying: --

                             Let me be,
    While all around in silence lies,
    Moved to the window near, and see
    Once more, before my dying eyes, --

    Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
    The wide aerial landscape spread,
    The world which was ere I was born,
    The world which lasts when I am dead."

The closing lines of "Sunrise" express better than anything else Lanier's own confident faith as he passed behind the veil: --

    And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
    And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
    Labor, at leisure, in art -- till yonder beside thee
    My soul shall float, friend Sun,
    The day being done.

His body was taken to Baltimore, where it rests in Greenmount Cemetery in the lot of his friends, the Turnbulls, close by the son whose memory they have perpetuated by the endowment of a permanent lectureship on poetry in Johns Hopkins University. The grave is unmarked -- even by a slab. It divides the interest of visitors to Baltimore with the grave of Poe, which, however, is in another part of the city. So these two poets, whose lives and whose characters were so strikingly unlike, sleep in their adopted city.

Shortly after Lanier's death memorial services were held at Johns Hopkins University, at which time beautiful tributes were paid to him by his colleagues and friends. A committee of the citizens of Baltimore was appointed to raise a fund for the sustenance and education of the poet's family. They were aided in this by admirers of Lanier and public-spirited citizens throughout the country. Meantime his fame was growing, the publication of his poems in 1884 giving fresh impetus thereto.

Seven years after his death a bust of the poet was presented to the University by Mr. Charles Lanier of New York.* "The hall was filled," says ex-President Gilman, "with a company of those who knew and admired him. On the pedestal which supported the bust hung his flute and a roll of his music; a garland of laurels crowned his brow, and the sweetest of flowers were strewn at his feet. Letters came from Lowell, Holmes, Gilder, Stedman; young men who never saw him, but who had come under his influence, read their tributes in verse; a former student of the University made a critical estimate of the `Science of Verse'; a lady read several of Lanier's own poems; another lady sang one of his musical compositions adapted to words of Tennyson, and another song, one of his to which some one else wrote the music; a college president of New Jersey held up Lanier as a teacher of ethics; but the most striking figure was the trim, gaunt form of a Catholic priest, who referred to the day when they, two Confederate soldiers (the Huguenot and the Catholic), were confined in the Union prison, and with tears in his eyes said, his love for Lanier was like that of David for Jonathan. The sweetest of all the testimonials came at the very last moment, unsolicited and unexpected, from that charming poetess, Edith Thomas. She heard of the memorial assembly, and on the spur of the moment wrote the well-known lines, suggested by one of Lanier's own verses: --

    On the Paradise side of the river of death."

--
* For a full record of the exercises see `A Memorial of Sidney Lanier', Baltimore, 1888.
--

The aftermath of Lanier's home life is all pleasant to contemplate. His wife, although still an invalid, has, by her readings from her husband's letters and poems, and by her sympathetic help for all those who have cared to know more about him, done more than any other person to extend his fame. With tremendous obstacles in her way, she has reared to manhood the four sons, three of whom are now actively identified with publishing houses in New York city, and one of whom, bearing the name of his father, is now living upon a farm in Georgia. Charles Day Lanier is president of the Review of Reviews Company, and is associated with his youngest brother, Robert Sampson Lanier, in editing "The Country Calendar". Henry Wysham Lanier is a member of the firm of Doubleday, Page & Company, and editor of "Country Life in America". They all inherit their father's love of music and poetry, and through their magazines are doing much to foster among Americans a taste for country life. By a striking coincidence -- entirely unpremeditated on their part -- three of the sons and their mother live at Greenwich, Connecticut. It will be remembered that the home of the English Laniers was at Greenwich, -- and so the story of the Lanier family begins and ends with this name, -- one in the Old World and one in the New.