Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), author of poems such "Marshes of the Glynn" (1879) and "Sunrise" (1882). Miles subsequent reference to "friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves" and the quotation that follows are taken from Lanier's "Sunrise," a long poem on the transcendental spirit which animates the material world. The poem's central symbol is a live-oak, a "sweet burly-bark'd, man-bodied Tree" (145) whose community of limbs and leaves represents the organic unity of matter and spirit. Lanier's live-oak prefigures Miles' courthouse Oak as a symbol of what Miles calls "a community of living things." For both Lanier and Miles, it is not the simple fact of life, but the perpetual communion between living things, which ties material existence to the spirit.