Selected Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 5

him to rejoin
himself in the practice of the law. Thanking his father for his
thoughtfulness, Lanier justified his own course
in these earnest words:
"My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through
pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial
atmosphere of a farcical college
and of a bare army and then of an
exacting business life,
through all the discouragement of being
wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways -- I say,
think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances and of a
thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music
and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish
them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to
enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after
having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much
bitterness?"*1* Of course, the father yielded and did all that his slender
means would allow toward keeping up his son, who henceforth devoted
every energy to music and literature. Despite continued ill-health,
which now and again necessitated visits of months' duration to Florida,
North Carolina, and Virginia, Lanier did a vast amount of work. He
was engaged as first flute for the Peabody Symphony Concerts, a
position that he filled with rare distinction for six years. As to his
literary work, this began with the publication of his novel, `Tiger-lilies',
in 1867, and in the same year, of occasional poems in `The Round
Table' of New York. `Corn', published in `Lippincott's Magazine'
(Philadelphia) for February, 1875, is the first of his poems that attracted
general notice, and the one that gained him the friendship of Bayard
Taylor. To Taylor he owed his selection to write the `Centennial
Cantata', which gave him still greater notoriety, though, to be sure,
some of it was not very grateful to him. In 1876 the Lippincotts
published his `Florida', and in 1877 his first volume of `Poems',

which contained ninety-four pages and consisted chiefly of pieces*2*
previously published in the magazines. Soon after settling in Baltimore,

Lanier made a careful study of Old and Middle English, the fruits of
which he partially embodied in courses of lectures given to his private
class and to the public, the latter at the Peabody Institute, in 1879.
During these years, too, he had been steadily turning out poems of high
order. On his birthday, February 3, in 1879, he received notice of his
appointment as Lecturer on English Literature at the Johns Hopkins
University of Baltimore for the ensuing scholastic year, with a fixed
salary, the first since his marriage. In the summer of 1879 he wrote his
`Science of English Verse', which constituted the basis of his first
course of lectures at the Johns Hopkins University. Notwithstanding
serious illness, this same winter, 1879-80, he lectured at three private
schools and kept up his musical engagement at the Peabody Concerts.
The next winter, 1880-81, he came near dying, but still kept writing
(`Sunrise' was written with a fever temperature of 104 Degrees) and
went through his twelve lectures at the Hopkins, afterwards embodied
in `The English Novel'. How trying this must have been to him can be
gathered from the following words of Mr. Ward:
"A few of the earlier
lectures he penned himself; the rest he was obliged to dictate to his
wife. With the utmost care of himself,
going in a closed carriage and
sitting during his lecture,
his strength was so exhausted that the
struggle for breath
in the carriage on his return seemed each time to
threaten the end. Those who heard him listened in a sort of fascinated
terror, as in doubt whether the hoarded breath would suffice to the end
of the hour."*3* After this a trip was made to New York to arrange for
issuing some books for boys, and four were issued, two posthumously:
`Boy's Froissart' (1878), `Boy's King Arthur' (1880), `Boy's
Mabinogion' (1881),
and `Boy's Percy' (1882). Another work, an
account of North Carolina similar to that of Florida, was contracted for
and was definitely planned, but, owing to aggravating infirmities, could
not be completed.
--
*1* Ward's `Memorial', p. xx. f.
*2* They are named in the
`Bibliography'.
*3* Ward's `Memorial', p. xxviii.
--
For the end was near at hand. Desperate illness had made it necessary
to seek relief near Asheville, N.C., where he was joined
by Mrs.

Lanier and by his father and step-mother. Growing no better, he was
moved to Lynn, Polk County, N.C. Of the rest we shall hear in the
words of his wife: "We are left alone (it is August 29, 1881) 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