fire gleams redly in the open grate, and the lamp burns softly on the
library table, and all things invite to poetic dreams.

November 12, 1880, Sidney Lanier wrote to his publisher a letter of
appreciation of the beautiful work done upon his volume, "The Boy's
King Arthur." It is dated at Number 435 North Calvert Street, the
latest Baltimore address that we have.

* * * * *

The distinction Sidney Lanier achieved as first flutist in the
orchestra of the Peabody Institute led to an offer of a position in
the Thomas Orchestra, which the condition of his health did not permit
him to accept.

In the summer of 1880 his "Science of English Verse" was published.
"Shakespeare and His Forerunners" resulted from his work with his
classes in Elizabethan Poetry. "The English Novel" is the course of
lectures on "Personality Illustrated by the Development of Fiction,"
delivered at Johns Hopkins University in the winter of 1880-'81. As we
read the printed work in its depth and strength, we do not realize
that his wife took the notes from his whispered dictation, and that
his auditors as they listened trembled lest, with each sentence, that
deep musical voice should fall on eternal silence. All this while he
had been working at lectures and boys' books, when, as he said, "a
thousand songs are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if
I do not utter them soon." One of the thousand, "Sunrise," he uttered
with a temperature of 104 degrees burning out his life, but it is full
of the rapture of the dawn.