SOURCE: Starke, Aubrey Harrison. “Lark of the Dawn.” In Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study, pp. 390-411. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933.

In the following excerpt, Starke chronicles the scholarship, poetry, and prose of Lanier's final years.

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But in considering together the four books for boys, ignoring the fact that work on them extended from 1879, possibly from 1878, through the last days at Camp Robin in the early fall of 1881, we have overlooked some interesting work on which Lanier was engaged while the manuscripts of the King Arthur, the Mabinogion and the Percy remained yet unfinished.

First, there were the translations from Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry contained in the Shakspere lectures, in The Science of English Verse, and in separate essays, but undertaken not so much as part of his academic work—not even as an integral part of his treatise on prosody—as...