In addition to supporting his new dignity he finds time and strength for his usual work, and he writes on January 30, 1878, “I have been mainly at work on some unimportant prose matter for pot-boilers, but I get off a short poem occasionally, and in the background of my mind am writing my Jacquerie.”  Unfortunately, “Jacquerie” remained in the background of his mind, with the exception of two songs—­all we have to indicate what a stirring presentation our literature might have had of the fourteenth century awakening of “Jacques Bonhomme,” that early precursor of the more terrible arousing in ’Ninety-Three.

In the latter part of the year Lanier was living at Number 180 St. Paul Street, and in December he wrote to a friend: 

“Bayard Taylor’s death slices a huge cantle out of the world....  It only seems that he has gone to some other Germany a little farther off....  He was such a fine fellow, one almost thinks he might have talked Death over and made him forego his stroke.”

At Bayard Taylor’s home, where Lanier visited, were two immense chestnut trees, much loved by the two poets.  Mrs. Taylor wrote that one of the trees died soon after the death of its poet owner.  The other lingered until a short time after the passing of Lanier.  It was in connection with the lines of the “Cantata,” written in the Baltimore home of the Southern poet, that the poet friends began a long-continued series of letters which one loves to read on a winter night, when the winds are battling with the world outside, and the 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.