During the scant six years that followed, the years of his literary life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, he lived in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries to which he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he lay totally incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the speedy termination of all. Poetry he could write only in moments stolen from more imperative things. He compiled a guide book to Florida, he prepared courses of lectures on Shakespeare for clubs of women, he delivered two scholarly courses of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and he published four juveniles that adapted for boys the old romances of chivalry. He wrote lyrics and songs, but his future as a poet must rest on five poems: "Corn," the first significant poem from the new South; "The Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the West," which he intended should do for the centennial year what Taylor had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode; "The Marshes of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; and, finally on his death bed, held in life only by his imperious will, "Sunrise," his most joyous and most inspired improvisation of all. V For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things, then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with excitement as do those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I cannot tell you with what eagerness I devoured _Felix Holt_." "My heart was all a-cry." "The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath blown me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.