In the occasional improvements in his health, in the temporary respites from the implacable foe, was done the literary work which gives Sidney Lanier his place in the hall of fame. A born musician, he played organ, piano, flute, violin, banjo and guitar, but his preference was the violin and his specialty the flute. It was his exquisite music on the flute which secured and held for him the leadership of the Peabody Symphony Concerts, in Baltimore. To this city he went to live in 1873, and Baltimore was his home during the few years that were left to him. There is no record of a braver struggle with poverty and disease than that made by the Georgia poet during these last tragical years. Fugitive writings for the magazines, lecture courses to private classes, books in prose and books in verse, first-flute in an orchestra, public lectures at the Peabody Institute, and then the final scene in North Carolina where the long, hideous battle comes to its pitiful close. (Aug. 1881.) It is not probable that Sidney Lanier ever got much money out of his books. “Tiger Lilies,” his novel, made no hit; “The Science of English Verse” could not possibly appeal to many; and even his volumes of verse had no considerable recognition during the poet’s life-time. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Lanier will ever be one of the favorites of all classes, like Burns and Byron, Longfellow and Bret Harte. It appears to be the literal fact that the Georgia poet was =always= hard up. Poverty and Consumption were =always= dogging his steps. To keep himself and family from want, he =had= to be first-flute in the Concert, =had= to deliver those lectures. No matter how weak he was, no matter how ill and depressed, he =had= to go,—and he =did= go and go and go, until he was so far spent that it may be said that his last lectures were the death-rattle of a dying man. It is said that his hearers, to whom his condition was but too evident, listened to these final discourses “in a kind of fascinated terror.” Read this extract from one of his letters to his wife: “So many great ideas for Art are born to me each day, =I am swept away into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind=; and I find within myself such entire, yet humble, confidence of possessing every single element of power to carry them all out, =save the little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us clothed and fed in the meantime=. “=I do not understand this=.” (The black type is ours.) It reminds one of that letter of Edgar Poe, written to Childers of Georgia, requesting a small loan and saying simply, abjectly, “I am so miserably poor and friendless.”