"
==
Having now given sacredly to art what vital forces his will could command,
he devoted himself, with an intense energy, to the study
of English literature, making himself a master of Anglo-Saxon
and early English texts, and pursuing the study down to our own times.
He read freely, also, and with a scholar's nice eagerness,
in further fields of study, but all with a view to gathering the stores
which a full man might draw from in the practice of poetic art;
for he had that large compass which sees and seeks truths
in various excursions, and no field of history, or philology, or philosophy,
or science found him unsympathetic. The opportunity for these studies
opened a new era in his development, while we begin to find
a crystallization of that theory of formal verse which he adopted,
and a growing power to master it. To this artistic side of poetry he gave,
from this time, very special study, until he had formulated it
in his lectures in the Johns Hopkins University, and in his volume
"The Science of English Verse".
But from this time the struggle against his fatal disease
was conscious and constant. In May, 1874, he visited Florida
under an engagement to write a book for distribution by a railroad company.
Two months of the summer were spent with his family at Sunnyside, Ga.,
where "Corn" was written.
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