The final consuming fever opened in May, 1880. In July he went
with Mrs. Lanier and her father to West Chester, Pa.,
where a fourth son was born in August. Unable to bear the fall climate,
he returned, alone, early in September to his Baltimore home.
This winter brought a hand-to-hand battle for life. In December he came
to the very door of death. Before February he had essayed the open air
to test himself for his second University lecture course.
His improvement ceased on that first day of exposure.
Nevertheless, by April he had gone through the twelve lectures
(there were to have been twenty), which were later published
under the title "The English Novel". A few of the earlier lectures
he penned himself; the rest he was obliged to dictate to his wife.
With the utmost care of himself, going in a closed carriage
and sitting during his lecture, his strength was so exhausted
that the struggle for breath in the carriage on his return
seemed each time to threaten the end. Those who heard him
listened with a sort of fascinated terror, as in doubt
whether the hoarded breath would suffice to the end of the hour.
It was in December of this winter, when too feeble to raise his food
to his mouth, with a fever temperature of 104 degrees,
that he pencilled his last and greatest poem, "Sunrise",
one of his projected series of the "Hymns of the Marshes".
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