During these years, too, he had been steadily turning out poems of high order.
On his birthday, February 3, in 1879, he received notice of his appointment
as Lecturer on English Literature at the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore
for the ensuing scholastic year, with a fixed salary, the first since
his marriage. In the summer of 1879 he wrote his `Science of English Verse',
which constituted the basis of his first course of lectures
at the Johns Hopkins University. Notwithstanding serious illness,
this same winter, 1879-80, he lectured at three private schools
and kept up his musical engagement at the Peabody Concerts.
The next winter, 1880-81, he came near dying, but still kept writing
(`Sunrise' was written with a fever temperature of 104 Degrees)
and went through his twelve lectures at the Hopkins, afterwards embodied
in `The English Novel'. How trying this must have been to him
can be gathered from the following words of Mr. Ward:
"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.
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