By December, 1872, he had given up hope of permanent relief in his Georgia home and gone to San Antonio, Tex., in search of a new home, leaving wife and children behind. But the soft healing air of this region could bring no relief to one whose whole being was hungering and thirsting to express itself in music and poetry. To his wife he writes:

Were it not for some circumstances which make such a proposition seem absurd in the highest degree, I would think that I am shortly to die, and that my spirit hath been singing its swan song before dissolution. 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. The very inner spirit of and essence of all wind songs, bird songs, passion songs, folk songs, country songs, sex songs, soul songs, and body songs hath blown upon me in quick gusts like the breath of passion, and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody.

And so in April, 1873, he returned

with the conviction ever becoming deeper that he had but a short time in which to do his life work, and that life work was to be not in law, but in music and letters.

We catch a glimpse of the inner struggles, which went on during these years, in his first letter to Bayard Taylor, August 17, 1875: "I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine my life has been as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relation with men of letters, with travelers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things." Step by step he was driven to follow his natural bent, to seek a musical atmosphere and a land of books and the companionship of those who could understand his longings and appreciate his gifts. From Baltimore, November 29, 1873, he writes to his father, who

generously offers him a share in his business and income:

My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college, and a bare army, and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways-I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and of poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you, as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?

After another visit to New York he made his home in Baltimore, beginning in December, 1873, an engagement as first flute for the Peabody Symphony Concerts. In the spring of 1874 he writes: "I've shed all the tears about it that I'm going to,

and am now pumping myself full of music and poetry, with which I propose to water the dry world.

God has cut me off inexorably from any other life than this (literary and artistic). So, St. Cecilia to the rescue! and I hope God will like my music."

To Paul H. Hayne, whom he had never seen, but with whom he had exchanged many a pleasant letter, he writes in May:

I spent last winter in Baltimore, pursuing music and meditating my "Jacquerie." I was flauto-primo of the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, and God only could express the delight and exultation with which I helped to perform the great works brought out by that organization during the season. Of course this was a queer place for me. Aside from the complete bouleversement of proceeding from the courthouse to the footlights, I was a raw player and a provincial withal, without practice, and guiltless of instruction-for I had never had a teacher. To go under these circumstances among old professional players, and assume a lead

ing part in a large orchestra which was organized expressly to play the most difficult works of the great masters, was (now that it's all over) a piece of temerity that I don't remember ever to have equaled before. But I trusted in love, pure and simple, and was not disappointed; for, as if by miracle, difficulties and discouragements melted away before the fire of a passion for music which grows ever stronger within my heart; and I came out with results more gratifying than it is becoming in me to specify. 'Tis quite settled that I cannot practice law. Either writing or speaking appears to produce small hemorrhages which completely sap my strength; and I am going in a few weeks to New York, without knowing what on earth I am to do there, armed only with a silver Böhm flute and some dozen of steel pens.

But Baltimore was henceforth his home, and for the remainder of his short life he was "engaged always in a threefold struggle, for health, for bread, and for a literary career." Often for months at a time he was forced to give up regular duties and to go away in search of recovery and