Chapter VI: Part 6

The nucleus of the “Reveries of a Bachelor” was a paper contributed to _The Southern Literary Messenger_, and entitled “A Bachelor’s Reverie, in Three Parts: 1. Smoke, signifying Doubt; 2. Blaze, signifying Cheer; 3. Ashes, signifying Desolation.” Mr. Mitchell has a bibliographical rarity in his library in the shape of a copy of this first paper, in book form, bearing date Wormsloe, 1850, with the following colophon: “This edition of twelve copies of the Bachelor’s Reverie, by Ik: Marvel, hath been: by the Author’s Leave: printed privately for George Wymberley Jones.” This Mr. Jones was a wealthy and eccentric gentleman, who amused himself with a private printing-press at his estate of Wormsloe, near Savannah. The “Reveries,” by the way, has been by all odds its author’s most popular work, judged by the unfailing criterion of “sales.” In 1851 Mr. Mitchell was invited by Henry J. Raymond to edit the literary department of the _Times_, then newly established; but the labor promised to be too exacting for his state of health, and the offer was declined. In May, 1853, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Consul for the United States at Venice. In June of the same year he was married to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, and sailed again for Europe to enter upon the duties of his consulate. He was attracted to Venice by the opportunities for historical study, and while there he began the collection of material looking toward a history of the Venetian Republic. This plan never found fulfilment, but traces of Mr. Mitchell’s Venetian studies crop out in many of his subsequent writings; especially, perhaps, in his lecture on “Titian and his Times,” read before the Art School of Yale College, and included in his latest volume, “Bound Together” (1884). In 1854 he resigned his consulate, and in July of the following year, he purchased Edgewood.

During the past thirty-three years Mr. Mitchell has led the enviable life of a country gentleman--a life of agriculture tempered by literature and diversified by occasional excursions into the field of journalism. He has seen his numerous children grow up about him; he has entertained at his charming home many of our most distinguished _literati_; and he has kept open his communication with the reading public by a series of books and contributions to the periodical press, on farming, landscape-gardening, and the practical and æsthetic aspects of rural life. He edited “The Atlantic Almanac” for 1868 and 1869, and in the latter year accepted the editorship of _Hearth and Home_--a position which made it necessary for him to spend a part of every week in New York. He was one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and Commissioner from the United States at the Paris Exposition of 1878. His taste and experience in landscape-gardening have been called into play in the laying-out of the city park at East Rock, and at many private grounds in New Haven and elsewhere. Of late years the University has had the benefit of his services in one way and another. He has been one of the Council of the School of Fine Arts, since the establishment of that department, and has lectured before the School. In the fall and winter of 1884, he delivered a course of lectures on English literature to the students of the University; and the crowd of eager listeners that attended the series to the close showed that Mr. Mitchell had not lost that power of interesting and delighting young men which gave such wide currency to his “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life” a generation ago. Among the other lectures and addresses delivered on various occasions--several of which are collected in “Bound Together,”--special mention may be made of the address on Washington Irving, which formed one of the pleasantest features of the centennial celebration at Tarrytown in 1883. Irving not only honored Mr. Mitchell with his personal friendship, but he was, in a sense, his literary master. For different as are the subjects upon which the two have written, Mr. Mitchell, more truly than any other American writer, has inherited the literary tradition of Irving’s time and school. There is the same genial and sympathetic attitude toward his readers; the same tenderness of feeling; and, in style, that gentle elaboration and that careful, high-bred English which contrasts so strikingly with the brusque, nervous manner now in fashion. Among the treasures of Mr. Mitchell’s correspondence, none, I will venture to say, are more highly valued by him than the letters from Washington Irving, although the collection contains epistles from Hawthorne, Holmes, Dickens, Greeley, and many other distinguished men. Other interesting _memorabilia_ are the roughly drawn plans of Bayard Taylor’s house and grounds at “Kennett,” which the projector sketched for his host during his last visit at Edgewood.

In appearance Mr. Mitchell is rather under than over the average height, broad-shouldered and squarely shaped, the complexion fresh and ruddy, the nose slightly aquiline, the lips firmly shut, the glance of the eye kindly but keen. The engraving in _The Eclectic Magazine_ for September, 1867, still gives an excellent idea of its subject, though the dark, luxuriant whiskers there pictured are now a decided gray. It may not be generally know that, besides German translations of several of Mr. Mitchell’s books, his “Reveries” and “Dream Life” have been reprinted in Germany in Dürr’s Collection of Standard American Authors.

HENRY A. BEERS.

FRANCIS PARKMAN

FRANCIS PARKMAN

IN JAMAICA PLAIN AND IN BOSTON

The surroundings and experiences of Francis Parkman were, in some respects, very happily in accord with his aims and achievements, and in other respects as unfortunate as one could imagine. His home in childhood was near the forest of the Middlesex Fells, Massachusetts; and his wanderings and shootings in those woods early developed the two leading interests of his youth--the woods and the Indian. When his literary taste and ambition were aroused, in Harvard, he chose as his topic the French and Indian or Seven Years’ War, because it dealt with these favorite subjects, and, moreover, appealed to his strong sense of the picturesque. The die was thus cast; and thereafter, through college, through the law school, indeed through life, it molded his existence. For some years his reading, study, and vacation journeys all had a bearing on that particular subject. On leaving college he was troubled with an abnormal sensibility of the retina, which restricted the use of his eyes within very narrow limits. As it was apparent, therefore, that he could not then collect the vast body of materials required for the history of that war, he concluded to take up, as a preparatory work in the same direction, the conspiracy of Pontiac. In accordance with his plan pursued in studying all of his topics, he visited the localities concerned, and, where it was possible, saw the descendants of the people to be described. Not content with seeing the semi-civilized Indians, he went to the Rocky Mountains, in 1846, lived a while with the Ogallalla Sioux, visited some other tribes, and studied the character, manners, customs and traditions of the wildest of the Indians. But he bought this invaluable experience at a dear price; for while with these tribes on the hunt and the war-path he was attacked by an acute disorder, and being unable to rest and cure himself, his constitution was nearly ruined as well as his eyesight. However, he returned safe if not sound from his perilous journey, and wrote “The Oregon Trail” (1847) and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” (1851) by the help of readers and an amanuensis. He had now to settle himself in the prospect of years of ill-health and perhaps blindness.

In 1854 he bought a property on the edge of Jamaica Pond, and established himself and his family there in the woods and on the shore of a beautiful sheet of water--surroundings congenial to his fancy and his restrained ambition. About ten years of his life, in periods of two or three years, passed as a blank in literary labor; and during the remainder of the time, frequent and long interruptions broke the line of his efforts. Such an experience at the opening of his career would have been unendurable without some absorbing pursuit; and having a favorable site for gardening and an unfailing love of nature, he took up the study of horticulture. By 1859 it had become his chief occupation--one that filled happily several years, and to the last occupied more or less time according to the amount of literary work he could do. His labors were made fruitful to the public in a professorship at the Bussey Institution, the publication of “The Book of Roses” in 1866, the presidency of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and in careful experiments extending over ten or twelve years in the hybridization of lilies and other flowers. Among the most noted of his floral creations is the magnificent _lilium Parkmanni_, named by the English horticulturist who purchased the stock. Mr. Parkman’s summer home, at the Pond, was a plain but sunny and cheerful house, in the midst of a garden sloping down to the water; his study window looked to the north, the light least trying to sensitive eyes. The charming site, the landscapes about, the greenhouse and grounds in summer full of rare flowers, were the chief interests of the place; for his library and principal workshop were in Boston. As much exercise was necessary to him, he was a familiar figure in this pretty suburb of the city, either riding on horseback, rowing on the pond, or walking in the fields and woods.

But in the midst of all these discouraging delays and extraneous occupations, his literary aims were not forgotten; he pushed on, when he could, his investigations and composition by the help of readers and an amanuensis. Those who are unacquainted with the labor of historic research can scarcely imagine the difficulty, extent, and tedium of his investigations. The reader can glance over a book and pick out the needle he seeks in the haystack; but he who uses another’s eyes must examine carefully the entire stack in order not to miss a possible needle. Mr. Parkman’s ground has been won inch by inch. On finishing “The Conspiracy of Pontiac,” he had extended his first plan of writing the Seven Years’ War, and determined to take up the entire subject of French colonization in North America; and instead of making a continuous history, to write a series of connected narratives. He therefore continued, and extended, his journeys for investigation, in this country, in Canada, and in Europe; and by the help of readers and copyists he selected and acquired the necessary documents. But even with all the aid possible, the preparation of the first volume of the series consumed fourteen years. “The Pioneers of France in the New World” appeared in 1865, “The Jesuits in North America” in 1867, “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” in 1869, “The Old Régime in Canada” in 1874, “Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.” in 1877, “Montcalm and Wolfe” in 1884.

Mr. Parkman’s winter home, where he did the most of his work, was in the house of his sister, Miss Parkman, at 50 Chestnut Street, Boston--a quiet locality on the western slope of Beacon Hill. His study was a plain, comfortable, front room at the top of the house, with an open fire, a small writing-table beside the window, and shelves of books covering the walls. The most valuable of his treasures were manuscript copies of both public and private documents. For the sake of greater safety and more general usefulness he parted with some of these manuscripts--gave a lot of _fac-simile_ maps to Harvard College, and a collection of thirty-five large volumes to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The latter embrace eight volumes of documents from the Archives of Marine and Colonies and other archives of France, relating to Canada, from 1670 to 1700; twelve volumes from the same sources, from 1748 to 1763; four volumes from the Public Record Office of London, from 1750 to 1760; one volume from the National Archives of Paris, from 1759 to 1766; one volume from the British Museum, from 1751 to 1761; one volume of diverse letters to Bourlamaque by various officers in Canada during the war of 1755-63; one volume of letters to the same by Montcalm while in Canada (Montcalm had requested Bourlamaque to burn them, but Mr. Parkman, fifteen years before he could find them, believed in their existence, and finally discovered them in a private collection of manuscripts); one volume of Montcalm’s private letters to his wife and his mother, written while he was in America--obtained from the present Marquis de Montcalm; and one volume of Washington’s letters to Colonel Bouquet, from the British Museum. The most recent publication, “Montcalm and Wolfe,” takes in twenty-six of these volumes, besides a large lot of printed matter and notes made at the sources of information. The above collection constitutes about half of Mr. Parkman’s manuscripts. A considerable part of them cannot be estimated by pages and volumes, being unbound notes and references representing a vast amount of research. Two sets of copyists sent him from France and England copies of the papers he designated.

Mr. Parkman’s experience offers a valuable and encouraging example in the history of literature. On the one side he had poor health and poor sight for a vast amount of labor; on the other he had money, time, capacity, a tough, sinewy, physique, a resistant, calm, cheerful temper, and an indomitable perseverance and ambition. As in some other cases, his disabilities seem to have been negative advantages, if we may judge by his productions; for his frequent illnesses, by retarding his labors, increased his years and experience before production, and forced the growth of departments of knowledge generally neglected by students. He was led to give equal attention to observing nature, studying men, and digesting evidence. His studies and manual labors in horticulture and his practical familiarity with forest life and frontier life quickened his sympathy with nature. His extensive travels gave him a wide knowledge of life, manners, and customs, from the wigwam to the palace. Far from being a recluse, he was, until his death in 1893, a man of the world, often locked out of his closet and led into practical and public interests (for six years he was President of the St. Botolph Club of Boston, and for ten years one of the seven members of the Corporation of Harvard University). He was naturally a student of men, and a keen observer of character and motives. His discouraging interruptions from literary work, while not often stopping the above studies, forced upon him time for reflection, for weighing the evidence he collected, and for perfecting the form of his works. Doubtless human achievements do proceed from sources more interior than exterior; but the circumstances of Mr. Parkman’s life must have conduced to the realism, strength, and picturesqueness of his descriptions; to the distinctness of his characters, their motives and actions; to the thoroughness of his investigations; and to the impartiality of judgment and the truth of perspective in his histories.

C. H. FARNHAM.

GOLDWIN SMITH

GOLDWIN SMITH

AT “THE GRANGE”

Beverly Street, though it lies in the heart of the city, is one of the most fashionable quarters of Toronto. About the middle of its eastern side a whole block is walled off from curious eyes by a high, blank fence, behind which rises what seems a bit of primeval forest. The trees are chiefly fir-trees, mossed with age, and sombre; and in the midst of their effectual privacy, with sunny tennis-lawns spread out before its windows, is The Grange. The entrance to the grounds is in another street, Grange Road, where the fir-trees stand wide apart, and the lawns stretch down to the great gates standing always hospitably open. The house itself is an old-fashioned, wide-winged mansion of red brick, low, and ample in the eaves, its warm color toned down by the frosts of many Canadian winters to an exquisite harmony with the varying greens which surround it. The quaint, undemonstrative doorway, the heavy, dark-painted hall-door, the shining, massy knocker, and the prim side-windows,--all savor delightfully of _United Empire Loyalist_ days. Just such fit and satisfactory architecture this as we have fair chance of finding wherever the makers of Canada came to a rest from their flight out of the angry, new-born republic. As the door opens one enters a dim, roomy hall, full of soft brown tints and suggestion of quiet, the polished floor made noiseless with Persian rugs. On the right hand open the parlors, terminated by an octagonal conservatory. The wing opposite is occupied by the dining-room and a spacious library.

The dining-room has a general tone of crimson and brown, and its walls are covered with portraits in oil of the heroes of the Commonwealth. Milton, Cromwell, Hampden, Pym, Vane, _et al._--they are all there, gazing down severely upon the well-covered board. The abstemious host serenely dines beneath that Puritan scrutiny; but to me it has always seemed that a collection of the great cavaliers would look on with a sympathy more exhilarating. From here a short passage leads to the ante-room of the library, which, like the library itself, is lined to the ceiling with books. At the further end of the library is the fireplace, under a heavy mantel of oak, and near it stands a massive writing-desk, of some light colored wood. A smaller desk, close by, is devoted to the use of the gentleman who acts as librarian and secretary. The ample windows are all on one side, facing the lawn; and the centre of the room is held by a billiard-table, which, for the most part, is piled with the latest reviews and periodicals. The master of The Grange is by no means an assiduous player, though he handles the cue with fair skill. In such a home as this, Mr. Goldwin Smith may be considered to have struck deep root into Canadian soil; and as his wife, whose bright hospitality gives The Grange its highest charm, is a Canadian woman, he has every right to regard himself as identified with Canada. In person, Mr. Smith is very tall, straight, spare; his face keen, grave, almost severe; his iron-gray hair cut close; his eyes restless, alert, piercing, but capable at times of an unexpected gentleness and sweetness; his smile so agreeable that one must the more lament its rarity. The countenance and manner are preëminently those of the critic, the investigator, the tester. As he concerns himself earnestly in all our most important public affairs, his general appearance, through the medium of the Toronto _Grip_, our Canadian _Punch_, has come to be by no means unfamiliar to the people of Canada.

In becoming a Canadian, Goldwin Smith has not ceased to be an Englishman; he has also desired to become an American, by the way. He holds his English audience through the pages of _The Contemporary_ and _The Nineteenth Century_, and he addresses Americans for some weeks every year from a chair in Cornell University. In Canada he chooses to speak from behind an extremely diaphanous veil--the _nom de plume_ of “A Bystander”; and under this name he for some time issued a small monthly (changed to a quarterly before its discontinuance), which was written entirely by himself, and treated of current events and the thought of the hour. That periodical has now been succeeded by _The Week_, to which the Bystander has been a contributor since the paper was founded. It were out of place to speak here of Goldwin Smith’s career and work in England; it would be telling, too, what is pretty widely known. In Canada his influence has been far deeper than is generally imagined, or than, to a surface-glance, would appear. On his first coming here he was unfairly and relentlessly attacked by what was at the time the most powerful journal in Canada, the Toronto _Globe_; and he has not lacked sharp but irregular antagonism ever since. Somewhat relentless himself, as evinced by his attitude toward the Irish and the Jews, and having always one organ or another in his control, he has long ago wiped out his score against the _Globe_, and inspired a good many of his adversaries with discretion. He devotes all his energy and time, at least so far as the world knows, to work of a more or less ephemeral nature; and when urged to the creation of something permanent, something commensurate with his genius, he is wont to reply that he regards himself rather as a journalist than an author. He would live not by books, but by his mark stamped on men’s minds. It does, indeed, at first sight, surprise one to observe the meagreness of his enduring literary work, as compared with his vast reputation. There is little bearing his name save the volume of collected lectures and essays--chief among them the perhaps matchless historical study entitled “The Great Duel of the Seventeenth Century,”--and the keen but cold monograph on Cowper contributed to the English Men-of-Letters. His visible achievement is soon measured, but it would be hard to measure the wide-reaching effects of his influence. Now, while a sort of conservatism is creeping over his utterances with years, doctrines contrary to those he used so strenuously to urge seem much in the ascendant in England. But in Canada he has found a more plastic material into which, almost without either our knowledge or consent, his lines have sunk deeper. His direct teachings, perhaps, have not greatly prevailed with us. He has not called into being anything like a Bystander party, for instance, to wage war against party government, and other great or little objects of his attack. For this his genius is not synthetic enough--it is too disintegrating. But his influence pervades all parties, and has proved a mighty shatterer of fetters amongst us--a swift solvent of many cast-iron prejudices. He has opened, liberalized, to some extent deprovincialized, our thought, and has convinced us that some of our most revered fetishes were but feathers and a rattle after all. But he sees too many sides of a question to give unmixed satisfaction to anybody. The Canadian Nationalists, with whom he is believed to be in sympathy, owe him both gratitude and a grudge. He has made plain to us our right to our doctrines, and the rightness of our doctrines; he has made ridiculous those who would cry “Treason” after us. But we could wish that he would suffer us to indulge a little youthful enthusiasm, as would become a people unquestionably young; and also that he would refrain from showing us quite so vividly and persistently all the lions in our path. We think we can deal with each as it comes against us. His words go far to weaken our faith in the ultimate consolidation of Canada; he tends to retard our perfect fusion, and is inclined to unduly exalt Ontario at the expense of her sister Provinces. All these things trouble us, as increasing the possibility of success for a movement just now being actively stirred in England, and toward which Goldwin Smith’s attitude has ever been one of uncompromising antagonism--that is, the movement toward imperial federation.

Speaking of Mr. Smith and Canadian Nationalism, as the Nationalist movement is now too big to fear laughter, I may mention the sad fate of the first efforts to institute such a movement. A number of years ago, certain able and patriotic young men in Toronto established a “Canada First” party, and threw themselves with zeal into the work of propagandizing. Mr. Smith’s cooperation was joyfully accepted, and he joined the movement. But it soon transpired that it was the movement which had joined him. In very fact, he swallowed the “Canada First” party; and growing tired of propagandizing when he thought the time was not ripe for it, and finding something else to do just then than assist at the possibly premature birth of a nation, he let the busy little movement fall to pieces. The vital germ, however, existed in every one of the separate pieces, and has sprung up from border to border of the land, till now it has a thousand centers, is clothed in a thousand shapes, and is altogether incapable of being swallowed.

As I am writing for an American audience, it may not be irrelevant to say, before concluding, that while Goldwin Smith is an ardent believer in, and friend of, the American people, he has at the same time but a tepid esteem for the chief part of American literature. He rather decries all but the great humorists, for whom, indeed, his admiration is unbounded. He has a full and generous appreciation for the genius of Poe. But he misses entirely the greatness of Emerson, allows to Lowell no eminence save as a satirist, and is continually asking, privately, that America shall produce a book. As he has not, however, made this exorbitant demand as yet in printer’s ink, and over his sign and seal, perhaps we may be permitted to regard it as no more than a mild British joke.

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.

FREDERICTON, N. B.

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

EDMUND C. STEDMAN

IN NEW YORK AND AT “KELP ROCK”

New York is an ugly city, with only here and there a picturesque feature. Still the picturesque exists, if it be sought for in remote corners. When about to choose a permanent home, Mr. Stedman did not exile himself to the distance at which alone such advantages are to be obtained. For he may be said to be the typical literary man of his day, in that he is the man of his epoch, of his moment--of the very latest moment. There is that in his personality which gives him the air of constantly pressing the electric button which puts him in relation with the civilized activities of the world. He was born man of the world as well as poet, with a sensitive response to his age and surroundings which has enabled him to touch the life of the day at many divergent points of contact. He owes to an equally rare endowment, to his talent for leading two entirely separate lives, his success in maintaining his social life free from the influences of his career as an active business man. The broker is a separate and distinct person from the writer and poet. The two, it is true, meet as one, on friendly terms, on the street or at the club. But the man of Wall Street is entertained with scant courtesy within the four walls of the poet’s house.

Once within these, Mr. Stedman’s true life begins. It is an ardent, productive, intellectual life, only to be intruded upon with impunity by the insistent demands of his social instincts. Mr. Stedman has the genius of good-fellowship. His delight in men is only second to his delight in books. How he has found time for the dispensing of his numerous duties as host and friend is a matter of calculation which makes the arithmetic of other people’s lives seem curiously at fault. He has always possessed this talent for forcing time to give him twice its measure. That expensive mode of illumination known as burning the candle at both ends would probably be found to be the true explanation.

I have said that Mr. Stedman’s town house could not be characterized as rich in picturesque external adjuncts. The street in which it is situated--West Fifty-fourth--is of a piece with the prevailing character of New York domestic architecture. It is a long stretch of brown-stone houses, ranged in line, like a regiment of soldiers turned into stone. But the impassive chocolate features, like some mask worn by a fairy princess, conceal a most enchanting interior. Once within the front door, the charm of a surprise awaits one. Color, warmth, and grace greet the eye at the outset. If it be the poet’s gift to turn the prose of life into poetry, it is certain that the same magical art has here been employed to make household surroundings minister to the æsthetic sense. There is a pervading harmony of tone and tints throughout the house, the rich draperies, the soft-toned carpets, and the dusk of the tempered daylight, are skillfully used as an effective background to bring into relief the pictures, the works of art, and the rare bits of bric-à-brac. One is made sensible, by means of a number of clever devices, that in this home the arts and not the upholstery are called upon to do the honors. These admirable results are due almost entirely to the taste and skill of Mrs. Stedman, who possesses an artist’s instinct for grouping and effect. She has also the keen scent and the patience of the ardent collector. A tour of the house is a passing in review of her triumphs, of trophies won at sales, bits picked up in foreign travel, a purchase now and then of some choice collection, either of glass or china, or prints and etchings. Among the purchases has been that of a large and beautiful collection of Venetian glass, whose delicate grace and iridescent glow make the lower rooms a little museum for the connoisseur. But more beautiful even than the glass is the gleam of color from the admirable pictures which adorn the walls. Mr. Stedman is evidently a believer in the doctrine that there is health in the rivalry of the arts. His pictures look out from their frames at his books, as if to bid them defiance. The former are of an order of excellence to make even a literary critic speak well of them; for Mr. Stedman has a passion for pictures which he has taken the pains to train into a taste. He was a familiar figure, a few years ago, at the Academy of Design receptions on press-night. He was certain to be found opposite one of the best water-colors or oil-paintings of the Exhibition, into the frame of which, a few minutes later, his card would be slipped, on which the magic word “Sold” was to be read. It was in this way that some charming creations of Wyant, of Church, and other of our best artists, were purchased. Perhaps the pearl of his collection is Winslow Homer’s “Voice from the Cliffs,” the strongest figure-picture this artist has yet produced. The walls divide their spaces between such works of art and a numerous and interesting collection of gifts and souvenirs from the poet’s artist and literary friends. Among these is a sketch in oil of Miss Fletcher, the author of “Kismet,” by her stepfather, Eugene Benson; a bronze bas-relief of Bayard Taylor, who was an intimate friend of Mr. Stedman’s; and a companion relief of the latter poet, hanging side by side with that of his friend as if lovingly to emphasize their companionship.

The usual parallelogram of the New York parlor is broken, by the pleasantly irregular shape of the rooms, into a series of unexpected openings, turnings and corners. At the most distant end, beyond the square drawing-room, the perspective is defined by the rich tones of a long stretch of stained glass. The figures are neither those of nymph nor satyr, nor yet of the æsthetic young damsel in amber garments whom Burne-Jones and William Morris would have us accept as the successor of these. Here sit two strangely familiar-looking stolid Dutchmen in colonial dress, puffing their pipes in an old-time kitchen. They are Peter Stuyvesant and Govert Loockermans, in the act of being waited upon by “goede-vrouw Maria, ... bustling at her best to spread the New Year’s table.” Lest the gazer might be in need of an introduction to these three jovial creations of the poet’s fancy, there are lines of the poem intertwined with the holly which serves as a decorative adjunct. No more fitting entrance could have been chosen to the Stedman dining-room than this. If there was no other company, there was always the extra plate and an empty chair awaiting the coming guest. It has pleased the humor of Boston to lance its arrows of wit at New York for the latter’s pretensions to establishing literary circles and coteries. When literary Boston was invited to the Stedmans to dinner, these satirical arrows seemed suddenly to lose their edge. During the four or five years that Mr. and Mrs. Stedman occupied their charming house, New York had as distinctly a literary center as either Paris or London. On Sunday evenings, the evenings at home, there was such a varied assemblage of guests as only a metropolis can bring together. Not only authors and artists, critics and professional men, but fashion and society, found their way there. At the weekly dinners were to be met the distinguished foreigner, the latest successful novelist or young poet, and the wittiest and the most beautiful women. As if in humorous mockery of the difficulties attendant upon literary success and recognition, the dining-room in its size and seating capacity might not inaptly be likened to that Oriental figure of speech by which the rich found heaven so impossible of access. The smallness of the room only served, however, like certain chemical apparatus, to condense and liberate the brilliant conversational gases. If the poet were in his most gracious mood, the more favored guests, after dinner, might be allowed a glimpse of the library. Books were scattered so profusely over the house, that each room might easily have been mistaken for one. But in a large square room at the top of the house is the library proper--workshop and study together. This building his poet’s nest under the eaves of his own cornice is the one evidence of the recluse in Stedman’s character. When he is about to pluck his own plumage that his fledglings may be covered, he turns his back on the world. All the paraphernalia of his toil are about him. The evidences of the range and the extent of his reading and scholarship are to be found in taking down some of the volumes on the shelves. Here are the Greek classics, in the original, with loose sheets among the pages, where are translations of Theocritus or Bion, done into finished English verse. Mr. Stedman’s proficiency in Doric Greek is matched by his familiarity with the modern French classics, whose lightness of touch and airy grace he has caught in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” “Toujours Amour,” and “Jean Prouvaire’s Song.” With a delicate sense of fitness, the dainty verse of Coppée, Béranger, Théodore de Banville, the sonnets of Victor Hugo, and, indeed, his whole collection of the French poets, is bound in exquisite vellum or morocco. Among these volumes the poet’s own works appear in several rare and beautiful editions. There are the “Songs and Ballads,” issued by the Bookfellows Club, the essay on Edgar Allan Poe in vellum (the first so bound in America), and other beautifully illustrated and printed copies of his poems. The shelves and tables are laden with a wealth of literary treasure. But there is one volume one holds with a truly reverent delight. It is Mrs. Browning’s own copy of “Casa Guidi Windows,” with interlineations and corrections. It was the gift of the poetess to Mrs. Kinney, Stedman’s mother, who was among Mrs. Browning’s intimate friends. “How John Brown took Harper’s Ferry,” it is pleasant to learn, was an especial favorite with the great songstress.

Since the reversal of fortune which overwhelmed Mr. Stedman five years ago, this charming home has been temporarily leased. The family, however, were altogether fortunate in securing Bayard Taylor’s old home in East Thirtieth Street, during an absence in Europe of the latter’s wife and daughter. Here the conditions surrounding Stedman’s home life have been necessarily changed. The arduous literary labor attendant on the publishing of his recently completed volume on the “Poets of America,” which completes the series of contemporaneous English and American poets, together with his work on the “Library of American Literature” (of which he and Miss Hutchinson are the joint editors), the writing of magazine articles, poems and critiques, and the increased cares of his business struggles, make him too hard-worked a man to be available for the lighter social pleasures. The Sunday evenings are, however, still maintained, as his one leisure hour, and the hospitality is as generous as the present modest resources of the household will permit. Mr. Stedman’s early career, and the native toughness of fibre which has enabled him to fight a winning battle against tremendous odds during his whole life, furnished him with the fortitude and endurance with which he met his recent calamity. The heroic element is a dominant note in his character. At the very outset of his career he gave proof of the stuff that was in him. Entering Yale College in 1849, and suspended in ’53 for certain boyish irregularities, the man in him was born in a day. At nineteen he went into journalism, married at twenty, and in another year was an editor and a father. Ten years later, after service in all the grades of newspaper life, the same energy of decision marked his next departure. He gave up journalism, and went into active business in Wall Street that he might have time for more independent, imaginative writing. The bread-winning was so successful that in another ten years he had gained a competence, and was about to retire from business, to devote himself entirely to literary pursuits. He now returns to the struggle with fortune with the old unworn, undaunted patience. He has been sustained in the vicissitudes of his career by the cheering companionship of his wife. Ever in sympathy with her husband’s work and ambitions, Mrs. Stedman has possessed the gift of adaptability which has enabled her to meet with befitting ease and dignity the varying fortunes which have befallen them. In the earlier nomadic days she was the Blanche, who, with the poet, rambled through the “faery realm” of Bohemia. The “little King Arthur” is a grown man now, his father’s co-worker and devoted aid. The king has abdicated in favor of a tiny princess, who rules the household with her baby ways. This is another Laura, _ætat_ four, who, with her mother, Mrs. Frederick Stedman, completes the family circle. It needs the reiterated calls for grandpa and grandma to impress one with the reality of the fact that this still youthful-looking couple are not masquerading in the parts. Mr. Stedman, in spite of his grayish beard and mustache, is a singularly young-looking man for his years. He is slight, with slender figure and delicate features. His motions and gestures are full of impulse and energy. He has the bearing of a man who has measured his strength with the world. The delicate refinement and finish of his work, as well as its power and vigor, are foreshadowed in his _personnel_. His manner is an epitome of his literary style. His face has the charm which comes from high-bred features molded into the highest form of expression--that of intellectual energy infused with a deep and keen sympathetic quality. Something of this facial charm he inherits from his mother, now Mrs. Kinney. As the lovely and brilliant wife of the Hon. William B. Kinney, when the latter was American Minister at the Court of Turin, this gifted lady won a European reputation for the sparkling radiance of her beauty.

As a talker Mr. Stedman possesses the first and highest of qualities--that of spontaneity. The thought leaps at a bound into expression. So rapid is the flow of ideas, and so fluent its delivery, that one thought sometimes trips on the heels of the next. His talk, in its range, its variety, and the multiplicity of subjects touched upon, even more, perhaps, than his work, is an unconscious betrayal of his many-sided life. The critic, the poet, the man of business and the man of the world, the lover of nature, and the keen observer of the social machinery of life, each by turn takes the ascendant. The whole, woven together by a brilliant tissue of short, epigrammatic, trenchant sentences, abounding in good things one longs to remember and quote, forms a most picturesque and dazzling ensemble. Added to the brilliancy, there is a genial glow of humor, and such an ardor and enthusiasm in his capacity for admiration, as complete Mr. Stedman’s equipment as a man and a conversationalist. He would not be a poet did he not see his fellow-man aureoled with a halo. His natural attitude toward life and men is an almost boyish belief and delight in their being admirable. It is only on discovering they are otherwise that the critic appears to soften the disappointment by the rigors of analysis. Stedman is by nature an enthusiast. He owes it to his training that he is a critic. As an enthusiast he has the fervor, the intensity, the exaltation, which belong to the believer and the lover of all things true and good and beautiful. He is as generous as he is ardent, and his gift of praising is not to be counted as among the least of his qualities. But the critic comes in to temper the ardor, to weigh the value, and to test the capacity. And thus it is found that there are two men in Mr. Stedman, one of whom appears to be perpetually in pursuit of the other, and never quite to overtake him.

If poets are born and not made this side of heaven, so are sportsmen. In Stedman’s case the two appeared in one, to prove the duality possible. Summer after summer, in the hard-won vacations, the two have sailed the inland lakes and fished in the trout streams together; the fisherman oblivious of all else save the movements of that most animate of inanimate insects--the angler’s fly; the poet equally absorbed in quite another order of motion--that of nature’s play. The range of Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance among backwoodsmen and seafaring men is in proportion to the extent of his journeyings. “There are at least a hundred men with whom I am intimate who don’t dream I have ever written a line,” I once overheard him say in the midst of a story he was telling of the drolleries of some forest guide who was among his “intimates.” This talent for companionship with classes of men removed from his own social orbit has given Stedman that breadth of sympathy and that sure vision in the fields of observation which makes his critical work so unusual. He knows men as a naturalist knows the kingdom of animal life. He can thus analyze and classify, not only the writer, but the man, for he holds the key to a right comprehension of character by virtue of his own plastic sensibility. His delight in getting near to men who are at polaric distances from him socially, makes him impatient of those whom so-called culture has removed to Alpine heights from which to view their fellow-beings. “There’s so and so,” he once said, in speaking of a second-rate poet whose verses were æsthetic sighs to the south wind and the daffodil; “he thinks of nothing but rhyming love and dove. I wonder what he would make out of a man--a friend of mine, for instance, in the Maine woods, a creature as big as Hercules, with a heart to match his strength. I should like to see what he would make of him.” Stedman’s own personality is infused with a raciness and a warmth peculiar to men who have the power of freshening their own lives by that system of wholesome renewal called human contact. Much of the secret of his social charm comes from his delight in, and ready companionship with, all conditions of men.

In his present study in the little house in Thirtieth Street there are several photographs, scattered about the room, of a quaint and picturesque seaside house. This is the summer home on the island of New Castle, N. H. It has a tower which seems to have been built over the crest of the waves, and a _loggia_ as wide and spacious as a Florentine palace. No one but a sailor or a sea-lover could have chosen such a spot. To Mr. Stedman, New Castle was a veritable _trouvaille_. It fulfilled every condition of pleasure and comfort requisite in a summer home. The sea was at his doors, and the elms and fields ran down to meet it. The little island, with its quaint old fishing village, its old colonial houses, its lanes and its lovely coast line, is the most picturesque of microcosms ever set afloat. There is no railroad nearer than three miles, and to reach it one crosses as many bridges as span a Venetian canal. Mr. Stedman himself, the poet John Albee, Barrett Wendell (one of Boston’s clever young authors), Prof. Bartlett, of Harvard, and Jacob Wendell’s family, make a charming and intimate little coterie. At Kelp Rock Mr. Stedman is only the poet, the genial host, and the _bon camarade_. Business cares and thoughts are relegated to the world whence they came. The most approachable of authors at all times, at New Castle, with the sea and the sunshine to keep his idleness in countenance, he seems fairly to irradiate companionship. His idleness is of an order to set the rest of the world a lesson in activity. In his play he is even more intense, if possible, than in his work. The play consists of five or six hard-writing hours in his tower during the morning. This is followed by an afternoon of sailing, or fishing, or walking, any one of which forms of pleasure is planned with a view to hard labor of some kind, some strenuous demand on the physical forces. The evening finds him and his family, with some of the group mentioned and often with stray visitors from the outer world, before the drift-wood fire in the low-raftered hall, where talk and good-cheer complete the day.

With such abundantly vigorous energies, Mr. Stedman’s quarter of a century of productiveness is only an earnest of his future work. He has doubly pledged himself hereafter to the performance of strictly original creative writing. As critic he has completed the work which he set himself to do--that of rounding the circle of contemporaneous poetry. In giving to the world such masterpieces of critical writing as the “Victorian Poets” and “Poets of America,” he owes it to his own muse to prove that the critic leaves the poet free.

ANNA BOWMAN DODD.

[Since this sketch was written (November, 1885) Mr. Stedman has sold his Fifty-fourth Street house, leased a house in East Twenty-sixth Street, bought one in West Seventy-eighth Street (1890) and sold it in 1895, at the same time that he disposed of “Kelp Rock.” His permanent home is now at Lawrence Park--“Casa Laura,” named after his wife and granddaughter--although he spent last winter in apartments in New York. His most recent works are his Victorian and American Anthologies and “Mater Coronata,” the poem written for the Bicentennial Celebration of Yale University.--EDITORS.]

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

IN NEW YORK

Among those New York men-of-letters who are “only that and nothing more”--who are known simply as writers, and not as politicians or public speakers, like George William Curtis in the older, or Theodore Roosevelt in the younger, generation,--there is no figure more familiar than that of Richard Henry Stoddard. The poet’s whole life since he was ten years old has been passed on Manhattan Island; no feet, save those of some veteran patrolman, “have worn its stony highways” more persistently than his. The city has undergone many changes since the boy landed at the Battery one Sunday morning over half a century ago, and with his mother and her husband wandered up Broadway, but his memory keeps the record of them all.

It is not only New York that has changed its aspect in the hurrying years; the times have changed, too, and the conditions of life are not so hard for this adopted New Yorker as they were in his boyhood and early youth. Perhaps he is not yet in a position to display the motto of the Stoddards, “Post Nubes Lux,” which he once declared would be his when the darkness that beclouded his fortunes had given place to light. But his labors to-day, however irksome and monotonous, are not altogether uncongenial. He is not yet free from the necessity of doing a certain amount of literary hackwork (readers of _The Mail and Express_ are selfish enough to hope he never will be); but he has sympathetic occupation and surroundings, leisure to write verse at other than the “mournful midnight hours,” a sure demand for all he writes (a condition not last or least in the tale of a literary worker’s temporal blessings), and, above all, that sense of having won a place in the hearts of his fellow-men which should be even more gratifying to a poet than the assurance of a niche in the Temple of Fame. Such further gratification as this last assurance may give, Mr. Stoddard certainly does not lack.

The story of the poet’s life has been told so often, and in volumes so readily accessible to all (the best account is to be found in “Poets’ Homes,” Boston, D. Lothrop Co.), that I do not need to rehearse it in detail. Like the lives of most poets, especially the poets of America, it has not been an eventful one, if by eventful we imply those marvelous achievements or startling changes of fortune that dazzle the world. Yet what more marvelous than that the delicate flower of poetry should be planted in a soil formed by the fusion of such rugged elements as a New England sailing-master and the daughter of a “horse-swapping” deacon? Or that, once planted there, it should have not only survived, but grown and thriven amid the rigors of such an early experience as Stoddard’s? These surely _are_ marvels, but marvels to which mankind was passably accustomed even before Shelley told us that the poet teaches in song only what he has learned in suffering.

Mr. Stoddard was born July 2, 1825, at Hingham, Mass., the home of his ancestors since 1638. The Stoddards were seafaring folk; the poet’s father being one of those hardy New England captains whose bones now whiten the mid-sea sands. It was a step-father that brought Richard and his mother to New York; and here the boy had his only schooling and an unpromising practical experience of life. The reading and writing of poetry kept his soul alive during these dark days, and his achievements did not fail of appreciation. Poe paid him the back-handed compliment of pronouncing a poem he had written too good to be original; while N. P. Willis more directly encouraged him to write. So also did Park Benjamin, Lewis Gaylord Clarke, and Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland. But the first friendship formed with a writer of his own age resulted from a call on Bayard Taylor--already the author of “Views Afoot” and one of the editors of the _Tribune_,--who had accepted some verses of the poet’s, and who was, later on, the means of making him acquainted with another young poet and critic--the third member of a famous literary trio. This was Edmund Clarence Stedman, a younger man than the other two by eight years or so; then (in 1859) but twenty-six years old, though he had already made himself conspicuous by “The Diamond Wedding” and “How Old Brown took Harper’s Ferry.” With Taylor Mr. Stoddard’s intimacy continued till the death of that distinguished traveler, journalist, poet, translator and Minister to Germany; with Stedman his friendship is still unbroken. He has had many friends, and many are left to him, but none have stood closer than these in the little circle in which he is known as “Dick.”

When Mr. Stoddard met the woman he was to marry, he had already published, or rather printed (at his own expense), a volume called “Footprints.” The poems were pleasantly noticed in two or three magazines, and one copy of them was sold. As there was no call for the remainder of the edition, it was committed to the flames. Encouraged by this success, the young poet saw no impropriety in becoming the husband of a young lady of Mattapoisett. Elizabeth Barstow was her name, and the tie that bound them was a common love of books. It was at twenty-five (some years before his first meeting with Taylor or Stedman) that the penniless poet and the ship-builder’s daughter were made one by the Rev. Ralph Hoyt, an amiable clergyman of this city, “who found it easier to marry the poet than to praise his verses.”