of Carlyle. This translation will doubtless come to be regarded as Bayard Taylor's foremost achievement. It was largely instrumental in obtaining for him the appointment, in 1878, as Minister to Germany, whither he sailed thoroughly worn out with congratulations and flowers and champagne. Excessively hard work had taken its revenges, and he was never to enjoy the great future that the new life in Germany held out to him-he was never, for one thing, to carry out his fond plan of writing the biography of Goethe, a task for which he was well fitted. He died soon after reaching Germany.

His death is the symbol of his life. His whole career, his poetical achievement most of all, was an approximation to high distinction that was frustrated through both outer and inner forces. He was cast in a large, a Goethean mould; he aspired highly and in many directions, seeking self-realization, but he lacked-outwardly-freedom from worldly troubles and-inwardly-Goethe's ideal of Entsagung. His buoyant enthusiasm, his capacity for hard work, tended to deploy in the void because of his lack of concentration and true harmony. He sought what he liked to call "cosmical experience," but in his eagerness he lost himself.

The consequences are plainly visible in his poetry. It is the poetry of a man who has "aspired" rather than "attained.” It is, to begin with, dangerously versatile. Aside from his varied experiments in prose, Taylor wrote lyrics, pastorals, idylls, odes, dramatic lyrics, lyrical dramas, translations, poems in German, poems in every mood and every metre, poems consciously or unconsciously imitative of a host of poets (he had a remarkable but ill-controlled verbal memory), poems on themes Oriental, Greek, Norse, American from coast to coast, poems classical, sentimental, romantic, realistic, poems of love, of nature, of art. In most of this work he was acceptable to his age; in very little is he acceptable to a later time. His poetry, again, is diffuse, as the poetry of a fifteen-hour-a-day journalist is likely to be. Despite a certain buoyant resonance, a resonance, however, rarely full enough; despite a frequent delicacy of perception and expression; despite a sense of melody that seldom fails; despite a simplicity of method and phrasing that betokens sincerity;-despite all these merits and others, his poetry attracts mildly because it is diffuse, and it is diffuse,

R. H. Stoddard

43

fundamentally, because it is shallow. In his ode on Goethe, written three years before Taylor died, conscious of his "lighter muscle" he asks with an undercurrent of sadness:

How charge with music powers so vast and free,
Save one be great as he?

Taylor, with all his aspiration and energy, was ill-educated, ill-disciplined, emotionally and intellectually unsymmetrical. He was too fond of his narghile and of melon-seeds brought all the way from Nijni-Novgorod. He learned modern Greek before he learned ancient Greek. His few good poems, such as the popular Bedouin Song, John Reed, The Quaker Widow, Euphorion, are far too few. He had latent powers, if not supreme power, but it was misdirected. To his contemporaries, he was a distinguished poet as well as traveller; to us he is an interesting personality.'

While Shelley was Taylor's poet, Richard Henry Stoddard found in Keats, as he says in a verse tribute, the Master of his soul. As a boy, he "lived for Song," and throughout his life, in surroundings essentially alien and "an age too late," he dedicated himself to poetry with a happiness and dignity, and with a degree of success in his own day, quite out of proportion to the merit of his achievement.

A New Englander like Aldrich and Stedman, he was born in the same year with Taylor (1825), in Hingham, Massachusetts, where his ancestors were hardy sailors. In his Recollections he tells of his grandfather's house by the sea, where his mother sang melancholy hymns at nightfall, and of the ancient church and cemetery that gave tone to the family life-"dying seemed to be the most laudable industry of the time." His father being lost at sea, the pale widow and her delicate boy removed to Boston, and later to New York, where she married again. After a few years of schooling, Richard was set to work, first as errand-boy, as shop-boy, and as legal copyist, spending part of his petty earnings in the purchase of the English poets, -later as blacksmith and as moulder in an iron foundry. On the threshold of manhood, he worked in the foundry for three hard years, with ever one consolation: "the day would end, night would come, and then I could write poetry." In 1849 he I For Taylor's travels see Book III, Chap. xv.

published his first volume, Footprints, of which he tells us one copy was sold before the edition was given to the flames. Leaving the foundry, he supported himself, like Aldrich and Taylor, as a journalist, becoming in time literary editor of the World and Mail and Express. Meanwhile he had married Elizabeth Barstow, of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, "one of those irrepressible girls," says her husband, "who are sometimes born in staid Puritan families," who later attained some distinction as novelist and poetess ("for she became," says Stoddard, "the best writer of blank verse of any woman in America"), and had secured a clerkship in the New York Custom House which he held till 1870. He lived in New York through many of its varied decades till 1903, a prominent figure in the literary life, a close friend of Taylor, Stedman, and the others. In his somewhat austere devotion to beauty he was far removed from the Bohemians; he states specifically with regard to Pfaff's “I never went inside the place." His life lacked the advantages— and disadvantages of much travel, though, like his friends, he poetized the magical Orient (in The Book of the East). His personality was that of a somewhat angular individualist, outspoken, vigorous, inflexible in his support of the right. He was a product of Puritan New England as well as a disciple of Keats.

New England didacticism, however, is all but absent from his poetry. Here and there is a trace, now and then a whole poem, such as On the Town, a harlot's plea for justice, which has also, it is true, a modernly realistic aspect; but otherwise the world of sin that Hawthorne loved to brood over and the New England poets sought to improve, is far away. He began his career as a palpable imitator of Keats's sensuousness, magical epithet, and praise of beauty. His Autumn is little more than a frank copy of the ode by Keats. Other early poems are full of echoes of Milton and Wordsworth. Though he soon passed into his own manner, which was never highly individualized, one can discern his masters everywhere. Some of his best narrative poetry, such as Leonatus and Imogen, is agreeably reminiscent of Keats. His blank verse, as in the tribute to Bryant, The Dead Master, often has power and accomplished variety, but it is not individual. Indeed, it may not be unfair to say that Stoddard was mainly a passionate lover of poetry,

more passionate than the others of the New York group, and not so much a natural creator of it. Creation was, to him, an inevitable accident; enjoyment of others' poetry was a leading function of life. Most of his work is the expression of commonplace sentiment and tame emotion. Its merit is melody and deftness, in phrasing, in rhyming, in imagery. Consequently his best work is doubtless that which the public of his day knew him by, his lyrics, as in the pleasant volume Songs of Summer, diverse snatches of song without attachment to time or place, also without much meaning or purpose, but so well fashioned that one can understand why Stoddard was once a prominent poet. His Lincoln, an Horation Ode, however, still has power.1

If Bayard Taylor's handicap was travel, and Stoddard's uncongenial labour, Stedman's was business. Though born of an old New England family in Hartford, Connecticut, and educated at Yale, he immersed himself so thoroughly in Wall Street that he belongs to New York. Probably he owed less to his father, lumber merchant and devout Christian, than to his mother, Elizabeth Dodge Stedman, a poetess notable chiefly for her ardent emotional life. Of her son she wrote: "As soon as he could speak he lisped in rhyme, and as soon as he could write, which was at the age of six years, he gave shape and measure to his dreams. He was a sedate and solemn baby." In college, as the youngest in a class of more than one hundred, he developed his infantile devotion to poetry, winning prizes, but losing his sedateness and solemnity. According to the Faculty Records, "Stedman, Soph. was dismissed for having been present at a 'dance house' near the head of the wharf," this being apparently his culminating indiscretion. As soon as he realized his error, he said in applying for his degree years later, he "resolved to obtain a higher culture"; and, taking himself in hand, he transformed his raw, strong-willed, highspirited youth to an attractive type of energetic, idealistic manhood. In 1855 he became a broker in New York. Associating himself with Greeley's Tribune, he presently found himself the popular author of three lively, rather journalistic poems— The Diamond Wedding, The Ballad of Lager Bier, and How Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry. In 1860, the year of his first volume, Poems, Lyric and Idyllic, he joined the staff of the See also Book III, Chap. II.

World. For this newspaper he went to the front, in 1861, as war correspondent. A man of thirty years when the war was over, he turned to the life of Wall Street, becoming, six years later, an active member of the Stock Exchange. He held his seat till 1900. "There was no such market for literary wares at that day as has since arisen, and I needed to be independent in order to write and study." Perhaps so; it was a bitter problem to solve; yet there is little question that Stedman's choice limited his literary achievement in quality as well as quantity. To be sure, he could not have foreseen the financial misfortunes that beset his way to independence. At the same time, he had a talent for business that might better not have been developed, since it flourished at the expense of a rarer talent that he possessed for literary criticism and for poetry. With more knowledge and the discipline of hard thinking, his literary criticism, at its best in Poets of America (1885), might have contributed much to a department of our literature that is all too weak. He had high, if not the highest, seriousness, without the admixture of sentimentalism that often accompanies ideality and range.

His distinction as a literary critic and as an editor of anthologies and other works seems to have given rise to an unwarranted presumption in his favour as a poet. If he had a voice of his own, he spoke in uncertain tones; in the main his poetry is an echo of the romantic poets and Tennyson. He seems to have written frequently in cold blood; at least he told Winter that "it was his custom to select with care the particular form of verse that he designed to use, and sometimes to invent the rhymes and write them at the ends of the lines which they were to terminate,—thus making a skeleton of a poem, as a ground-work on which to build." Aside from his war verse1 he wrote poems on New York themes, the best of which is Pan in Wall Street; on New England life and ideals, including the charming lines entitled The Doorstep; on The Carib Sea; on special occasions, including poems on Greeley and several of the New England poets; and on various other themes, notably in The Hand of Lincoln and Stanzas for Music. In most of this work-limited in quantity to a single volume-Stedman's muse is decorously uplifted rather than elevated of its own I See Book III, Chap. II.