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Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell
now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the
young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of 'Leaves of
Grass', and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already
met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given
hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.
Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can
be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a
friend's house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,
and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the
joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston,
the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary
life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his
ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from
Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young
evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press
could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for
its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington
correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these
days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the
Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,
and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many
more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with
another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing
in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of
it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that
he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.
But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been
all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock
Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature
and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which
seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the
faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar
and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we
can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.

But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him
an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many;
but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each
said how much he liked certain thing of the other's; I even seized my
advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in
my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not
think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem,
for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own
sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to
the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic
sense of fitness, "Forlorn," and I tried it first with the 'Atlantic
Monthly', which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a
former editor of 'Harper's Monthly', but he could not see his advantage
in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I
sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry
it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it
to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning
with the 'Fortnightly Review', sent it to him for me. It was promptly
returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a
poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I
heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I
offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to
America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of
Mr. Lucas's death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in
the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the
office of the 'Nation' newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr.
Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where
it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased
it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
misfortunes endeared it to its author.

But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and
with poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw
him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him,
as much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had
a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as
much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing
upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the
superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like
sitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avenged
if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up so
stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
votaries.

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there.
But what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she
has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and
novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar
fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a
time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.

I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out.
We sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they
set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I
bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the
time at least no

"----rumor of oppression or defeat,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,"

could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it.
I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then,
and for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of
that than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world
where there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven
for me as anything I could think of.

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial
pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors,
and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for
long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my
friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp
in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant young Irishman
who had dazzled us with his story of "The Diamond Lens," and frozen our
blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--"What was It"--a ghost that
could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and
risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it.
In that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction
of discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was
acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw
from a wound received in battle.




VI.

Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At
dinner (which we had at two o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
and he said of me to his wife: "Think of his having got Stillman's place!
We ought to put poison in his wine," and he told me of the wish the
painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin's work there in a book
of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.

The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over
the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book
he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
myself.

At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through
one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He
died in it, at last.

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two
charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
women.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. . . . .
Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust . . . . . . . . . . . .
Became gratefully strange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like. . . . . . . .
Charles Reade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it. . . . . .
Death of the joy that ought to come from work. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced. . . . . .
Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two . . . . . . . . . . .
Edward Everett Hale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it.. . . . .
Emerson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare . . . . . . . .
Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected . . . . . . . .
First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to. . . . . . . . . .
Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time . . . . . . . . . . .
Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand. . . . . . . .
Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love . . . . . . . . . . .
Heine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life. . . . . . . . .
I did not know, and I hated to ask.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I find this young man worthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be. . . . . . . . .
If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his. . . . . . . .
In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal . . . . . . .
Incredible in their insipidity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Industrial slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lincoln. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Love of freedom and the hope of justice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lowell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Man who had so much of the boy in him. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Men who took themselves so seriously as that need. . . . . . . . . . . .
Met with kindness, if not honor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps. . . . . . . . . .
Never paid in anything but hopes of paying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality. . . . . . .
Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission . . . . . . . . .
Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Remember the dinner-bell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seen through the wrong end of the telescope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stoddard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Things common to all, however peculiar in each . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thoreau. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Visited one of the great mills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness . . . . . .
Wit that tries its teeth upon everything . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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