V.

I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury

Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of

that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit

that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O’Connor, at the house

of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the

promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in

the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I

believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt

Whitman’s champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already

espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly

exploited by the poor lady of Bacon’s name, who died constant to it in an

insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as “the fat

peasant of Stratford,” and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a

measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then

full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful

breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered

round the first fires of autumn, O’Connor would lift his beautiful head

with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, “Friends, I feel a sense of

victory in the air.” He was not wrong; only the victory was for the

other aide.

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.