Romantic Life-Story of Poor Boy Who
Heard the Voice of the Muse in
an Iron Foundry.
Richard Henry Stoddard, who won fame as a poet, critic, and journalist,
fought his way upward through conditions that would have discouraged most
men. His parents were miserably poor and his father died while the boy was
still young. His mother was of a restless, wandering disposition, and when
Richard was ten years old she left her New England home and brought him to
New York. "Here," he says, "we landed at or near the Battery one bright
Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, and wandered up Broadway, which
was swarming with hogs."
His step-father's brother-in-law kept an oyster bar, and he at once put
the boy to work learning to open oysters, attending to customers, and
keeping the place clean. The work and the surroundings were rough, and
Stoddard was so manifestly unfitted for his work that he was finally taken
away from the bar and sent into the streets to sell matches. After a few
months of this he was placed in a cheap second-hand clothing store, but
here his earnings were not sufficient to satisfy his family, and though he
was of frail physique his mother apprenticed him to a blacksmith.
"I was put to work at once on the anvil," he says, "and before the day was
over my right hand was so blistered that I had to open its fingers with my
left hand, and detach them from the handle of the sledge hammer that I
wielded."
He was eighteen years old when he was sent to work in an iron foundry, and
he remained at this occupation several years, studying and writing
incessantly at night. One poem, "Ode on a Grecian Flute," was accepted by
the _Broadway Journal_, a little weekly edited by Edgar Allan Poe. Later
the originality of the poem was doubted. Stoddard went to assure Poe that
it was original. He found him asleep in an office chair. On being
awakened and told by Stoddard that the poem was original, Poe jumped up
and yelled:
"You lie! Get out before I throw you out."
Stoddard fled, and the poem was not published. The last glimpse he ever
had of Poe was one cold and stormy autumn day. Stoddard was hurrying along
Broadway, well sheltered by an umbrella, when he noticed Poe, thinly clad,
crouching against the side of a building in an attempt to find refuge from
the storm. Stoddard walked around the corner and paused. He wanted to go
back and offer Poe the shelter of his umbrella, but he did not dare. The
following summer Poe died in Baltimore. Afterward Stoddard wrote the first
genuinely fair and appreciative life of him.