tal constitution. As to the latter, the system of control at Yale twenty-five years ago was in a state of transition from the old rule, more police-like than paternal, to the present liberal plan of confiding in students as men and gentlemen.

Young Stedman fell under its censure, for no very grave error, and quitted college without taking his degree. But Yale has never regarded her errant sons with a step-mother's glance. When honorable toil in a literary career had brought the fulfillment of his earlier promise, the University gladly claimed Stedman again, and enrolled him among its alumni of the year 1853, with the degree of Master of Arts.

Still urged by his precocity and ardor of disposition to press early into the battle of life, Stedman put his talent to practical use by undertaking the management of a newspaper at Norwich, at the age of nineteen. A year later, while the law yet declined to regard him as his own master, he married one of the daughters of his native State-and whatever opinions may be held of its poets, there are no better wives than those of Connecticut-and became the owner of the Winsted Herald, published in Litchfield County. The time was more stimulating to editorial energy and originality than the place. The last of the hollow pacts between freedom and slavery had lately been signed, and most of the independent editors of the north, following the lead of the great New York anti-slavery journal, were busy in vociferously railing the seal off the bond. The politics of the paper were Whig, but its manager belonged to the coming race of journalists, and did not understand Conservatism to imply the defense of wrong. The spirit and ingenuity with which Stedman conducted his journal, and the novelty of the correct literary tone which he took pains to impart to it, earned him a high reputation throughout the State. But an intellect so clear and a taste so refined as his could not long be contented with the crookedness and wrangles of journalism. The crambe recocta of its matter must have disgusted a palate naturally delicate, and skilled already in rare flavors. The pursuit was so exacting and irksome as to give little leisure for higher cultivation. He hesitated to sink the man of letters in the man of a paper, conscious that the two careers are utterly distinct, and can only be brought into one through some rarely

fortunate concurrence of circumstances. His ambition, acting upon the conviction that his powers were devoted to unsuitable work, wasted in a narrow circle, drew him at length to New York. The best social connections, such as those which Stedman enjoyed, unserviceable enough to a young man at the outset in any hard-working profession, can give no aid whatever to the beginner in a literary career. Until he has shown what he is, readers care nothing at all who he is. The field was crowded with aspirants like himself, many of them of more practical ability and larger experience in the ways of town life. His finer qualities were quite as likely at first to tell against him as in his favor in the competition. He was to go through the hard discipline of poverty and hope deferred, that steels the character if strong, and widens the sympathies, if true. How strong and how true these were in his case the result has clearly testified. There are two of his poems, written about this time that are filled with the memory and the feeling of his early struggles. One of these describes, with a fanciful grace and careless dash that yet betray in some touches defiant reaction from bitter sorrow, "the pride and pain that dwell so low in valleys of Bohemia." For that fairy kingdom did once upon a time descend into our very streets, and hold here a brief historic existence. A few of the noble and generous spirits owed allegiance to it-some of their shadowy figures are discernible in the poem-of whom a part carried only its light and grace into the real world where they have made a name, and others went down through folly and evil into early ruin. It could be at best but a pale copy of that joyous Parisian abandon which served as an excuse for the loosest recklessness of life. The free, roving, loving, homelessness of the Provençal minstrel-the “dance and song and sunburnt mirth" of that first genuine Bohemian, are hardly reconcilable even in Paris with debts and duns, and the decent restraints of modern ways. When absinthe and the Quartier Latin were represented by lager in the Bowery, and flâneur got translated loafer, the glamour soon faded. But whatever of romance youth, and heart, and wit could cast over such heedless days, lives again at its best in this little poem of Stedman's. The other poem, "Flood-tide," bearing the date of 1857, opens with a fine lyric burst, catching something of the lift of

"Locksley Hall," though really with a more human tone, and more definite picturesque point. It is a poem to Action, alive with aspiration, aching with eagerness, and falling slowly back through natural cadences to quiescence in duty, and the abnegation of content with the worth of common deeds. We can hardly err in imagining that much of the author's personal history during this period is to be read in these stanzas.

Twenty years ago the reading public of New York were demanding a new poet, for the credit of letters in the metropolis. The scrannel-pipe of Willis and Morris gave thin and harsh echos to the sounding notes; long silent or seldom heard, of Bryant and Halleck. Longfellow's strain, sweet if not over full, with Whittier's and Lowell's vigorous verse, had preserved the tradition of American poetry, which the sister city affected to guard as her own. A kindly welcome was ready for the three or four youthful poets, who, with Stedman among them, modestly came forward to fill the vacant ranks. The names of Stoddard, Taylor, Aldrich, Boker and Timrod will recall to many of this generation still young, the early promise of those days, since hobly fulfilled. Naturally enough, the influence of Tennyson, then in his prime, was over them all in some degree. Some of Stedman's first published verses, such as "Heliotrope," "The Freshet," "The Ordeal by Fire," though too original to be imitations, unconsciously show traits of the model. In 1859, three poems appeared in the Tribune, which might have have been written by as many different authors, indicating respectively as they do no common powers of light satire, genial fancy, and clear description, deepened by a certain grim humor. These were "The Diamond Wedding," "The Ballad of Lager Bier," and "Old John Brown." They gained the public attention, and led to the printing, in the following year, of his first volume of Lyric and Idyllic poems. There was enough in it for reputation, but not for the promise of gain, and Stedman, with daily task-work for others to perform, returned to journalism. There is a magnetism in type-metal from which those who have once yielded to it can never escape. He labored steadily and faithfully for some years, at first as a contributor to The New York World, and afterwards as its correspondent at Washington through the first campaigns of the war. There were no

better newspaper letters written during the rebellion than those sent by him from the head-quarters of McDowell and McClellan. His quick observation, generalizing power, vivid color in words, and concise aptness prove how essential the poetic faculty is to that most modern product of the press, that historical painter of the instant for the million, the war-correspondent. England gave us the model, and Stedman was one of the few whose near approach to that original ensured the wide circulation of their letters, both here and in Europe.

Towards the close of the war Stedman exchanged arms for the gown, passing a few months of official life in confidential relations with the Attorney General of the government, Edward Bates, a man whose sagacity was quick to distinguish from the adventurers crowding Washington an aid. who could understand and value the solid qualities that had won him respect and love throughout a long career at St. Louis. In 1864 Stedman returned to New York. Probably the fatiguing monotony of employment on the daily press seemed tame to him after the exciting life of camps. Whether to escape its demands upon his time, or in the hope of more rapid fortune, he chose the pursuit which seems to those clear of its vortex the most stimulating and exacting of all-that of a stockbroker. But Stedman's slight organization is informed with an excess of nervous force. It may be that the tumult of the Exchange withdraws from it the due quantity of vitality to leave his faculties in a regulated state for calm, mental work. At any rate, he has found leisure and self-poise enough to devote diligent labor to study, poetry, and criticism. His published volumes since the war comprise Alice of Monmouth and other Poems, printed in 1864, and The Blameless Prince, which appeared five years later. Besides these, many separate poems have been composed in later years, among which are "The Heart of New England," a story of the truest feeling and simplest fidelity to nature, and an address in verse, entitled "Gettysburg," delivered in 1872, before the Society of the Army of the Potomac, at Cleveland. latest public appearance was at Dartmouth, where he delivered a poem, recently published in this Magazine, remarkable for its contrasted pictures of scholastic and active life, and its noble eulogy on the late Chief Justice. The volume of his collected works which has just issued from the

His

press of J. R. Osgood & Co., does not include the "Hebrew Pastorals," a series of ten careful idyllic studies upon biblical subjects, from Abraham to Ruth, written in blank verse. To these he has devoted his maturest powers, and those specimens of them which have been already published, give us reason to believe that they will add to the reputation he has already gained.

A fine instinct for unity and proportion limits Stedman to a range of simple themes, and dictates a careful and systematic treatment of them. His accurate construction of plan and faithful finish of detail are equally admirable. He never oversteps the modesty of nature through the morbid choice of a subject, or by strained effects in his manner of dealing with it. His poetic His poetic conception has borne no monsters, his contemplation of life avoids its distortions, and he leaves to coarser fancies the congenial work of peopling its dark places with shapes of sensuality and misery. It is not that his men and women are pale ideals, that fail of truth to humanity in doing and suffering. But it is by lifting them above the ordinary lot of man, through some attribute of force or goodness, not lowering them beneath it, that he makes them more interesting than the people we meet in the streets. He will not drag us back to the groveling instincts and blind violence that betray our lower origin, if modern theories are to be accepted, so long as the aspirations they cannot stifle may be caught and transfigured to prophetic images of light and purity. Nor does he lose the richest poetic material by thus shutting out the vague region from the chaos of which the half-human half-diabolic specters that haunt the chambers of the brain for so many modern poets are evoked. The natural sunshine and cloud suffice for his pencil, under which man now rejoices or sorrows, without descending to borrow either gleams or gloom from that formless kingdom out of which he may have emerged. Some quiet nook of scenery, or idyllic passage, or grave historic incident, or tender emotion attracts him, serving as the point from which the grace and harmony of life rather than its discord and wretchedness may be displayed. Stedman's technical execution has the firmness and precision which his true sense of relation would lead us to expect. The frame of his two larger pieces is carefully constructed, the interest in their gradually evolving char

acters continuous, and the incidents leading to their natural catastrophe well conceived and fitly linked together. Two or three fresh pictures of landscape in the "Blameless Prince" and all the highly finished stanzas in studied variety of measure marking points of rest between the passages of action in "Alice," are very charming. The skillful observance of relation between the parts and the whole is even more true to perfect form, if less evident on the surface, in the arrangement of the more elaborate ones among his minor poems. In "Summer Rain," for instance, and in the "Feast of Harvest," "The Songster," and the Dartmouth Ode, the subject is first firmly sketched, then expanded with ample and congruous illustrations through a wide range of associated thoughts, held. still close with the guiding idea, and concluded with a fullness of tone that leaves on the ear as in the mind, a satisfied sense of symmetry. The fruit of deep critical study appears in the selection of language, in strict keeping with the course of his theme--bold and rich where it rises, simple and clear in the level. movements. Epithets are sparingly and aptly used, and no redundancy or mere swell of periods disfigures the even fullness, crisp with delicate descriptive ripples. He has the secret too of pathetic tones, hushed to a passing sigh or a tender regret, without wasteful vehemence. Yet these can break into passionate lament, as in the last scenes of the "Prince.' There is one group of his minor poems in which Stedman displays a very peculiar power, blending pathos with solemnity, and quickening the vivid mental image with a spiritual thrill, which creates an effect of somber grandeur, breathing through such stanzas as "Spoken at Sea," "The Duke's Exequy," "The Assault by Night,” “The Old Admiral," with the sound of a mysterious voice from afar. In these, as in most of his later poems, particularly, the studied effect of measure deserves attention. Stedman's naturally correct ear rarely fails in suggesting the adjustment of the metrical movement of his lines to the burthen of their thought. His various experiments in the musical forms that minister to his art indicate patient research and practice. These have been carried to a still higher point by some among those of his contemporaries we have named, and similar labor should be less neglected than it has been by their younger imitators.