It was in the order of things, and no cause for blame, that, after this town passed from the provincial stage, there was so long a period when it had to be, as De Quincey said of Oxford Street, a stony-hearted mother to her bookmen and poets; that she had few posts for them and little of a market.  Even her colleges had not the means, if they had the will, to utilize their talents and acquirements.  We do owe to her newspapers and magazines, and now and then to the traditional liking of Uncle Sam for his bookish offspring, that some of them did not fall by the way, even in that arid time succeeding the Civil War, when we learned that letters were foregone, not only inter arma, but for a long while afterward.  Those were the days when English went untaught, and when publishers were more afraid of poetry than they now are of verse.  Yet here is one who was able to live through it all, and now sees a changed condition, to the evolution of which he contributed his full share.  But he is no more a child of the past than of the present, nor need he repine like Cato, as one who has to account for himself to a new generation.  He is with us and of us, and in the working ranks, as ever.

For all this he began long enough ago to have his early poetry refused by Poe, because it was too good to be the work of an obscure stripling, and to have had Hawthorne for his sponsor and friend.  His youth showed again how much more inborn tendency has to do with one’s life than any external forces—­such as guardianship, means, and what we call education.  The thrush takes to the bough, wheresoever hatched and fledged.  Many waters cannot quench genius, neither can the floods drown it.  The story of Dickens’s boyhood, as told by himself, is not more pathetic—­nor is its outcome more beautiful—­than what we know of our guest’s experiences—­his orphanage, his few years’ meagre schooling, his work as a boy in all sorts of shifting occupations, the attempt to make a learned blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron-moulding, at which he worked on the East Side from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year.  As Dr. Griswold put it, he began to mould his thoughts into the symmetry of verse while he moulded the molten metal into shapes of grace.  Mr. Stoddard, however, says that a knowledge of foundries was not one of the learned Doctor’s strong points.  Yet the young artisan somehow got hold of books, and not only made poetry, but succeeded in showing it to such magnates as Park Benjamin and Willis.  The kindly Willis said that he had brains enough to make a reputation, but that “writing was hard work to do, and ill paid when done.”  But the youth was bound to take the road to Arcady.  He asked for nothing better than this ill-paid craft.  His passion for it, doubtless was strengthened by his physical toil and uncongenial surroundings.  For one I am not surprised that much of his early verse, which is still retained in his works, breathes the spirit of Keats, though where and how this strayed