singer came to study that most perfect and delicate of masters none but himself can tell.  The fact remains that he somehow, also, left his moulding and trusted to his pen.  To use his own words, he “set resolutely to work to learn the only trade for which he seemed fitted—­that of literature.”  From that time to this, a half century, he has clung to it.  Never in his worst seasons did he stop to think how the world treated him, or that he was entitled to special providences.  He accepted poverty or good-luck with an equal mind, content with the reward of being a reader, a writer, and, above all, a poet.  He managed not to loaf, and yet to invite his soul—­and his songs are evidence that the invitation was accepted.  If to labor is to pray, his industry has been a religion, for I doubt if there has been a day in all these fifty years when, unless disabled bodily, he has not worked at his trade.

We all know with what results.  He has earned a manly living from the first, and therewithal has steadily contributed a vital portion to the current, and to the enduring, literature of his land and language.  There was one thing that characterized the somewhat isolated New York group of young writers in his early prime—­especially himself and his nearest associates, such as Taylor and Boker, and, later, Aldrich and Winter.  They called themselves squires of poesy, in their romantic way, but they had neither the arrogance nor the chances for a self-heralding, more common in these chipper modern days.  They seem to have followed their art because they adored it, quite as much as for what it could do for them.

Of Mr. Stoddard it may be said that there have been few important literary names and enterprises, North or South, but he has “been of the company.”  If he found friends in youth, he has abundantly repaid his debt in helpful counsel to his juniors—­among whom I am one of the eldest and most grateful.  But I cannot realize that thirty-seven years of our close friendship have passed since I showed my first early work to him, and he took me to a publisher.  Just as I found him then, I find him any evening now, in the same chair, in the same corner of the study, “under the evening lamp.”  We still talk of the same themes; his jests are as frequent as ever, but the black hair is silvered and the active movements are less alert.  I then had never known a mind so stored with bookish lore, so intimate with the lives of rare poets gone by, yet to what it then possessed he, with his wonderful memory, has been adding ever since.

If his early verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable style of his own—­to the utterance of those pure lyrics, “most musical, most melancholy”—­“to the perfection of his matchless songs,” and again, to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in “The Fisher and Charon”—­to the grace and limpid narrative verse of “The King’s Bell,” to the feeling, wisdom—­above all, to the imagination—­of his loftier odes, among