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.