EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.
POET AND CRITIC; AUTHOR OF “THE [♦]VICTORIAN POETS.”
[♦] ‘VICRTORIAN’ replaced with ‘VICTORIAN’
URING the year 1859, two poems were published in the New York Tribune which made genuine sensations. They were so unlike in subject and treatment that no one would have guessed they emanated from the same brain and were penned by the same hand. The first, entitled “The Diamond Wedding,” was a humorous thrust of ridicule at the “parade” made in the papers over the lavish and expensive jewels and other gifts presented by a wealthy Cuban to his bride—a young lady of New York. This poem, when published, called forth a challenge from the irate father of the lady; but, fortunately, a duel was somehow averted.
The other poem, “How Old Brown Took Harper’s Ferry,” recounted the incident of that stern old abolitionist boldly marching with a few men into Virginia and capturing the town of Harper’s Ferry. There was no American poet who might not have felt proud of this production. Bayard Taylor was so pleased with the genius manifested in both these poems that he sought the author’s acquaintance and introduced him to R. H. Stoddard, who in turn, after examining a collection of his verses, recommended them for publication to Charles Scribner, who issued them the next year (1860) under the title of “Poems, Lyric and Idylic.”—Thus was Mr. Stedman introduced into the literary world.
Edmund Clarence Stedman is a native of Connecticut. He was born in the city of Hartford on the eighth day of October, 1833,—and comes of a good family of some poetic reputation. Rev. Aaron Cleveland, one of his ancestors, is said to have been a poet. Arthur Cleveland Cox, well known as a religious writer of verse, was his cousin. His mother was herself a poet, and also the author of the tragedy “Bianco Caprello.” When Stedman was two years of age he was sent to live with his grand-uncle, James Stedman, a jurist and scholar, who looked carefully after the early education of his nephew. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to Yale College, where he was among the foremost in English composition and Greek. But it is said that for some disobedience of the discipline of the institution, he fell under the censure of the college management and left without graduating. The University afterward, however, enrolled him among the alumni of 1853 with the degree of Master of Arts.
Upon leaving Yale, at the age of nineteen, Stedman took the management of a newspaper at Norwich, and the next year married a Connecticut girl and became owner of the Winsted Herald, when he was only twenty-one. Under his management, this paper soon rose to be one of the most important of the political papers of the State. Three years later we find him writing on the “New York Tribune,” where he obtained a foot-hold in literature, as we have already indicated by the publication of the two poems above mentioned.
When the “World” was started, in the winter of 1860, Mr. Stedman engaged with that journal and was editor of it when the news came over the wires that Fort Sumter had been fired upon. He wrote a poem on the occasion which was, perhaps, the first poem inspired by the war between the states. Soon after this Mr. Stedman went to Washington as the army correspondent of the “World.” He was at the first battle of Bull’s Run and published a long and graphic letter in the “World” about the defeat of the Union troops which he witnessed. This letter was the talk of the town for days and altogether has been pronounced the best single letter written during the whole war.
Before the close of the war, Mr. Stedman resigned his position as editor and entered the office of Attorney General Bates at Washington; but in January, 1864, he returned with his family to New York and published his second volume of poems entitled, “Alice of Monmouth, An Idyl of the Great War, and Other Poems,” which may be described as a little poetic novel. The opening scene is laid in Monmouth County, New Jersey; the later ones on the battle fields of Virginia.
The titles and dates of Mr. Stedman’s other books are as follows: “The Blameless Prince, and other Poems” (1869); “Poetical Works” (1873); “Victorian Poets” (1875); “Hawthorne and Other Poems” (1877); “Lyrics and Idyls, with Other Poems” (1879); the “Poems of Austin Dobson,” with an introduction (1880); “Poets of America” (1886), and with Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, he edited “A Library of American Literature” (11 vols., 1888–1890).
Many people entertain the notion that a man cannot be at one and the same time, a poet and a man of business. This is a mistake. [♦]Fitz-Green Halleck was for many years a competent clerk of John Jacob Astor; Charles Sprague was for forty years teller and cashier in a Boston bank; Samuel Rodgers, the English poet, was all his life a successful banker; Charles Follen Adams, the humorous and dialectic poet, is a prosperous merchant in Boston; and Edmund Clarence Stedman has been for many years the head of a firm of stock brokers with a [♣]suite of offices in Exchange Place, New York, dealing in government securities and railway stocks and bonds, and also petroleum, in which fortunes were at one time made and lost with great rapidity. Nevertheless, Mr. Stedman, the stock-broker and banker is still Mr. Stedman, the poet. The most of his splendid verses have been produced while he was depending for a living upon journalistic work or upon some business for support. Mr. Stedman also illustrates the fact, as Edgar Allen Poe had done before him, that a poet may be a practical critic. And why not? If poets are not the best critics of poetry, musicians are not the best critics of music, architects are not the best critics of architecture and painters of painting. Mr. Stedman’s “Victorian Poets” is, perhaps, the most important contribution of all our American writers to the critical literature on the English Poets.
[♦] ‘Fitz Green Hallack’ replaced with ‘Fitz-Green Halleck’
[♣] ‘suit’ replaced with ‘suite’
The home-life of Mr. Stedman is described as being an ideally happy one. One of his poems entitled “Laura, My Darling,” addressed to his wife, gives us a delightful glimpse into the heart and home of the poet.
BETROTHED ANEW.
“The sunshine of the outer world beautifully illustrates the sunshine of the heart in the ‘Betrothed Anew’ of Edmund Clarence Stedman.”—Morris.
HE sunlight fills the trembling air,
And balmy days their guerdons bring;
The Earth again is young and fair,
And amorous with musky spring.
The golden nurslings of the May
In splendor strew the spangled green,
And hues of tender beauty play,
Entangled where the willows lean.
Mark how the rippled currents flow;
What lustres on the meadows lie!
And, hark! the songsters come and go,
And trill between the earth and sky.
Who told us that the years had fled,
Or borne afar our blissful youth?
Such joys are all about us spread,
We know the whisper was not truth.
The birds that break from grass and grove
Sing every carol that they sung
When first our veins were rich with love
And May her mantle round us flung.
O fresh-lit dawn! immortal life!
O Earth’s betrothal, sweet and true,
With whose delights our souls are rife!
And aye their vernal vows renew!
Then, darling, walk with me this morn;
Let your brown tresses drink its sheen;
These violets, within them worn,
Of floral fays shall make you queen.
What though there comes a time of pain
When autumn winds forebode decay?
The days of love are born again;
That fabled time is far away!
And never seemed the land so fair
As now, nor birds such notes to sing,
Since first within your shining hair
I wove the blossoms of the spring.
THE DOOR-STEP.
HE conference meeting through at last,
We boys around the vestry waited,
To see the girls come tripping past
Like snow-birds willing to be mated.
Not braver he that leaps the wall,
By level musket-flashes litten,
Than I, who stepped before them all
Who longed to see me get the mitten.
But no, she blushed and took my arm!
We let the old folks have the highway,
And started toward the Maple Farm,
Along a kind of lovers’ by-way.
I can’t remember what we said,
’Twas nothing worth a song or story,
Yet that rude path by which we sped
Seemed all transformed and in a glory.
The snow was crisp beneath our feet,
The moon was full, the fields were gleaming;
By hood and tippet sheltered sweet
Her face with youth and health was beaming.
The little hand outside her muff—
O sculptor, if you could but mould it!
So slightly touched my jacket-cuff,
To keep it warm I had to hold it.
To have her with me there alone,
’Twas love and fear and triumph blended:
At last we reached the foot-worn stone
Where that delicious journey ended.
She shook her ringlets from her hood,
And with a “Thank you Ned,” dissembled,
But yet I knew she understood
With what a daring wish I trembled.
A cloud passed kindly overhead,
The moon was slyly peeping through it,
Yet hid its face, as if it said,
“Come, now or never, do it, do it!”
My lips till then had only known
The kiss of mother and of sister,
But somehow full upon her own
Sweet, rosy, darling mouth—I kissed her!
Perhaps ’twas boyish love, yet still,
O listless woman! weary lover!
To feel once more that fresh wild thrill,
I’d give—But who can live youth over!