Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations

by Charles Hemstreet

One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed, spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song, Sparkling and Bright, was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose early death shadowed his whole life.

Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor of the American as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he founded the Knickerbocker magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S. Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in the same field of writing.

All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's shop; and more, too, for he had worked with N.P. Willis on the Mirror, and had travelled far in the wild West despite an accident in his youth which had crushed his leg between a boat and the wharf, leaving him a life-long cripple. In this western journeying he gathered material for A Winter in the West and Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie. He had already written Vanderlyn, and now in the book-shop was daily discussing his plans for Grayslaer. No hint came to the minds of those who listened to his witty talk in idle hours at the book-shop that in another ten years he would be taken from his last city home in Greene Street to live out the remaining thirty-four years of his life in the asylum at Harrisburg, Pa., a mental wreck.

It was Hoffman who introduced Lewis Gaylord Clark to the book-shop. Clark had been associated with him on the Knickerbocker magazine, and it was Clark who continued that publication for many years in the office on Broadway, just south of Cortlandt Street. To the office very often went his twin brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Philadelphia Gazette, who contributed his now long-forgotten verse to his brother's magazine almost to the day of his death.

It was quite natural that John L. Stephens should make Bartlett's book-shop a headquarters while he was in town, for Bartlett and he were firm friends of years' standing, and their minds ran along in very much the same historical groove. Many a story the famous traveller recounted to his friend and to the others who were gathered there, and his presence was eagerly looked for. He had been to Egypt and had written from there letters that were published in the Knickerbocker when Hoffman was at its head. He had been to Arabia, to Poland, and to half a dozen other countries, and had written of his travels with a straightforward directness that was very much like his clear ringing talk. His visits to the book-shop happened years before he became interested in the Panama Railroad, for when this project came to his hand he devoted so much of himself to the building of the road across the Isthmus that he gave little time to writing.

Another man who lingered in the book-shop more than any of the others was a sort of protégé of Clark's, since Clark had in a great measure discovered him. His name was Frederick S. Cozzens, a wine merchant, and almost every afternoon he walked from his place around the next corner in Vesey Street, the second block below Broadway. It was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then a great deal talked about as the author of the Sparrowgrass Papers.

This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of books and opinions, Arcturus, for Evert A. Duyckinck was one of the habitués there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his brother George was to start the publication of The Literary World; and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this publication collected material and wrote their Encyclopædia of American Literature, which gave them fame long after both were dead.

The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of 1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself, heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made. James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous business for a writer's career, projected his Literary Gazette, in which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he transferred his New England Magazine to New York under the title of the American Monthly Magazine, the same year established Our New World. He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at Bartlett's place thought much of the author of The Old Sexton.

William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen, so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work.

In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these memories start. At that corner, in a building long gone now, when Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the New York Review and Athenæum, in which his own poem, Death of the Flowers, was published, and in which Halleck's Marco Bozzaris first appeared. In his office there Bryant often talked with Percival and with Hillhouse, and there he discussed with Verplanck and Sands what manner of verse he would contribute to the newly started Talisman magazine.