Returning to Norwich, the home of his uncle, he pursued for a time the study of law. Later he connected himself with the local newspaper, and in 1853, at the age of twenty, he was married. Two years later, he left newspaper work to become the New York representative of a firm which was to engage in the manufacture and sale of clocks. Accordingly in the summer of 1855 he took up for the first time his residence in the city that was to be so closely connected with the rest of his life.
The clock factory made haste to burn and Stedman again was out of employment, this time in the great wilderness of New York. For a time he was a real estate and commission broker, later he was a clerk in a railroad office. Still later he attracted wide attention with his ephemeral poem "The Diamond Wedding," and on the strength of this work became a correspondent of the Tribune. In 1861 he went to the front as war correspondent of the Washington World, and his letters during the early years of the struggle were surpassed by those of no other correspondent. In 1862 he was given a position in the office of the Attorney-General and a year later he began his career as a broker in Wall Street, a career that was to hold him in its grip for the rest of his life.
Pan and Wall Street are far from synonymous. There was poetry in Stedman's soul; there were within him creative powers that he felt were able to place him among the masters if he could but command time to study his art. He worshiped beauty and he was compelled to keep his eye upon the stock-ticker. He read Keats and Tennyson, Moschus and Theocritus, but it was always after the freshness of his day had been given to the excitement of the market place. Time and again he sought to escape, but the pressure of city life was upon him. He had a growing family now and there were no resources save those that came from his office. It was a precarious business in which he engaged; it was founded upon uncertainty; failure might come at any moment through no fault of his own. Several times during his life he was on the brink of ruin. Time and again his health failed him, but he still struggled on. The financial chapter of his biography is one of the most pathetic in literary annals. But through toil and discouragement, amid surroundings fatal to poetic vision, he still kept true to his early literary ideals, and his output when measured either in volumes or in literary merit is remarkable.
The first period of Stedman's poetic life produced little save colorless, passionless lyrics, the echoes of a wide reading in other poets. He went, like all of his clan, to books rather than life. He was early enamoured of the Sicilian idylists. It was a dream that never quite deserted him, to make "a complete, metrical, English version of the idyls of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion"—an idle dream indeed for a vigorous young poet in a land that needed the breath of a new life. Why dawdle over Theocritus when fields are newly green and youth is calling? Stedman himself seems to have misgivings. "When the job [the collecting of the various texts] was nearly ended, I reflected that one's freshest years should be given to original work, and such excursions might well be deferred to the pleasures of old age. My time seemed to have been wasted."[74]
During this earlier period poetry was to him an artistic thing to be judged coldly from the standpoint of art and beauty. He worked with extreme care upon his lines. For a time he considered that he had reached his highest level in "Alcetryon," and he waited eagerly for the world to discover it. William Winter, his fellow poet of beauty, hailed it as "not unworthy of the greatest living poet, Tennyson"; Professor Hadley of Yale pronounced it "one of the most successful modern-antiques that I have ever seen." Then Lowell, with one of his flashes of insight, told the whole truth: "I don't believe in these modern antiques—no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of 'em. They are all wrong. It is like writing Latin verses—the material you work in is dead." It was the voice of an oracle to the young poet. Twenty-three years later he wrote of his chagrin when Lowell had praised his volume in the North American Review and had said nothing of his pièce de résistance "Alectryon." "Finally I hinted as much to him. He at once said that it was my 'best piece of work,' but no 'addition to poetic literature,' since we already have enough masterpieces of that kind—from Landor's Hamadryad and Tennyson's Œnone down to the latest effort by Swinburne or Mr. Fields.... Upon reflection, I thought Lowell right. A new land calls for new song."[75]
The episode is a most significant one. It marks the passing of a whole poetic school.
To the war period that followed this era in the poet's life belong the deepest notes of Stedman's song. In his Alice of Monmouth, he is no longer the mere poet of beauty, he is the interpreter of the thrill, the sacrifice, the soul of the great war. The poem has the bite of life in it. "The Cavalry Song" thrills with the very soul of battle:
Dash on beneath the smoking dome,
Through level lightnings gallop nearer!
One look to Heaven! no thoughts of home:
The guidons that we bear are dearer.
Charg-e!
Cling! Clang! forward all!
Heaven help those whose horses fall!
Cut left and right!
The poem "Wanted—a Man" written in the despondent autumn of 1862, came not from books, but hot from a man's heart: