E. C. Stedman.
This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude, for this reply came, two months later,—
University Club, 370 Fifth Avenue, New York, Sunday, Sept. 16, 1883.
My dear Higginson,—There is a good deal, say what you will, in “moral support.” I have proved it during the last few weeks: ’twould have been hard to get through with them, but for just such words as yours. And I have had them in such abundance that, despite rather poor displays of human nature in a sample of my own manufacture, I am less than ever a pessimist.
As for that which Sophocles pronounced the father of meanness—πενία—both my wife and myself have been used to it nearly all our lives, and probably shall have, now, to renew our old acquaintance with it. Though somewhat demoralized by a few years of Philistine comfort—the Persicos apparatus, &c.—I think we shall get along with sufficient dignity.
We have suffered more, however, than the money-loss, bad as that is. And hence we are doubly grateful to those who, like yourself, send a cheery voice to us at just this time.
Ever sincerely yrs.,
Edmund C. Stedman.
During the next few years we had ample correspondence of a wholly literary and cheerful tone. He became engaged upon his Library of American Literature with a congenial fellow worker, Miss Ellen Hutchinson, and I was only one of many who lent a hand or made suggestions. He was working very hard, and once wrote that he was going for a week to his boyhood home to rest. During all this period there was, no doubt, the painful business entanglement in the background, but there was also in the foreground the literary work whose assuaging influence only one who has participated in it can understand. Then came another blow in the death of his mother, announced to me as follows:—