A stately marble pile whose pillars rise
From deep-set bases fluted to the dome.
The spacious windows front the rising sun,
And when its splendor smites them, many-paned,
Tri-arched and richly-stained,
A thousand mornings brighten there as one.
The painting has grown mellow with the flight of a quarter-century. It shows the influence of Turner very plainly, and is accepted by the painter of the scene in words as a fair interpretation in color of the château en Espagne of his song. It was a favorite of Sandford Gifford’s—another dear friend of the poet’s, whose handiwork in lake and mountain scenery lights up other corners of the room. Kindred treasures are a masterly head, by Eastman Johnson, of a Nantucket fisherman, gazing seaward through his glass; a glimpse of the Alps, presented by Bierstadt to Mrs. Stoddard; a swamp-scene, by Homer Martin, in his earlier manner; a view of the Bay of Naples, by Charles Temple Dix, the General’s son; and bits of color by Smillie, Jarvis McEntee, S. G. W. Benjamin, and Miss Fidelia Bridges. Two panels (“Winter” and “Summer”) were given to the owner by a friend who had once leased a studio to J. C. Thom, a pupil of Edouard Frère. When the artist gave up the room, these pictures were sawed out of the doors on which he had painted them. Besides two or three English water-colors, there are small copies by the late Cephas G. Thompson, whose art Hawthorne delighted to praise, of Simon Memmi’s heads of Petrarch and Laura, at Florence. A more personal interest attaches to an oil-painting by Bayard Taylor—a peep at Buzzard’s Bay from Mattapoisett, disclosing a part of the view visible from Mrs. Stoddard’s early home. Not all of these works are to be found in the library; for in our hurried tour of inspection we have crossed the threshold of the dining-room, where such prosaic bits of furniture as a sideboard, dinner-table and straight-backed chairs hold back the flood of books. One wave has swept through, however, and is held captive in a small case standing near the back windows. The summer light that finds its way into this room is filtered through a mass of leaves shading a veranda similar to the one in front.
The poet’s “den,” on the second floor, embraces the main room and an alcove, and is lighted by three windows overlooking the street. His writing-desk—a mahogany one, of ancient make—stands between two of the windows. Above it hangs a large engraving of Lawrence’s Thackeray, beneath which, in the same frame, you may read “The Sorrows of Werther” in the balladist’s own inimitable hand. As you sit at the desk, Mrs. Browning looks down upon you from a large photograph on the wall at your right—one which her husband deemed the best she ever had taken. A delicate engraving hangs beside it of Holmes’s miniature of Byron—a portrait of which Byron himself said, “I prefer that likeness to any which has ever been done of me by any artist whatever.” It shows a head almost feminine in its beauty. An etching of Hugo is framed above a striking autograph that Mr. Stoddard paid a good price for—at a time, as he says, when he thought he had some money. The sentiment is practical: “Donnez cent francs aux pauvres de New York. Donnez moins, si vous n’êtes pas assez riche; mais donnez. Victor Hugo.” The manuscript, which looks as if it might have been written with a sharpened match, is undated and unaddressed. Every one, therefore, is at liberty to regard it as a personal appeal or command to himself. Close beside the Byron portrait is an etching of Mr. Stedman; into its frame the owner has thrust that gentleman’s visiting card, on which, over the date “Feb. 14, 1885,” are scribbled these lines:
It is a Friar of whiskers gray
That kneels before your shrine,
And, as of old, would once more pray
To be your Valentine.
Among the treasures of mingled literary and artistic interest in this room is a small portrait of Smollett. It is painted on wood, and the artist’s name is not given. Mr. Stoddard has not found it reproduced among the familiar likenesses of the novelist. Along the wall above the mantel-piece runs a rare print of Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrimage,” with the designation of each pilgrim engraved beneath his figure. It is noteworthy for its dissimilarity, as well as its likeness, to the poet-painter’s more familiar works. The main wall in the alcove I have spoken of displays a life-size crayon head of Mr. Stoddard, done by Alexander Laurie in 1863. It also gives support to several rows of shelves, running far and rising high, filled chock-full of books less prettily bound than those in the library, but of greater value, perhaps, to the eyes that have so often pored upon them. It is the poet’s collection, to which he has been adding ever since he was a boy, of English poetry of all periods; and it has been consulted to good purpose by many other scholars than the owner. Under an engraving of Raphael’s portrait of himself, at the back of the larger room, is a case filled with books of the same class, but rarer still—indeed, quite priceless to their owner; for they are the tomes once treasured by kindred spirits, and inscribed with names writ in that indelible water which still preserves the name of Keats.
Of the books of this class, from the libraries of famous authors—some being presentation copies, and others containing either the owners’ signatures or their autographic annotations of the text,—may be mentioned volumes that once belonged to Edmund Waller, Thomas Gray, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge, Lord Byron, Thomas Lisle Bowles, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Campbell, William Motherwell, and Caroline Norton. Among signatures or documents in the manuscript of famous men are the names of William Alexander, Earl of Sterling; Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke; Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, author of “Gorboduc”; Samuel Garth, author of “The Dispensary,” and others. Among the manuscripts cherished by Mr. Stoddard are letters or poems from the pens of William Shenstone, Burns, Cowper, Sheridan, Southey, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Campbell, Dickens, Thackeray, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Ebenezer Elliott, “the Corn Law Rhymer”; Walter Savage Landor, James Montgomery, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Hood, Bryan Waller Procter (“Barry Cornwall”), Miss Mitford, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne, Frederick Locker-Lampson, N. P. Willis, Charles Brockden Brown, J. G. Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leigh Hunt, Washington Irving, Robert Browning, Mrs. Browning, and scores of other English and American poets and writers of distinction.
Included in this choice collection are the manuscripts of Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem,” Thackeray’s “Sorrows of Werther,” Bryant’s “Antiquity of Freedom,” Longfellow’s “Arrow and Song” (“I shot an arrow into the air”), Mrs. Browning’s “Castrucci Castricanni,” pages of Bryant’s translation of Homer, Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” Lord Houghton’s “I Wandered by the Brookside,” Barry Cornwall’s “Mother’s Last Song,” Sheridan’s “Clio’s Protest” (containing the famous lines,
They write with ease to show their breeding,
But easy writing’s cursed hard reading),