Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/63

Stedman 45 more passionate than the others of the New York group, and not so much a natural creator of it. Creation was, to him, an inevitable accident ; enjoyment of others' poetry was a leading function of life. Most of his work is the expression of common- place sentiment and tame emotion. Its merit is melody and deftness, in phrasing, in rhjmiing, in imagery. Consequently his best work is doubtless that which the pubHc of his day knew him by, his Ijrrics, as in the pleasant volume Songs of Summer, diverse snatches of song without attachment to time or place, also without much meaning or purpose, but so well fashioned that one can understand why Stoddard was once a prominent poet. His Lincoln, an Horation Ode, however, still has power. ^ If Bayard Taylor's handicap was travel, and Stoddard's uncongenial labour, Stedman's was business. Though bom of an old New England family in Hartford, Connecticut, and educated at Yale, he immersed himself so thoroughly in Wall Street that he belongs to New York. Probably he owed less to his father, lumber merchant and devout Christian, than to his mother, Elizabeth Dodge Stedman, a poetess notable chiefly for her ardent emotional life. Of her son she wrote: "As soon as he could speak he lisped in rhyme, and as soon as he could write, which was at the age of six years, he gave shape and measure to his dreams. He was a sedate and solemn baby." In coUege, as the youngest in a class of more than one hundred, he developed his infantile devotion to poetry, winning prizes, but losing his sedateness and solemnity. According to the Faculty Records, "Stedman, Soph, was dismissed for having been present at a 'dance house' near the head of the wharf," this being apparently his culminating indiscretion. As soon as he reahzed his error, he said in appls^ing for his degree years later, he "resolved to obtain a higher culture"; and, taking himself in hand, he transformed his raw, strong-willed, high- spirited youth to an attractive type of energetic, idealistic man- hood. In 1855 he became a broker in New York. Associating himself with Greeley's Tribune, he presently found himself the popular author of three lively, rather journalistic poems — The Diamond Wedding, The Ballad of Lager Bier, and How Old Br mm Took Harper's Ferry. In i860, the year of his first volume. Poems, Lyric and Idyllic, he joined the staff of the ' See also Book III, Chap. 11.