Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/61

R. H. Stoddard 43 fundamentally, because it is shallow. In his ode on Goethe, written three years before Taylor died, conscious of his ' 'lighter muscle" he asks with an undercurrent of sadness: How charge with music powers so vast and free, Save one be great as he? Taylor, with all his aspiration and energy, was ill-educated, ill-disciplined, emotionally and intellectually unsymmetrical. He was too fond of his narghile and of melon-seeds brought all the way from Nijni-Novgorod. He learned modem Greek before he learned ancient Greek. His few good poems, such as the popular Bedouin Song, John Reed, The Quaker Widow, Eu- phorion, are far too few. He had latent powers, if not supreme power, but it was misdirected. To his contemporaries, he was a distinguished poet as well as traveller; to us he is an interest- ing personahty. ' While Shelley was Taylor's poet, Richard Henry Stoddard found in Keats, as he says in a verse tribute, the Master of his soul. As a boy, he "lived for Song," and throughout b's life, in surroundings essentially ah en and "an age too late," he dedicated himself to poetry with a happiness and dignity, and with a degree of success in his own day, quite out of proportion to the merit of his achievement. A New Englander like Aldrich and Stedman, he was bom in the same year with Taylor (1825), in Hingham, Massachusetts, where his ancestors were hardy sailors. In his Recollections he tells of his grandfather's house by the sea, where his mother sang melancholy hymns at nightfall, and of the ancient church and cemetery that gave tone to the family life — "dying seemed to be the most laudable industry of the time. ' ' His father being lost at sea, the pale widow and her delicate boy removed to Boston, and later to New York, where she married again. After a few years of schooling, Richard was set to work, first as errand-boy, as shop-boy, and as legal cop3nst, — spending part of his petty earnings in the purchase of the English poets, — slater as blacksmith and as moulder in an iron foundry. On the threshold of manhood, he worked in the foundry for three hard years, with ever one consolation: "the day would end, night would come, and then I could write poetry." In 1849 he ' For Taylor's travels see Book III, Chap. xv.