Poet, born Hingham, Mass., July 2, 1825; worked as iron moulder in youth; soon began to contribute to papers; held a position in custom house, 1853–70; confidential clerk to Gen. McClellan, 1870–3; city librarian, New York, 1874–5; literary reviewer New York World, 1860–70; of New York Mail and Express since 1880. Author: “Poems;” Adventures in Fairy Land;” “Life of Humboldt;” “Songs of Summer;” “The King’s Bell;” “The Book of the East;” “Abraham Lincoln, A Horatian Ode;” “Putnam the Brave;” “A Century After;” “Life of Washington Irving;” “The Lion’s Cub and Other Verse;” “Under the Evening Lamp;” etc. Edited the Bric-a-Brac Series; married Elizabeth D. Barstow, 1852.

Personal

  A personal description of Mr. Stoddard should be unnecessary. At this late day few of his readers can be unfamiliar with his face. It has been engraved more than once, and printed not only with his collected poems but in magazines of wider circulation than the books of any living American poet. It is not likely to disappoint the admirer of his work, for it is a poet’s face, as well as a handsome one. The clear-cut, regular features are almost feminine in their delicacy; but in the dark eyes, now somewhat dimmed though full of thought and feeling, there is a look that counteracts any impression of effeminacy due to the refinement of the features, or the melodious softness of the voice. The hair and beard of snowy whiteness make a harmonious setting for the poet’s ruddy countenance. Though slightly bowed, as he steps forward to meet you (with left hand advanced) Mr. Stoddard still impresses you as a man of more than middle height. His cordial though undemonstrative greeting puts the stranger at his ease at once; for his manner is as gentle as his speech is frank.

  The life and work of Mr. Stoddard are a saddening instance of the short-sightedness of mankind, of the imperfection of our present social order, of the way in which a man may be compelled to waste endowments of a high order, that he may wring from a niggard world a bare subsistence…. If, as Seneca thinks, the gods are well pleased when they see great men contending with adversity, Mr. Stoddard must have afforded the gods much delight, for his life has been one struggle with adverse fortune…. It would not be easy to name the other American author who has done so much hard work for so insignificant pay. Mr. Stoddard has been all his life a most laborious man, working harder than any mechanic in town and receiving wages but little better than those of a clever mechanic. Most of this labor has been mere hack work. One says this in no disparagement of Mr. Stoddard, or of the usefulness of what he has done, but in hot indignation of soul that Pegasus should thus be put in the plough…. Mr. Stoddard has not complained; he has borne his burden as a brave man should, cheerfully, nobly, but the iron must have entered into his soul.

  The dinner had been announced for eight o’clock, but an hour was passed in the reception given to the poet before the guests sat at the tables. Mr. Stoddard, bowed and feeble, made a very touching figure as he received the congratulations of his friends, whom he tried to recognize as they thronged around him by the sound of their voices, for his sight was too dim to enable him to distinguish their features. His wits, however, were alert enough; and it was delightful to hear his replies to the sallies of some of his old comrades, and to observe how cleverly he managed conversation with those he had met long before, and whose feelings he could not hurt by betraying forgetfulness of the acquaintance they claimed with him.

  Stoddard’s story of his boyhood is a painful one. His was that greatest of all possible misfortunes, a mother whom he could not respect or love. She subjected him to work for which he had no aptitude or sufficient strength, culminating in an iron-foundry from his eighteenth year till his twenty-first. If he had not been born a poet, he would not have been made one by these hard conditions. The wonder is that they did not kill at once the poet and the boy.

  It is not given to every man to live such a life as that which closed when Richard Henry Stoddard passed away in May of the present year. To say nothing of having the poetic gift, few indeed have the stamina, the energy, the divine enthusiasm which carry them over the stony places and enable them to win an honorable and permanent place in the guild of poets. To few has been granted the privilege of knowing, and knowing intimately, so many of the men who made our literature during three score of years. He knew Bryant, Halleck, Willis, Poe, and nearly all of the famous New England group; he was the intimate friend of Bayard Taylor, George Boker, and Buchanan Read; he was the friend and counsellor of a host of younger writers, such as Stedman and Howells.

  In the last ten years it has been my privilege to see much of Richard Henry Stoddard. To one who belonged to a younger generation it was the opening of a volume of literary history to enter that second-floor study where nearly all the poet’s time was passed. There he sat at his desk, with Thackeray’s portrait and verses on the wall above, laboriously writing, with the strongest lights and glasses aiding his failing eyesight, or more often seated at the corner of the hearth, with books heaped on the floor about him, he dropped the volume in his hands to give the visitor a greeting which rarely lacked a note of cheeriness even in his darker hours. Books lined the walls. There were rare editions, autograph copies, all manner of literary treasures which have been made known through his magnificent gift to the Authors’ Club. There were rare manuscripts and letters also; Petrarch, Poe, Tennyson, Browning, as the case might be, and despite the apparent disorder, Mr. Stoddard’s persistent memory usually held all their stories and their resting-place as well. In these surroundings there was abundant invitation to reminiscence and comment. A box behind his chair contains letters from Poe, and perhaps the box was opened, and the opening meant a vivid story of his meetings with Poe, and descriptions, told with dry chuckles, of certain curious members of the Poe environment.

General

  “The King’s Bell,” exquisite for the limpid flow of its verse and the sweetly melancholy tone of its thought, together with other poems by Richard Henry Stoddard, have not received their due meed of praise.

  The peculiar traits of Stoddard’s genius are distinct through all the changing forms and preparing studies that taught him the mastery of his art. At the first, as at the last, his thought is clear, virile and single, and uttered in words of force and simplicity. There is not in all his work a hazy conception nor a wavering line. There are in it combinations purely original, and sentences cut like gems. Its sincerity bespeaks freedom from conceit and strained effects—its direct purpose compels it into Saxon syllables and lucid phrase. The outline of his subjects is firm, positive as a swift-drawn circle, bounding the parts in proportioned concord…. Until the history of our country has grown so old that its earliest records have lost all distinctness, we may believe that Stoddard’s name will remain written in them as that of one of the few poets—less than a score would round the tale—whose genius illustrated the first century of its national literature.

  Last of all poets should we call Mr. Stoddard a preacher, and he would smile if we called him a moralist; but his narrative poems are saturated with elevated moral sentiment, derive indeed their power from it; though it is the beauty of virtue with which he, as a poet, is primarily concerned…. His rank among the singers, not as regards popularity, but as regards the beauty and permanence of his work, is not to be a low one; he can not, I think, be placed among the poets of the third or of the second rank in our generation.

  The characteristics of Stoddard’s verse are affluence, sincere feeling, strength, a manner unmistakably his own, very delicate fancy, and, above all, an imagination at times exceeded by that of no other American poet. This last quality pervades his ambitious pieces, and at times breaks out suddenly in the minor verse through which he is best known. The exigencies of his profession have too constantly drawn upon his resources; the bulk of his miscellaneous verse is large, and to this is somewhat due its unevenness. No poet is more unequal; few have more plainly failed now and then. On the other hand, few have reached a higher tone, and a selection could be made from his poems upon which to base a lasting reputation. “The Fisher and Charon,” “The Dead Master,” and the “Hymn to the Sea,” are noble pieces of English blank verse, the secret of whose measure is given only to the elect; one is impressed by the art, the thought, the imagination, which sustain these poems, and the Shakespeare and Lincoln odes. Stoddard’s abundant songs and lyrics are always on the wing and known at first sight,—a skylark brood whose notes are rich with feeling.

  Stoddard is the exponent of retrospective sorrow and a gentle melancholy. Sombre themes generally suit him best; and yet, even in his mourning over “The Flight of Youth,” there is a note of warm, quick feeling, which proves that the heart of youth is with him still and takes wing only in his verse.

  The gap between his best and worst is sadly wide. But his five hundred pages of collected poems are full-freighted with the opima spolia of observation, reflection, fancy, imagination. Let him who fears as that American materialism can silence the chant of the soul and the carol of nature turn to Stoddard and find sufficient answer in him alone…. I remember, as of yesterday, the fresh open-air delight, the seeming presence of bird, breeze, and flower, with which in boyhood I read Stoddard’s “Songs of Summer;” and as I return to them I find indeed that their season “never dies,” for it is the eternal summer of song.

  I know of no other English-speaking poet of the day who can turn a song so gracefully and easily as Mr. Stoddard can. Certain of his lyrics are, to my mind, unsurpassed for haunting charm of cadence. He has also written several odes of admirable nobility and stateliness.

  In Stoddard the critic and the creator are united. Probably no living man rivals him in knowledge of ancient and modern poetry; and this knowledge does not lie inert in his memory, but is incorporate in his thought, rendering his naturally sound and wholesome taste next to infallible in questions of literary judgment. He has applied this taste to his own verse, leaving little for other critics of it to do. If anything, he has been too remorseless; sometimes nothing but the naked conception seems to be left. Yet in his severity he never forgets beauty; he both remembers it and understands it, as his “Hymn to the Beautiful” sufficiently testifies. He finds it everywhere, and his words are transfigured with its spirit.

  Stoddard I believe to be the highest poetic genius now living in America, his work always good, always of the very highest character.

  Whatever poets may have strongly influenced Mr. Stoddard in his earlier years, no one poet dominated him. His was a catholic taste, a universal worship of the beautiful, and he could appreciate what was good or great in every English poet. As his mind matured, these suggestions of other poets disappear from his verse, and his style becomes more distinctive, more individual. The passion for beauty, however, does not become weaker. In the “Songs of Summer,” published during the flower of his young manhood, there is almost a tropical luxuriance of feeling and a prodigality of fancy not always matched by felicity of expression.

  Stoddard belongs to the purely imaginative school. He has a passionate love of the beautiful that reminds one of his early master, Keats. His poems are spontaneous and impassioned, yet in them all there is not a single inartistic or faulty line. Like Poe and Aldrich, he has pruned his work with remorseless care. He has the rare gift of being able to apply his broad critical powers to his own work as if it were the production of another, and he has not hesitated many times to reject that which a less conscientious poet would have left unquestioned.

  Although the lingering glow of Keats and of Tennyson, whom the young workman loved, may be discerned here and there, as in the graceful minstrelsy of “The King’s Bell,” and the liquid measures of the “Hymn to the Beautiful,” Stoddard’s verse has taken on more and more a frank, half-homely quality, suggestive of the plain American manhood it embodies. How truly this manhood, for all its quiet self-control, thrills with the poet’s passion, is proved by such a noble lyric as “Adsum.” Yet the white-haired minstrel, whom New York delights to honor, does not forget, in his “golden flush of sunset,” the fearless flame of dawn.

  As a writer of odes, Mr. Stoddard stands second only to Lowell in American literature. They all show the lofty tone, the energetic, virile style, the melodious cadences echoing and re-echoing the thought, and the glowing imagination of which he early gave such proof in his “Carmen Naturæ.” It is the music of these and some of his shorter lyrics that gives significance to the word “song” in the general sense of poetry. Stoddard is a “singer” in the true meaning of the term.

  We have no truer poet than Mr. Stoddard to-day, none older or better known, none who more than he has “learned in suffering what he taught in song.” It is meet that we should remember him, and pay tribute now and then to the beauty of his work and to the manliness of his life.

  Like every sturdy, uncompromising individuality, Mr. Stoddard roused antagonisms, sometimes by the spoken, sometimes by the written word. His standards were high for letters and for men, and he hated smug literary affectation, or moral cowardice, with all the force of a singularly vigorous nature. If he was frank in denouncing shams, however, he was equally prompt to point out promise or performance, and all that he said was sure to be infused with a spirit due to long and reverent association with the masters of English letters. But these imperfect notes are not intended to touch the poet’s purely literary side save as this is inevitable in the case of one whose love of letters was his life.