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172 letter 58 To Edmund Clarence Stedman [October 1874] New York, New York Tuesday aM Dear Stedman Stoddard is in bed, and the band in the street is playing a kind of dead march thing which sinks my heart into a lower hole. What is coming? It seems to me at times that Stoddard’s shadow grows longer so surely, so steadily, that I see it touching his grave. And what have I to call upon? Truly there are but two persons to whom I could go for advice and sympathy, which would be of avail to me. Yourself and Edward Smith.1 I should not hesitate to trust you. The latter has given me a friendship, so manly, so simple, straight-forward, that he has become an inestimable advantage to me. Stoddard is nearer to the giving up point than you think. The man is tired and discouraged with the fight. It crazes him, the constant demand upon him for money and his desperate inadequate efforts to obtain it. What a man he is—I never before acknowledged to myself that he was a great man, but he is, and I feel it, though I never so plainly felt his faults and weakness more. There will be a run on the Two Anchors2 —Vaux3 came in this morning to tell him how exquisite it was—and Bayard praises it in a letter to me this morning. Alden4 sent me a check just now of $20, for a little poem I wrote in Mattapoissett and sent to Conant5 but it is going in the Mag. The Difference6 I call it—but my poems don’t amount to much in the face of you fellers.7 You know I have often thought that you and I would make a perfect hash and [illegible] together—I think we are hospitable alike. Dick and Laura are something like too in one respect—don’t think. We had such a nice evening with you that it made me quite lively and refreshed. The fact is I am bruised hearted now a days—these things crush me. Miss Woolston8 is a gentlewoman. But of the experiences of life as you 173 and I know them, life is a sealed book—seeing her makes me wonder themoreatthelittleIhaveread.IhaveinvitedtheTaylorshere,andhope they will come by Sat. You and Laura must dine with us then. Your own EDBS I have a gorgeous amount of stationary, monogram &c you see at present. Manuscript: Edmund Clarence Stedman Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University notes 1. Very little is known about Edward Smith (??–??), with whom Elizabeth Stoddard appears to have been intimate in the mid to late 1870s. The nature of their relationship is unclear. 2. Richard’s poem “Two Anchors” was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in October 1874. 3. Calvert Vaux. See Letter 30, note 24. 4.HenryMillsAlden(1836–1919),editorof Harper’sNewMonthlyMagazinefrom 1869 until his death in 1919. 5. Samuel Stillman Conant. See Letter 49, note 4. 6. “The Difference” was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in February 1875. 7. Stoddard’s modesty is interesting in light of a letter written by George Boker to Taylor in July 1874, in which Boker explains his lack of faith in his own artistic powers: “You may curse the author of my awakening for her needless and malignant intermeddling between my conscience and my God, but that you would do our waspish friend a wrong; for, after all, she spoke but the simple truth. Lizzy, Dick, one or two others and myself were sitting together one night in the rooms of the Pythoness, when suddenly she broke forth, in her usual oracular manner: ‘George, you, Dick, Bayard,Stedman, Aldrich, Read, thewholeofyou youngsters, have all been dreary failures as poets. Not one of you has won even a third class position as a poet. There is not one of you who can justly lay claim to popularity in any true sense of the term. . . . You are all failures; and the sooner you stop writing the things that no public will read, the better for your peace of mind. Is not this truth?’ she said turning to me very sadly. ‘God’s truth!’ my lips and my conscience cried with one voice” (July 30, 1874, Bayard Taylor Papers, Cornell University). 8. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), American writer who met Stedman in St. Augustine, Florida, in March 1874. ...

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