superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like
sitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avenged
if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up so
stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
votaries.

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she
has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and
novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar
fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a
time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.