Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/23

 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

was the elder of the two sons of Edmund Burke Stedman and Elizabeth Clementine Dodge Stedman. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the 8th day of October, 1833. Of his father, who was a major in the militia and a prosperous lumber merchant, there are few traditions extant, as he died in his thirty-fifth year, after less than five years of married life. He was of good New England stock, and, as his letters show, a devoted husband and father, and an ardent Christian, typical of an era when the religious life was more frankly the topic of talk and letters than it is to-day. Of his mother we know more. Elizabeth Dodge Stedman was a woman whose beauty, magnetism, and vital charm have enriched the traditions of her day. A poet and writer of great promise, if not of great fulfilment, vibrantly sensitive to every form of artistic expression, a temperamental exaltée of the first rank, she was permitted to bequeath to her son that combination of qualities, undefined but unmistakable, which the world has agreed to call by the name of genius. In some yet unpublished memoirs, greatly prized in the family annals, she gives a charming picture of the dawning of the poetic impulse in the baby Edmund: "He was a remarkably precocious child from birth, and a very strange one. 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, indeed he hardly ever even smiled in babyhood and seldom xiii