Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/24

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH cried. When he was between five and six years, on being put to bed he would get on his knees, bury his head in the pillow, and if told to lie down and go to sleep, would answer, 'Let me alone, please, the poetry is coming.'"

When her son Edmund was six years old Mrs. Stedman married again, her second husband being the Hon. William Burnett Kinney, owner of the Newark "Daily Advertiser," who was shortly after appointed Minister to Sardinia. His wife accompanied him on his mission, leaving her two little sons, Edmund and Charles, in the care of their uncle, James Stedman, of Norwich, Connecticut. Here for fourteen years, and until his emancipation at the age of twenty, the battle was fought and re-fought between the just, but exacting and hot-tempered, guardian, a typical New England Puritan of the last century, and the high-spirited untamable lad, with his sore perception of an alien environment and his defiant struggles for ampler breathing space. Perhaps some such beginning as this was inevitable, and it is idle to speculate what different results a different milieu might have meant for the strong-willed boy. It may be noted in passing that he himself never alluded to those days without a flash of that spirit which renewed his youth to the last: "I was always a come-outer," he would say; "they couldn't do anything with me when I was a youngster, and it wasn't all beer and skittles for them either!" Perhaps pity for the trials of embryo genius need not forbid a pang for those harsh elders of a sterner day than ours, for whom truly it was not "all beer and skittles."

One good may be definitely claimed as a result of James Stedman's rule. The knowledge and love of the classics, both ancient and modern, which his nephew carried through life, was a direct result of his fostering care. This debt was recognized long ago by the late Augustus Rodney xiv