Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/25

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, in an article appearing in the old "Scribner's." "Stedman's English," he said, "proves, by the purity of its selection and the neatness and conciseness of its turn, that if the literature of his mother tongue made any part of his training,—and it probably did, under the direction of his uncle, who was a scholar and a jurist,—he was guided to the fountain, and not to the manufacturer's rills." His first long poem, "Purgatorio," written for the Kappa Sigma Theta of his college when he was sixteen years of age, although rightfully to be dismissed under the head of "Juvenilia," is a rapid fire of classical allusion mixed with the coterie-sprach of the college, curiously mature in its immaturity, and already showing that security of beat and rhythm that was never to fail him. In the following year he took the first prize in a Yale literary competition, with a poem in twenty-nine stanzas entitled "Westminster Abbey."

At the age of fifteen Edmund Clarence Stedman entered Yale College. He was suspended at the end of his Sophomore year for a prank that has been too often the subject of dark allusion, yet one so forgivable compared with many forms of youthful outbreak, that after all these years it calls for no veil of silence. He ran away with a travelling theatrical company, taking, it is said, a part in their performances. As a result of this escapade his college was closed to him, though his love for her never weakened, and twenty years later she was proud to restore her brilliant scapegoat to his class membership and give him his degree of Master of Arts.

After a period of private study under a tutor in Northampton, he returned to Norwich and founded the Norwich "Tribune," and in 1853, wnen twenty years old, he married Laura Hyde Woodworth, a beautiful girl of the same age, with whom he lived for more than fifty years and by xv