Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/28

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH has been to his ideal of it. Afterwards when I saw him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress and envied him, as much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had clothed him. I had a New York tailor, too, but with a difference. He had a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing for it. He was all for literature and for literary men as the superior of every one."

Stedman's first book was followed in 1864 by "Alice of Monmouth, an Idyl of the Great War, and other Poems," and in 1869 by "The Blameless Prince, and other Poems." A bare enumeration of his literary output from this time until a few years before his death makes the fact of his divided energy seem almost incredible.

The "Complete Poetical Works" appeared in 1875; "Hawthorne, and other Poems, in 1877; "Lyrics and Idyls, with other Poems," 1879; "Poems Now First Collected," 1894; "Mater Coronata," 1900.

His principal critical works were "Victorian Poets," published in 1875; "Poets of America," 1885; "The Nature and Elements of Poetry" (first delivered at Johns Hopkins University as the inaugural course of lectures for the Turnbull Chair of Poetry, and repeated at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania), 1892.

He edited (in association with T. B. Aldrich) "Cameos from the Poems of Walter Savage Landor"; the "Poems of Austin Dobson"; a "Library of American Literature" in eleven volumes (with Ellen M. Hutchinson), 1888-89; "The Works of Edgar Allan Poe" in ten volumes (with Professor G. E. Woodberry), 1895; "A Victorian Anthology," 1895; "An American Anthology," 1900.

In 1891 Mr. Stedman succeeded Mr. Lowell as president xviii