Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/29

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH of the American Copyright League. He also served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1904 and 1905.

In 1900, after thirty-one years of occupancy, Mr. Stedman gave up his seat on the Stock Exchange. He had already sold his town house and bought another home, named for his wife, the "Casa Laura," in Lawrence Park, Bronxville, a suburb of New York. Increasing years and failing health forbade the daily journey to and fro, and half impatiently, half humorously, he conceded that it was "time to be old and to take in sail." In the years that followed, though the zest of life never forsook him, the hand of destiny weighed heavy upon him. Friend after friend passed away, and each passing shook him sorely, for his loyalties were passions. He lost his wife in the summer of 1905; his eldest son died suddenly six months later. John Hay, Richard Henry Stoddard, T. B. Aldrich, all lifelong friends, were taken in swift succession. Henry Harland and William Sharp, best beloved of his juniors, fell in their prime. His superb vitality waned visibly, though he daily urged himself to the limit of his failing strength, and, well or ill, in work or in leisure, to one claim upon him he offered no resistance,—to the repeated call for guidance and advice from those who would write. The young writer, and especially the young poet, found in him a tireless friend. Erring perhaps, if he erred, in over-optimism, the very fact that youth would be at verse-making endeared it to him; and those who loved him best, loved best of all the cordial gravity with which he took every manuscript thrust at him and set himself to see what could be done about it. The tale of all he did about it will be fully told only in the literary output of the years ahead of us, for he never missed a sign of promise, and fundamentally, for all his leniency, he made no mistakes. xix