which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed.  This is not the place to eulogize such work.  But one thing may be noted in the progress of what in Berkeley’s phrase may be called the planting of arts and letters in America.  Mr. Stoddard and his group were the first after Poe to make poetry—­whatever else it might be—­the rhythmical creation of beauty.  As an outcome of this, and in distinction from the poetry of conviction to which the New England group were so addicted, look at the “Songs of Summer” which our own poet brought out in 1857.  For beauty pure and simple it still seems to me fresher and more significant than any single volume produced up to that date by any Eastern poet save Emerson.  It was “poetry or nothing,” and though it came out of time in that stormy period, it had to do with the making of new poets thereafter.

In conclusion, I am moved to say, very much as I wrote on his seventieth birthday, that our poet’s laborious and nobly independent life, with all its lights and shadows, has been one to be envied.  There is much in completeness—­its rainbow has not been dissevered—­it is a perfect arc.  As I know him, it has been the absolute realization of his young desire, the unhasting, unresting life of a poet and student, beyond that of any other writer among us.  Its compensations have been greater than those of ease and wealth.  Even now he would not change it, though at an age when one might well have others stay his hands.  He had the happiness to win in youth the one woman he loved, with the power of whose singular and forceful genius his own is inseparably allied.  These wedded poets have been blessed in their children, in the exquisite memory of the dead, in the success and loyalty of the living.  His comrades have been such as he pictured to his hope in youth—­poets, scholars, artists of the beautiful, with whom he has “warmed both hands before the fire of life.”  None of them has been a more patient worker or more loved his work.  To it he has given his years, whether waxing or waning; he has surrendered for it the strength of his right hand, he has yielded the light of his eyes, and complains not, nor need he, “for so were Milton and Maeonides.”  What tears this final devotion may have caused to flow, come from other eyes than his own.  And so, with gratulation void of all regrets, let us drink to the continued years, service, happiness of our strong and tender-hearted elder comrade, our white-haired minstrel, Richard Henry Stoddard.

LESLIE STEPHEN

THE CRITIC

[Speech of Leslie Stephen at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, April 29, 1893, in response to the toast, “Literature.”  Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy, spoke of Literature as “that in which is garnered up the heat that feeds the spiritual life of men.”  In the vein of personal compliment he said:  “For literature I turn to a distinguished writer