life as a good young evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the Night-blooming Serious.  I think Mr. Stedman wrote for its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these days of perfected telegraphing.  He had not yet achieved that seat in the Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business, and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many more singly devoted to it.  I used sometimes to speak about that with another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.  But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock Exchange.  What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature and to embody New York in it as no one else does.  In a community which seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage.  Scholar and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.

But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many; but any admirer was welcome.  We talked of what we had done, and each said how much he liked certain thing of the other’s; I even seized my advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem, for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to the young literary endeavorer.  It was a poem called, with no prophetic sense of fitness, “Forlorn,” and I tried it first with the ’Atlantic Monthly’, which would not have it.  Then I offered it in person to a former editor of ‘Harper’s Monthly’, but he could not see his advantage in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me.  From that point I sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry it away and bring it back.  On my way home, four years later, I took it to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning with the ‘Fortnightly Review’, sent it to him for me.  It was promptly returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly.  Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem to him.  The kindest letter of acceptance