Chapter Writers of New York and Pennsylvania of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

volumes, including a Life of Washington Irving (1881) and two realistic novels, effective studies of New York society, A Little Journey in the World (1889) and The Golden House (1894).

Richard H. Stoddard, 1825-1903.

Richard Henry Stoddard, whose early years were years of poverty, was toiling in an iron foundry when he began his poetical career in New York. A friendship with Bayard Taylor led to the publication of his first poems and to much literary work. From 1859 to 1870, Mr. Stoddard was employed in the New York custom-house, a position obtained with the friendly assistance of Hawthorne. From that time on, he was engaged in editorial work and held a high place among our minor poets. An autobiographic volume of Recollections (1903) is not the least interesting of his prose works. The poet's wife, Elizabeth B. Stoddard (1823-1902), was also a writer of verse and the author of three noteworthy novels, The Morgesons (1862), Two Men (1865), and Temple House (1867).

A Philadelphia writer, George Henry Boker (1823-1890), represents substantial attainment in the field of dramatic poetry. His successful tragedy, Francesca da Rimini (1856), is possibly the best of several which embody that romantic theme. Thomas Buchanan Read (1822-1872), like Boker a Pennsylvanian and a friend of Taylor and the Stoddards, was also an artist as well as poet. Of all his verse the battle lyric, Sheridan's Ride (1865), is the poem inevitably associated with his name.

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892.

By far the most interesting and important figure among the New York writers of this generation is that presented in the picturesque personality of Walt Whitman. Strictly speaking, he was not so much a member as one outside the literary circle just described. A man of rich vitality, lustily greeting life in all its phases, emphasizing, perhaps needlessly, the physical side of life, Whitman strode forth on his course, violating the conventionalities at every step. Not only in what he had to say as a poet was Whitman unconventional; he was unconventional also in the manner of saying. He violated the established rules of poetical expression as boldly and as confidently as he disregarded the ordinary rule of silence concerning the topics which he discussed with such amazing frankness. He was an innovator, a representative of new ideas. In the literary history of our country he stands unique. At once the target of criticism, he persevered in the delivery of what he certainly believed a "message"; and now, half a century and more since the publication of his earliest volume, he still stands a some-what problematical personality. In the minds of many he appears a man of undoubted genius, Ossianic, elemental, impressive; to some he is the teacher of new-found truths, the prophet and the poet of democracy.

His Life.

Walt Whitman was born on a farm on Long Island. His father was a descendant of pioneer New England stock; his mother's ancestry was Dutch. While Whitman was a child, his parents removed to Brooklyn, where his father practiced the trade of carpenter and builder. The boy was educated but scantily in the public schools, and entered a printer's office at thirteen. He was not continuously employed; he found time to roam the moors and beaches of Long Island in close touch with nature and delighting in the sea; he also found time to read much good literature, the Arabian Nights, Scott, Shakespeare, Ossian, the hero-poetry. of the Germans, and translations of the Greek dramatists and poets. There was a strange fitness in it -- this abrupt, haphazard introduction to the masterpieces of literature. Dante he read in the shadows of a wood; Homer he learned by heart in the shelter of great rocks, listening to the roar of the surf. At fifteen, he one day notices a ship under full sail, and has the desire to describe it like a poet. At eighteen, he teaches a country school. At twenty, he starts a weekly paper in his birthplace, then edits in leisurely fashion a daily paper in New York. He writes romances and verse of the conventional sort for a magazine, rides on the Broadway omnibuses and makes stanch friends with the drivers, is welcomed in the pilot-houses of the ferry-boats that ply on East River, frequents the Bowery, and is a conspicuous figure among the Bohemians who gather in Pfaff's restaurant. At twenty-eight, he is editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and then suddenly takes to the "open road" to see the country and get near