Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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‘ [127] developing and controlling our material heritage.’ It was because Stedman was so enthusiastic a follower of all the efforts and advances of the human mind, an alert man of affairs, experienced in business and finance, as well as a poet,¹ that he possessed in such generous measure the ability to judge both scientifically and poetically. His volumes Victorian poets (1876) and Poets of America—those standard works of fine sanity and even finer vision—reveal the great eclectic who with warm heart and open mind had a thousand approaches to life. His understanding of philosophy and his vibrating sense of melody are evident, but perhaps nowhere more significantly than in his appraisal of the poetry of Emerson, where he uses a metaphor suggested by science and the practical affairs of everyday life. Emerson, writes Stedman, ‘had seasons when feeling and expression were in circuit, and others when the wires were down.’ Only Stedman could thus have evalued the electric spark, the brilliant mysterious vitality of Emerson's poetry, negated at times by the insufficiency of his art.

Stedman's essays were almost exclusively in the field of literary criticism, but there have been published since his death two copious volumes of letters revealing in delightful fashion the range of his interest and the charm of his temperament. Beauty was his guide, and friendship was his passion. He had that spirituality which led him to write to John Hay —the most enjoyable of letter writers among our literary statesmen—that the earth ‘is smaller than either your soul or mine’; and though Stedman's manliness remained undaunted before cruel onsets of fate—frequent illness, the loss of fortune, the death of near and dear—he could be moved almost to woman's tears when the love of friends brought to him unexpected tribute. ‘For of Heavenly Love we may dream, but know nothing, while from the currents that flow between earthly hearts—young and old—we do gain our most real and exquisite compensation.’ In the hurried life of New York this poet who was a broker on the Stock Exchange made time to correspond not alone with his many confreres in fame but with a host of younger writers; and it was his chivalric boast that no letter from a woman ever remained unanswered. The