ment, this paper soon rose to be one of the most important of the political papers of the State. Three years later we find him writing on the "New York Tribune," where he obtained a foot-hold in literature, as we have already indicated by the publication of the two poems above mentioned.

When the "World" was started, in the winter of 1860, Mr. Stedman engaged with that journal and was editor of it when the news came over the wires that Fort Sumter had been fired upon. He wrote a poem on the occasion which was, perhaps, the first poem inspired by the war between the states. Soon after this Mr. Stedman went to Washington as the army correspondent of the "World." He was at the first battle of Bull's Run and published a long and graphic letter in the "World" about the defeat of the Union troops which he witnessed. This letter was the talk of the town for days and altogether has been pronounced the best single letter written during the whole war.

Before the close of the war, Mr. Stedman resigned his position as editor and entered the office of Attorney General Bates at Washington; but in January, 1864, he returned with his family to New York and published his second volume of poems entitled," Alice of Monmouth, An Idyl of the Great War, and Other Poems,' which may be described as a little poetic novel. The opening scene is laid in Monmouth County, New Jersey; the later ones on the battle fields of Virginia.

The titles and dates of Mr. Stedman's other books are as follows: "The Blameless Prince, and other Poems" (1869); "Poetical Works" (1873); "Victorian Poets" (1875); "Hawthorne and Other Poems" (1877); "Lyrics and Idyls, with Other Poems" (1879); the "Poems of Austin Dobson," with an introduction (1880); "Poets of America" (1886), and with Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, he edited "A Library of American Literature" (11 vols., 1888-1890).

Many people entertain the notion that a man cannot be at one and the same time, a poet and a man of business. This is a mistake. Fitz Green Hallack was for many years a competent clerk of John Jacob Astor; Charles Sprague was for forty years teller and cashier in a Boston bank; Samuel Rodgers, the English poet, was all his life a successful banker; Charles Follen Adams, the humorous and dialectic poet, is a prosperous merchant in Boston; and Edmund Clarence Stedman has been for many years the head of a firm of stock brokers with a suit of offices in Exchange Place, New York, dealing in government securities and railway stocks and bonds, and also petroleum, in which fortunes were at one time made and lost with great rapidity. Nevertheless, Mr. Stedman, the stock-broker and banker is still Mr. Stedman, the poet. The most of his splendid verses have been produced while he was depending for a living upon journalistic work or upon some business for support. Mr. Stedman also illustrates the fact, as Edgar Allen Poe had done before him, that a poet may be a practical critic. And why not? If poets are not the best critics of poetry, musicians are not the best critics of music, architects are not the best, critics of architecture and painters of painting. Mr. Stedman's "Victorian Poets" is, perhaps, the most important contribution of all our American writers to the critical literature on the English Poets.

One

The home-life of Mr. Stedman is described as being an ideally happy one. of his poems entitled "Laura, My Darling," addressed to his wife, gives us a delightful glimpse into the heart and home of the poet.

BETROTHED ANEW.

"The sunshine of the outer world beautifully illustrates the sunshine of the heart in the 'Betrothed Anew' of Edmund Clarence Stedman.”—Morris.

HAMILTON W. MABIE.

THE MODERN CRITIC.

N the modern school of literary critics, whose best representatives are Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Lowell and Stedman, Hamilton W. Mabie has a prominent place. His aim has been, as is the aim of all great criticism, not only to give an estimate of a man's work, but to show the man's soul. He was born at Cold Springs, on the banks of the Hudson, of a family of culture. He was prepared for college under a private tutor, and graduated at Williams College in the Class of '67-a class which numbered many men of fame.

From boyhood Maybie has been a great reader, and he is familiar with the classics of all literatures, as well as a student of contemporaneous literature.

After a course of law at Columbia University his literary tendencies drew him into his natural field and away from a profession uncongenial to him. In 1879 he took a position on the staff of the "Christian Union," which under its new name, the "Outlook," under the joint editorship of Mabie and Lyman Abbott, has taken a prominent place among the foremost religious journals of the world. "My Study Fire," which expresses our author's ideas of the function of literature, and the attitude and spirit of the literary man, first appeared as a series of articles in this religious journal.

In the last few years Mr. Mabie has taken a prominent place on the platform on literary and educational subjects, though he scrupulously keeps his public speaking subordinate to his writing. His addresses are marked with elegance, grace, and all the fruits of culture, and they show a profound study of the problems of life and spirit. He has a beautiful home at Summit, New Jersey, an enviable site for a writer, with the multitudinous charms of nature without and the gathered wisdom of the world's great thinkers within.

He is a man of robust life, of clear, healthy mind and of high faith. He has declared that "Skepticism is the root of all evil in us and in our arts. We do not believe enough in God, in ourselves, and in the divine laws under which we live. Great art involves great faith-a clear, resolute, victorious insight into and grasp of things, a belief real enough in

The mighty hopes which make us men'

to inspire and sustain heroic tasks," a declaration quite typical of all his thought.

COUNTRY SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

BY HAMILTON W. MABIE

Illustrated from original photographs by Conrad Baer.

AT the end of February the observer begins to see the faint forerunners of spring. The willow shows signs of renewing its freshness, and the long stretch of cold, with brilliant or steely skies, is interrupted by days full of an indescribable softness. It is almost pathetic to note with what joy the spirit of man takes cognizance of these first hints of the color, the bloom and the warmth slowly creeping up to the southern horizon-line. For we are children of the sun, and, much as we love our hearthstones, we are never quite at home unless we have the freedom of the out-of-door world. Winter finds its great charm in the ingathering of the memories of the summer that is gone and in the anticipation of the summer that is at hand. Half the cheer of the blazing log lies in the air of the woods which it brings into the narrow room.

To be out of doors is the normal condition of the natural man. At some period of our ancestral life, so dim in our thought but so potential in our temper, disposition and physique, we have all lived, so to speak, in the open air; and although city-born and city-bred, we turn to the country with an instinctive feeling that we belong there. There are a few cockneys to whom the sound of Bow Bells is

sweeter than the note of the bluebird, the resonant clarion of chanticleer or the far-off bleating of sheep; but to the immense majority of men these noises are like sounds that were familiar in childhood. I have sometimes thought that the deepest charm of the country lies in the fact that it was the home and play-ground of the childhood of the race, and, however long some of us have been departed from it, it stirs within us rare memories and associations which are imperishable. The lowing of cattle coming home at nightfall; the bleating of sheep on the hillside. pastures; the crowing of the cock, are older than any human speech which now exists. They were ancient sounds before our oldest histories were written. I know of nothing sweeter to the man who comes out of the heat and noise and dust of the city in midsummer than to be awakened. on the first morning by that irregular tinkle of bells which accompanies the early processions of the cows. One may never have come nearer a farm than his great-grandfather, but that sound makes him feel as if he were at home after some long and arduous absence.

THE OLD WELL-CURB

And one has but to put into his pocket a few of those clever newspapers which satirize society people in spirited and well-drawn lines, and carry them into the country, to discover that the picturesque flees the city and loves the country; so far, that is, as people are concerned. There is certainly something wrong with