s became.

"Read Chaucer for strength," he advises Stoddard on January
7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for
sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things,
and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age
as far as you can."

These young men were not quickly received, and they regarded the
utilitarian spirit of the time as against them. To Stoddard Boker once
confessed: "Were poetry forged upon the anvil, cut out with the axe,
or spun in the mill, my heaven, how men would wonder at the process!
What power, what toil, what ingenuity!"

Boker's correspondence with Stoddard began in a letter, dated
September 5, 1849, announcing overtures made by the London Haymarket
Theatre for his new tragedy, "Anne Boleyn," which he was contemplating
sending them in sheets. "I have also the assurance," he announces,
"that Miss Cushman will bring it out in this country, provided she
thinks her powers adapted to it."

Boker's pen was energetic, and it moved at a gait which shows how
fertile was his imagination. "The inseparables" cheered the way for
each other in the face of official journalistic criticism. Taylor
declared "Anne Boleyn" far in advance of "Calaynos," prophesying that
it would last. "Go ahead, my dear poet," he admonishes, "it will soon
be your turn to damn those who would willingly damn you." Together
these friends were always planning to storm the citadel of public
favour with poetry, but Boker seems to have been the only one to whom
the theatre held out attraction. By August 12, 1850, he was sending
news to Stoddard that "The Betrothal" would be staged the following
month. In good spirits, he writes:

The manager is getting it up with unusual care and splendour.
Spangles and red flannels flame through it from end to end. I
even think of appearing before the curtain on horseback, nay,
of making the whole performance equestrian, and of introducing
a hippopotamus in the fifth act. What think you? Have you
and your miserable lyrics ever known such glory? If the
play should take _here_, you benighted New-Yorkers will be
illuminated with it immediately after it has run its hundredth
night in the city which is so proud of its son.

This was the second of his pieces to be given performance, "Anne
Boleyn" never seeing the boards. "The Betrothal" was produced at the
Philadelphia Walnut Street Theatre, on September 2