If his early verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable
style of his own--to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical,
most melancholy"--"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again,
to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and
Charon"--to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell,"
to the feeling, wisdom--above all, to the imagination--of his loftier
odes, among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. This is not the
place to eulogize such work. But one thing may be noted in the progress
of what in Berkeley's phrase may be called the planting of arts and
letters in America. Mr. Stoddard and his group were the first after Poe
to make poetry--whatever else it might be--the rhythmical creation of
beauty. As an outcome of this, and in distinction from the poetry of
conviction to which the New England group were so addicted, look at the
"Songs of Summer" which our own poet brought out in 1857. For beauty
pure and simple it still seems to me fresher and more significant than
any single volume produced up to that date by any Eastern poet save
Emerson. It was "poetry or nothing," and though it came out of time in
that stormy period, it had to do with the making of new poets
thereafter.

In conclusion, I am moved to say, very much as I wrote on his seventieth
birthday, that our poet's laborious and nobly independent life, with all
its lights and shadows, has been one to be envied. There is much in
completeness--its rainbow has not been dissevered--it is a perfect arc.
As I know him, it has been the absolute realization of his young desire,
the unhasting, unresting life of a poet and student, beyond that of any
other writer among us. Its compensations have been greater than those of
ease and wealth. Even now he would not change it, though at an age when
one might well have others stay his hands. He had the happiness to win
in youth the one woman he loved, with the power of whose singular and
forceful genius his own is inseparably allied. These wedded poets have
been blessed in their children, in the exquisite memory of the dead, in
the success and loyalty of the living. His comrades have been such as he
pictured to his hope in youth--poets, scholars, artists of the
beautiful, with whom he has "warmed both hands before the fire of life."
None of them has been a more patient worker or more loved his work. To
it he has given his years, whether waxing o