Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

Turning back to Stedman's earlier book, the “Victorian poets,” one finds many a terse passage, as where he describes Landor as a “royal Bohemian in art,” or compares the same author's death in Florence at ninety, a banished man, to “the death of some monarch of the forest, most untamed when powerless.” Such passages redeem a book from the danger of being forgotten, but they cannot in the long run save it from the doom which awaits too great diffuseness in words. During all this period of hard work, he found room also for magazine articles, always thoroughly done. Nowhere is there a finer analysis, on the whole, of the sources of difficulty in Homeric translation than will be found in Stedman's review of Bryant's translation of Homer, and nowhere a better vindication of a serious and carefully executed book ( “Atlantic Monthly,” May, 1872). He wrote also an admirable volume of lectures on the “Nature and Elements of poetry” for delivery at Johns Hopkins University.

As years went on, our correspondence inevitably grew less close. On March 10, 1893, he wrote, “I am so driven at this season, ‘let alone’ financial worries, that I have to write letters when and where I can.” Then follows