Stedman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833. After the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, he was brought up from 1839 to 1850 under charge of an uncle. A member of the class of 1853 at Yale, he was "rusticated" (see p. 282) and then expelled for persistent misbehavior. Until 1863 he was in journalism, as petty proprietor in two Connecticut towns, and later as member of the _New York Tribune_ staff, ending with two years as war correspondent. In 1863 he went into Wall Street, and in 1869 became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. From this date to the end of his life in 1908 he knew little real repose, oscillating from over-exertion in business to over-exertion in writing, with occasional enforced vacations. His work as poet was inseparable from his labors as editor and critic. In this field he wrote "Victorian Poets," 1875, "Poets of America," 1885, and "The Nature and Elements of Poetry," 1892; and edited the "Library of American Literature" (with Ellen Hutchinson) 1888-1889, "A Victorian Anthology," 1895, and "An American Anthology," 1900. Stedman took the consequences of settling in the commercial capital of the United States. While the members of the Saturday Club were lending distinction to Boston, the members of the Ornithorhyncus Club and the Bohemians were receiving the impress of New York. Men came to the Saturday luncheons from Salem and Haverhill, Concord, and Cambridge as well as near-by Brookline and Boston itself, but the New York groups congregated into literary neighborhoods in the "Unitary Home" or "on the south side of Tenth Street." Thus it came about that Aldrich contributed to Boston what he brought there, but that Stedman was "made in New York." As a result Aldrich was more frankly absorbed in the concerns of the enlightened reader, and Stedman relatively more interested in a broader society. Both were war correspondents, but Aldrich admitted the war into his poetry only rarely, and then without much success. On the other hand, the first eighth of Stedman's collected poems are entitled "In War Time," and with the poems of Manhattan, of New England, and of special occasions amount to nearly one half the volume. Moreover, of the poems by Stedman which are generally known and quoted, quite the larger portion are included in utterances which are representative of literature "in its public relationships." A timely admonition from Lowell, as valuable as the one from Holmes to Aldrich, helped keep him out of the byways in which he was inclined to stray. In 1866 Stedman was proud of his "Alectryon," a blank-verse poem on a classic theme which had appeared in one of his books three years before.