If poets are born and not made this side of heaven, so are sportsmen. In Stedman’s case the two appeared in one, to prove the duality possible. Summer after summer, in the hard-won vacations, the two have sailed the inland lakes and fished in the trout streams together; the fisherman oblivious of all else save the movements of that most animate of inanimate insects--the angler’s fly; the poet equally absorbed in quite another order of motion--that of nature’s play. The range of Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance among backwoodsmen and seafaring men is in proportion to the extent of his journeyings. “There are at least a hundred men with whom I am intimate who don’t dream I have ever written a line,” I once overheard him say in the midst of a story he was telling of the drolleries of some forest guide who was among his “intimates.” This talent for companionship with classes of men removed from his own social orbit has given Stedman that breadth of sympathy and that sure vision in the fields of observation which makes his critical work so unusual. He knows men as a naturalist knows the kingdom of animal life. He can thus analyze and classify, not only the writer, but the man, for he holds the key to a right comprehension of character by virtue of his own plastic sensibility. His delight in getting near to men who are at polaric distances from him socially, makes him impatient of those whom so-called culture has removed to Alpine heights from which to view their fellow-beings. “There’s so and so,” he once said, in speaking of a second-rate poet whose verses were æsthetic sighs to the south wind and the daffodil; “he thinks of nothing but rhyming love and dove. I wonder what he would make out of a man--a friend of mine, for instance, in the Maine woods, a creature as big as Hercules, with a heart to match his strength. I should like to see what he would make of him.” Stedman’s own personality is infused with a raciness and a warmth peculiar to men who have the power of freshening their own lives by that system of wholesome renewal called human contact. Much of the secret of his social charm comes from his delight in, and ready companionship with, all conditions of men.