In his present study in the little house in Thirtieth Street there are several photographs, scattered about the room, of a quaint and picturesque seaside house. This is the summer home on the island of New Castle, N. H. It has a tower which seems to have been built over the crest of the waves, and a _loggia_ as wide and spacious as a Florentine palace. No one but a sailor or a sea-lover could have chosen such a spot. To Mr. Stedman, New Castle was a veritable _trouvaille_. It fulfilled every condition of pleasure and comfort requisite in a summer home. The sea was at his doors, and the elms and fields ran down to meet it. The little island, with its quaint old fishing village, its old colonial houses, its lanes and its lovely coast line, is the most picturesque of microcosms ever set afloat. There is no railroad nearer than three miles, and to reach it one crosses as many bridges as span a Venetian canal. Mr. Stedman himself, the poet John Albee, Barrett Wendell (one of Boston’s clever young authors), Prof. Bartlett, of Harvard, and Jacob Wendell’s family, make a charming and intimate little coterie. At Kelp Rock Mr. Stedman is only the poet, the genial host, and the _bon camarade_. Business cares and thoughts are relegated to the world whence they came. The most approachable of authors at all times, at New Castle, with the sea and the sunshine to keep his idleness in countenance, he seems fairly to irradiate companionship. His idleness is of an order to set the rest of the world a lesson in activity. In his play he is even more intense, if possible, than in his work. The play consists of five or six hard-writing hours in his tower during the morning. This is followed by an afternoon of sailing, or fishing, or walking, any one of which forms of pleasure is planned with a view to hard labor of some kind, some strenuous demand on the physical forces. The evening finds him and his family, with some of the group mentioned and often with stray visitors from the outer world, before the drift-wood fire in the low-raftered hall, where talk and good-cheer complete the day. With such abundantly vigorous energies, Mr. Stedman’s quarter of a century of productiveness is only an earnest of his future work. He has doubly pledged himself hereafter to the performance of strictly original creative writing. As critic he has completed the work which he set himself to do--that of rounding the circle of contemporaneous poetry. In giving to the world such masterpieces of critical writing as the “Victorian Poets” and “Poets of America,” he owes it to his own muse to prove that the critic leaves the poet free. ANNA BOWMAN DODD.