[Since this sketch was written (November, 1885) Mr. Stedman has sold his Fifty-fourth Street house, leased a house in East Twenty-sixth Street, bought one in West Seventy-eighth Street (1890) and sold it in 1895, at the same time that he disposed of “Kelp Rock.” His permanent home is now at Lawrence Park--“Casa Laura,” named after his wife and granddaughter--although he spent last winter in apartments in New York. His most recent works are his Victorian and American Anthologies and “Mater Coronata,” the poem written for the Bicentennial Celebration of Yale University.--EDITORS.] RICHARD HENRY STODDARD RICHARD HENRY STODDARD IN NEW YORK Among those New York men-of-letters who are “only that and nothing more”--who are known simply as writers, and not as politicians or public speakers, like George William Curtis in the older, or Theodore Roosevelt in the younger, generation,--there is no figure more familiar than that of Richard Henry Stoddard. The poet’s whole life since he was ten years old has been passed on Manhattan Island; no feet, save those of some veteran patrolman, “have worn its stony highways” more persistently than his. The city has undergone many changes since the boy landed at the Battery one Sunday morning over half a century ago, and with his mother and her husband wandered up Broadway, but his memory keeps the record of them all. It is not only New York that has changed its aspect in the hurrying years; the times have changed, too, and the conditions of life are not so hard for this adopted New Yorker as they were in his boyhood and early youth. Perhaps he is not yet in a position to display the motto of the Stoddards, “Post Nubes Lux,” which he once declared would be his when the darkness that beclouded his fortunes had given place to light. But his labors to-day, however irksome and monotonous, are not altogether uncongenial. He is not yet free from the necessity of doing a certain amount of literary hackwork (readers of _The Mail and Express_ are selfish enough to hope he never will be); but he has sympathetic occupation and surroundings, leisure to write verse at other than the “mournful midnight hours,” a sure demand for all he writes (a condition not last or least in the tale of a literary worker’s temporal blessings), and, above all, that sense of having won a place in the hearts of his fellow-men which should be even more gratifying to a poet than the assurance of a niche in the Temple of Fame. Such further gratification as this last assurance may give, Mr. Stoddard certainly does not lack.