When Mr. Stoddard met the woman he was to marry, he had already published, or rather printed (at his own expense), a volume called “Footprints.” The poems were pleasantly noticed in two or three magazines, and one copy of them was sold. As there was no call for the remainder of the edition, it was committed to the flames. Encouraged by this success, the young poet saw no impropriety in becoming the husband of a young lady of Mattapoisett. Elizabeth Barstow was her name, and the tie that bound them was a common love of books. It was at twenty-five (some years before his first meeting with Taylor or Stedman) that the penniless poet and the ship-builder’s daughter were made one by the Rev. Ralph Hoyt, an amiable clergyman of this city, “who found it easier to marry the poet than to praise his verses.” Realizing that man cannot live by poetry alone, particularly when he has given hostages to fortune (as Bacon, not Shakspeare, puts it) he set to work to teach himself to write prose, “and found that he was either a slow teacher, or a slow scholar, probably both.” But prose and verse together, though by no means lavish in their rewards to-day, were still less bountiful in the early ’50s; and even when the slow pupil had acquired what the slow teacher had to impart, he was in a fair way to learn by experience whether or no “love is enough” for husband and wife and an increasing family of children. Not long before this, however, it had been Mr. Stoddard’s good fortune to become acquainted with Hawthorne, and through the romancer’s friendly intervention he received from President Pierce an appointment in the New York Custom House. He was just twenty-eight years of age when he entered the granite temple in Wall Street, and he was forty-five when he regained his freedom from official bondage.