It has taken us a long while to get here, but here we are at last; and I, for my part, am in no hurry to get away again. It is just such a house as you would expect to find a man like Stoddard in: a poet’s home and literary workshop. There is no space, and no need, for a parlor. The front room (to the left as you enter the house) is called the library. Its general air is decidedly luxurious. There is a profusion of easy chairs and lounges, and of graceful tables laden with odd and precious bits of bric-à-brac. There is more bric-à-brac on the mantel-piece. The walls are covered close with paintings. At the windows hang heavy curtains; and the portière at a wide doorway at the back of the apartment frames a pleasant glimpse of the dining-room. Rugs of various dimensions cover the matting almost without break. The fireplace is flanked on each side by high book-cases of artistically carved dark wood, filled with books in handsome bindings. A full-length portrait of an officer in uniform fills the space above the mantel-piece: it is Colonel Wilson Barstow, of General Dix’s staff, who served at Fortress Monroe during the war, and died in 1868. It hangs where it does because the Colonel was Mrs. Stoddard’s brother. Between the front windows is a plaster medallion of the master of the house, by his old friend Launt Thompson. (A similar likeness of “Willy” Stoddard, and a plaster cast of his little hand, both by Mr. Thompson, are the only perishable mementoes his parents now possess--save “a lock of curly golden hair”--to remind them of their first-born, dead since ’61.) On the east wall is a canvas somewhat more than a foot square, giving a full-length view of Mr. Stoddard, standing, as he appeared to T. W. Wood in 1873, when the snow-white hair against which the laurel shows so green to-day had just begun to lose its glossy blackness. Alongside of this hangs a larger frame, showing W. T. Richards’s conception of “The Castle in the Air” described in the first poem of Stoddard’s that attracted wide attention,-- A stately marble pile whose pillars rise From deep-set bases fluted to the dome. * * * * * The spacious windows front the rising sun, And when its splendor smites them, many-paned, Tri-arched and richly-stained, A thousand mornings brighten there as one.