Included in this choice collection are the manuscripts of Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem,” Thackeray’s “Sorrows of Werther,” Bryant’s “Antiquity of Freedom,” Longfellow’s “Arrow and Song” (“I shot an arrow into the air”), Mrs. Browning’s “Castrucci Castricanni,” pages of Bryant’s translation of Homer, Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” Lord Houghton’s “I Wandered by the Brookside,” Barry Cornwall’s “Mother’s Last Song,” Sheridan’s “Clio’s Protest” (containing the famous lines, They write with ease to show their breeding, But easy writing’s cursed hard reading), Poe’s sonnet “To Zante,” Holmes’s “Last Leaf,” Lowell’s “Zekle’s Courtin’” and a manuscript volume containing nearly all of Bayard Taylor’s “Poems of the Orient.” His library of English poets contains many now scarce first editions--Drayton’s Poems, 1619; Lord Sterling’s “Monarchic Tragedies,” 1602; Brooke’s “Alaham Mustapha,” 1631; Milton’s Poems, 1645; the early editions of Suckling, etc. The most precious of all Mr. Stoddard’s literary relics is a lock of light brown or golden hair--the veriest wisp,--that came to him from his friend and brother poet Mr. George H. Boker of Philadelphia. Mr. Boker had it from Leigh Hunt’s American editor, S. Adams Lee, to whom it was given by Hunt himself. It was “the distinguished physician Dr. Beatty” who gave it to the English poet; and it was Hoole, the translator of Tasso, who gave it to Beatty. The next previous owner to Hoole was Dr. Samuel Johnson. Further back than this, Leigh Hunt could not trace it; but he believed it to be a portion of the lock attached to a miniature portrait of Milton known to have existed in the time of Addison and supposed to have been in his possession. That it came from the august head of the poet of “Paradise Lost” had never been doubted down to Dr. Beatty’s day; so at least wrote Hunt, in a manuscript of which Mr. Stoddard preserves a copy, in Lee’s handwriting, in a volume of Hunt’s poems edited by that gentleman. There is a fine sonnet of Hunt’s on these golden threads, written when they passed into his possession; and Keats’s poem, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” has made the relic still more memorable. It is smaller now than it was when these great spirits were sojourning on earth, for Leigh Hunt gave a part of it to Mrs. Browning. “Reverence these hairs, O Americans! (as indeed you will),” he wrote, “for _in them_ your great Republican harbinger on this side of the Atlantic appears, for the first time, actually and _bodily_ present on the other side of it.” A companion locket holds a wisp of silver hairs from the head of Washington.