Stedman came from Mount Auburn to my house after the funeral of Aldrich, with a look of utter exhaustion on his face such as alarmed me. A little rest and refreshment brought him to a curious revival of strength and animation; he talked of books, men, and adventures, in what was almost a monologue, and went away in comparative cheerfulness with his faithful literary associate, Professor George E. Woodberry. Yet I always associate him with one of those touching letters which he wrote to me before the age of the typewriter, more profusely than men now write, and the very fact that we lived far apart made him franker in utterance. The following letter came from Keep Rock, New Castle, New Hampshire, September 30, 1887:— “You are a ‘noble kinsman’ after all, of the sort from whom one is very glad to get good words, and I have taken your perception of a bit of verse as infallible, ever since you picked out three little ‘Stanzas for Music’ as my one best thing. Every one else had overlooked them, but I knew that—as Holmes said of his ‘Chambered Nautilus’—they were written ‘better than I could.’ By the way, if you will overhaul Duyckinck’s ‘Encyclopedia of Literature’ _in re_ Dr. Samuel Mitchill, you will see who first wrote crudely the ‘Chambered Nautilus.’” Two years after, he wrote, April 9, 1889:— “The newspapers warn me that you are soon to go abroad.... I must copy for you now the song which you have kindly remembered so many years. In sooth, I have always thought well of your judgment as to poetry, since you intimated (in ‘The Commonwealth,’ was it not?) that these three stanzas of mine were the thing worth having of my seldom-written verse. I will write on the next page a passage which I lately found in Hartmann (a wonderful man for a pessimist), and which conveys precisely the idea of my song.” To this he adds as a quotation the passage itself:— “The souls which are near without knowing it, and which can approach no nearer by ever so close an embrace than they eternally are, pine for a blending which can never be theirs so long as they remain distinct individuals.” The song itself, which he thought, as I did, his high-water mark, here follows. Its closing verse appears to me unsurpassed in American literature. STANZAS FOR MUSIC (From an Unfinished Drama) Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word; Close, close in my arms thou art clinging; Alone for my ear thou art singing A song which no stranger hath heard: But afar from me yet, like a bird, Thy soul, in some region unstirred, On its mystical circuit is winging.