The Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard Electronic resource
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander Von Humboldt (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander Von...)
Excerpt from The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander Von Humboldt
There are several biographies of Humboldt, French, German, and English, but none of any importance, except Professor Klencke's. Klencke had an excellent opportunity to make a good book, for much of his material was obtained from Humboldt himself, but he failed to do so. He seemed to have no idea of writing, beyond its being a means of conveying facts. His facts are reliable, but bunglingly arranged, without order or method. He says the same thing over and over again, and entirely lacks the chief requisite of a biographer - the art of making his subject attractive. Still, he is reliable, and the author has made considerable use of his work, especially in Book I.
The first five chapters of Book II. are taken from Humboldt's "Voyage aux Régions Equinoxiales." As these chapters cover an important epoch in Humboldt's life, it was thought advisable to let him tell his own story, and this has accordingly been done, wherever it was practicable, the relation being changed from the first person to the third - from autobiography to narrative.
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The Works of Washington Irving: The Sketch Book, Legends of the Conquest of Spain, A Life of Washington Irving By Richard Henry Stoddard ( Volume One of the Series)
(Washington Irving (1783-1859) was an American author of t...)
Washington Irving (1783-1859) was an American author of the early 19th century. Best known for his short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, he was also a prolific essayist, biographer and historian. He spoke fluent Spanish, which served him well in his writings on that country, and he could read several other languages, including German and Dutch. His first book was A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). He travelled on the Western frontier in the 1830s and recorded his glimpses of Western tribes in A Tour on the Prairies (1835). He spoke against the mishandling of relations with the Native American tribes by Europeans and Americans. He popularized the nickname aGothama for New York City, and is credited with inventing the expression athe Almighty dollara.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
An abridged History of England and condensed chronology, from the time of the ancient Britons to the reign of Queen Victoria; with a synopsis of England in the nineteenth century, etc.
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Title: An abridged History of England and condensed chr...)
Title: An abridged History of England and condensed chronology, from the time of the ancient Britons to the reign of Queen Victoria; with a synopsis of England in the nineteenth century, etc.
Publisher: British Library, Historical Print Editions
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.
The HISTORY OF BRITAIN & IRELAND collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. As well as historical works, this collection includes geographies, travelogues, and titles covering periods of competition and cooperation among the people of Great Britain and Ireland. Works also explore the countries' relations with France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Scandinavia.
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British Library
Maccalman, Archibald Hamilton; Stoddard, Richard Henry;
1880.
669 p. ; 8º.
9503.ee.11.
(Abraham Lincoln - An Horatian Ode is presented here in a ...)
Abraham Lincoln - An Horatian Ode is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Richard Henry Stoddard is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Richard Henry Stoddard then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
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This treasury of verse rejoices in the pleasures of the...)
This treasury of verse rejoices in the pleasures of the countryside and the beauty of the outdoors. Originally published in the mid-19th century, Under Green Leaves offers a wealth of poetry inspired by nature, from lyrics by English dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, to works by Metaphysical, Romantic, and Victorian poets.
Dozens of enchanting verses include William Blake's "Piping Down the Valleys Wild," "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats, Andrew Marvell's "The Garden," and Thomas Campbell's "To the Evening Star." No compilation of nature poetry would be complete without contributions from William Wordsworth, whose "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "To a Skylark" appear here. Other featured poets include John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Mary Howitt, and many other writers whose meditations on flowers, birds, woodlands, and summer evenings remain ever green.
Richard Henry Stoddard was an American poet, critic, and editor. He was one of the first in America to deal with Oriental themes.
Background
Richard was born on July 2, 1825 at Hingham, Massachussets, United States, the son of Reuben and Sophia (Gurney) Stoddard.
On his paternal side he was a descendant of John Stodder who had emigrated to Hingham and received there a grant of land in 1638. His ancestors had followed the sea for several generations, and his father had risen, through hard work, from the rank of ordinary seaman to that of master and part-owner of the Royal Arch, on which he was lost when Stoddard was but a child of two or three. He seems to have been the one person who might have influenced the child's later literary pursuits, for in letters which he wrote his wife while he was away on voyages, signed interchangeably "Reuben Stodder" and "Reuben Stoddard, " he exhibited a certain amount of untrained literary ability. The Gurneys were an uneducated and improvident family who, at the time Stoddard was a child, were principally employed as operatives in cotton mills throughout New England. After her husband's death Stoddard's mother made her home first with her husband's family and then with her own people, moving with them from one factory town to another.
His mother was a restless and lonely woman who, although she attempted to apply herself to her child's education, had neither the intelligence nor the emotional stability to give him much aid. After a few years in Hingham and in Abington, the ancestral home of the Gurneys, mother and son moved to Boston, where Stoddard ran about as a street urchin, while his mother was engaged in making rough clothes for the sailors who entered Boston harbor.
Education
Stoddard attended school in New York for a few years, learning little, but reading cheap reprints of Burns, James Beattie, Cowper, and Shakespeare.
His mother and his step-father had been unsympathetic towards advanced learning and too poor even to provide their son with good books to read. But Stoddard, unschooled as he was, early began to cultivate his love for literature and literary figures. He assiduously studied the English masters and by 1845 had begun to write. He was the typical figure of the literary climber.
He worked at his task of iron moulding uncomplainingly, buoyed up by the thought of friendly conversation with book-loving companions at night, and he sought out such men as Dr. Ralph Hoyt, Park Benjamin, and Lewis Gaylord Clark. From them and the books he studied so earnestly he learned much of the history and forms of English poetry.
Career
At the age of fifteen he was compelled to begin to contribute to the support of the family. He thus became successively an errand boy, a shop boy, a legal copyist, "a sort of factotum" in the office of a shortlived journal, a bookkeeper, and at the age of eighteen an iron moulder. It is difficult to understand how one with such a background could have entered upon literature as a profession.
His early verse appeared in such magazines as the Rover, the Home Journal, the Southern Literary Messenger, the Knickerbocker, the Union Magazine, and Godey's Lady's Book.
In 1849 he brought out, at his own expense, his first volume, Foot-Prints, of which one copy (now in the Library of Congress, Washington) was sold before Stoddard repented of his amateurish attempts and burned the whole edition. The poems are frankly imitative of Keats and Wordsworth. In 1851 he brought out Poems, which was favorably reviewed, a much more finished work than Foot-Prints.
During his seventeen-year tenure of the office in the position of an inspector of customs in the New York custom house he wrote constantly. From 1860 to 1870 he was a literary reviewer for the World (New York).
When his reputation became assured, about 1870, his home assumed the aspects of a literary salon. He has been described as the "Nestor of American literature, " and indeed for over thirty years his home was one of the most important centers of New York's cultural life. He served as a link between the older writers - Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, all of whom he had known - and the later writers of his own day - Bayard Taylor, Edmund Clarence Stedman, George Henry Boker, Thomas Buchanan Read, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Herman Melville.
After his discharge from customs duty he became for some three years a confidential secretary to General George Brinton McClellan in the docks department; in 1877 he was appointed city librarian, a political position involving the handling of municipal books, which he held for nearly two years.
From 1880 until his death he was the literary editor of the Mail and Express. During this latter period of his life he was engaged in several editorial ventures, notably as editor of the Aldine, a short-lived journal, and the Bric-. .. -Brac and Sans-Souci Series.
His unfortunate early life, the poor royalties from his work and from his wife's novels, the early death of two children, a sorrow crowned by the death of his third son, Lorimer, the gifted playwright, followed within the year by Mrs. Stoddard's death - all served to drive him towards a madness from which only his beloved books and faithful friends saved him.
Achievements
Richard Henry Stoddard was the authot of famous work The Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard, The Lion's Cub. A fair sample of his editorial work is English Verse (1883), done in collaboration with W. J. Linton.
In his parody of contemporary writers, The Echo Club (1876), Bayard Taylor placed Stoddard as one of the most important ciritcs of the day, alongside James Russell Lowell and George Ripley.
He was clearly imitative in most of his verse; many of his poems echo trite sentiments and express feeble emotions. In the field of criticism, however, he did much able work. By constant study he made himself one of the most learned critics of his day, and though his critical work often shows mistaken judgment or even personal bias, as in the case of Poe, it is on the whole remarkably accurate and painstaking, considering that most of it was designed as mere hackwork. As an editor he was careful and comparatively sound in his judgment.
Widely popular, Stoddard received the poetic effusions of hundreds of poetasters from all over the land, but, although he was genial, he was none the less firm and unswerving in his literary judgment. He hated sham and vigorously condemned as he wholeheartedly praised; his remarks on Bohemianism, for example, were vitriolic.
Personality
Stoddard was not in any sense a great poet. His ear was faulty, his powers of imagination were limited, but he often felt keenly and deeply the emotions which he expressed.
His conversation was vigorous and quite often profane. Withal he was a brave figure of a man, often railing at fate but going ahead methodically and painstakingly, dropping many caustic comments on life by the way.
In the later years of his life, as the result of rheumatism in childhood, two cataracts, and an attack of paralysis, he was an almost helpless invalid. A variety of other circumstances had combined as well to embitter him.
Connections
He was married, probably in December 1851, to Elizabeth Drew Barstow of Mattapoisett, Massachussets, a high-strung, temperamental woman who had a genius for conversation and some gift for writing.
