Recollections, personal and literary . ed in New York, as I have said, inan unpretending little house in East Fif-teenth Street. If I should attempt to char-acterise our home in a few words, I shouldsay that it was nearly such a home as allauthors ought to have. It is plainly fur-nished, but is full of good books, and goodpictures, most of which were painted by ourartist friends. The books are all English, ofcourse, for we had only such education aswe had given ourselves ; but they are allgood books. There is a room over the library which isfull of books and engravings. Here I havekept my coll
Recollections, personal and literary . ed in New York, as I have said, inan unpretending little house in East Fif-teenth Street. If I should attempt to char-acterise our home in a few words, I shouldsay that it was nearly such a home as allauthors ought to have. It is plainly fur-nished, but is full of good books, and goodpictures, most of which were painted by ourartist friends. The books are all English, ofcourse, for we had only such education aswe had given ourselves ; but they are allgood books. There is a room over the library which isfull of books and engravings. Here I havekept my collection of English poetry, newand old, which is an excellent one, myfriends say when they consult it, as did when he was writing his Vic-torian Poets. I have kept my autographshere also, and my books which once belongedto great men. I could show you the books of Byron,Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb,Leigh Hunt, Campbell, Gray, Pope, Sterne,Churchill, and many other famous Englishpoets; and I could show you a mahogany300. OUR HOME IN FIFTEENTH STREET box full of manuscripts from Cowper andShenstone, and Sheridan and Moore, andShelley and Sir Walter Scott and Burnsand Barry Cornwall, and Leigh Hunt andall the famous American poets of the nine-teenth century. I could also show you alock of the hair of John Milton.^ 1 This chapter was written earlier than some of its prede-cessors— before the books and manuscripts to which it referswere presented to the Authors Club. — R. H. 301 THE LAST YEARS XXIITHE LAST YEARS 1 THE difference between the oldFriends Seminary, in StuyvesantSquare, and the garish Waldorf-Astoria indicates measurably the differencebetween the daily life of Richard HenryStoddard and the life of the great NewYork thoroughfares and marts. For nearlyhalf a century he had been a tenant of PeterStuyvesants Bowery farm, and the graceand beauty of the nature which had onceclothed a pastoral landscape were subtlypreserved in his verse. In the early sixties
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