[1][2] By the following spring, his mother Elizabeth Clementine Stedman moved the boy and his younger brother to Plainfield, New Jersey, to live with her wealthy father, David Low Dodge.

He then moved to New York City in 1856 and joined the staff of the Tribune and then the World, for which latter paper he served as field correspondent during the first years of the Civil War.

[1][5] As opportunity offered, he studied law and was for a time private secretary to Attorney-General Bates at Washington, and was a member of the New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street from 1865 to 1900.

[5] An idyllic atmosphere is the prevalent characteristic of his longer pieces, while the lyric tone is never absent from his songs, ballads and poems of reflection or fancy.

[5] This study appeared in separate chapters in Scribner's Monthly (which closed in 1881 and was relaunched the same year as the Century Magazine), and was reissued, with enlargements, in the volumes entitled Victorian Poets (1875; continued to the Jubilee year in the edition of 1887) and Poets of America (1885), the two works forming the most symmetrical body of literary criticism yet published in the United States.

Their value is increased by the treatise on The Nature and Elements of Poetry (Boston, 1892) a work of great critical insight as well as technical knowledge.