up
Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to
Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It
was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there
was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in
the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold
converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean
forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera
House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of
attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend
the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as
though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments
connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the
year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a
company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an
Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas,
_Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia
College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian
opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house
near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers
of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da
Ponte's hopes.

If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few
years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at
his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from
there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and
some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby
St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave
crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay
buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of
these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he
said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but
had attained his ambition at last.

For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his
Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his
eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was
seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's,
acting so strangely that he was thou