ocality much changed since her
time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A
picturesque spot it was, overlooking the green stretches of
Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New
York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy
married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in
1850, a passenger in the merchantman _Elizabeth_, when the ship was
wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it.

To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While,
somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her
praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her
husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East
Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly
attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer,
expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunity offered. He,
on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once
referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace
of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her.

There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the
Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning
the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the
year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first
volume of poems, _Footnotes_, had just been published. At Miss Lynch's
house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time
later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their
marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard
made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor. Taylor had already travelled
on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels in
_Views Afoot_, and was then working under Greeley on the _Tribune_, as
one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that
pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and
supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote the
_Tribune's_ book criticisms.

_Views Afoot_ was the most popular book of the day when Stoddard
walked into the _Tribune_ office and introduced himself to the author,
finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the
start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only
broken in upon by death.

A few days after, Stoddard call