The image is all but gone from the glass plate; what remains is a faded shadow of the man and his daughter, frozen forever in the interrupted moment of their chess game. When this picture was taken, Clement Clarke Moore was past middle age, with most of his achievements behind him, with the way of life he had known in rural Manhattan disappearing. Born midway through the Revolution, he would die seven days after the Battle of Gettysburg, his eighty-four years spanning the birth and breakup of the Union.

The society in which he grew up was that of a landed aristocracy virtually unchanged from pre-Revolutionary days—a gentle, courtly, leisurely world. His maternal grandmother, an unreconstructed Tory, left his parents her handsome three-story house, called Chelsea, on a wooded hill overlooking the Hudson River at what is now Twenty-third Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues. She also bequeathed them a Jersey salt meadow, four slaves, and lands upstate which had been part of a 400,000-acre patent from the Crown. Clement Moore would have no real financial burdens thrust upon him. Nor would his grandmother’s politics prove a great drawback: his father, an Episcopal minister (later Bishop of New York) who had taken no sides in the Revolution, was asked to participate in George Washington’s inaugural and was called to the side of the dying Alexander Hamilton after the duel with Burr.

Although he published works on several other subjects, Moore’s abiding interests were language and religion. After graduating from Columbia College at the head of his class, he began work on A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language , which he brought out in 1809, hoping it might break down his countrymen’s resistance to the study of Hebrew. (Apparently he did not feel the need to defend the other languages in which he was fluent—Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian.) In 181 g he offered a part of his estate to the Protestant Episcopal Church, making possible the building of its General Theological Seminary, where he became professor of Biblical learning and for twenty-five years taught Oriental and Greek literature. Hc was also a benefactor of St. Peter’s Church, where he served faithfully as organist (given his interests, it may have been no accident that the church pews were marked with Roman numerals).

As the years passed, the burgeoning city began to crowd in on Chelsea. Twenty third Street became a busy thoroughfare; rows of small brick houses began to go up where there had been fields; woodland and marshes disappeared. Eventually nothing but the memory of the Moore house survived, in the name Chelsca Square. And if Moore himsell is remembered at all today, it is usually for a poem he wrote with no thought of publication, but as a Christmas gift for his family.

Sometime in December of 1822, he composed twenty-eight couplets of a ballad, and on Christmas live read