1. B. Aldrich, 1836

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was one of the first to publish of the eastern succession, and has been most steadfast in his devotion to the profession of his early choice. He was born in New Hampshire, passed a part of his youth in Louisiana, and, foregoing a college education, at the age of seventeen entered journalism at New York, where he won the friendship of Willis and became associated with Taylor, Stoddard, and Stedman. There, before he was twenty, he wrote the pathetic Ballad of Babie Bell, and also published his first volume of verse, The Bells (1854). A few years later he removed to Boston and became an integrai part of the literary life of New England. Lowell, the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, had welcomed his contributions to that magazine, and in 1881 Mr. Aldrich found himself in the editor's chair with Lowell as his contributor. He remained editor of the Atlantic for nine years, and his contributions to it number over a hundred. His poems have appeared in many

successive volumes and editions.

Though Aldrich works with comparative ease in a variety of forms, from the sonnet to dramatic blank verse, he is at his best in lyrics of sentiment and fancy and the polished trifles that go to make up society verse. One critic has ventured to say that he recalls the English Herrick. He has some characteristics in common with Longfellow. But Longfellow's simplicity is often replaced in Aldrich by a greater subtlety of thought and overlaid with a more elaborate art. His romantic fancy, too, has more of the far East in it than Longfellow's. Like Stoddard, he fell under the influence of Taylor's travelenriched fancy, and he affects strains that are blent with odors from the Orient." His Dressing the Bride and When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan are replete with color and all sensuous appeals. He is better known, however, by such simpler lyrics as Babie Bell, Before the Rain, and The Face Against the Pane.

Nor is it to be forgotten that Aldrich immensely widened his audience by those prose tales with which, in middle life, he began to vary the product of his pen, and which are marked by the same daintiness and artistic charm as his poetry, suppiemented with a rare quality of humor. The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), Marjorie Daw (1873), and Two Bites at a Cherry (1893) are all well known. The first, largely drawn from memories of Portsmouth, the city of his birth, has become a classic "juvenile"; it was a forerunner of various books in a similar vein, notably Warner's Being a Boy and Howells's A Boy's Town. The second, Marjorie Daw, ranks among the very best short stories written by American authors.

Emily Dickinson 1830-1886.

The poems

Classification and comparison, in the case of a poet like Emily Dickinson, avail nothing. She was modern; beyond that the chances of time and place do not signify; her life and her poetry were equally remote from the ways of others. Her years were passed in seclusion at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was treasurer of Amherst College. Her scanty verses, a kind of soul's diary, written with no thought of publication, became known to a few friends, and after much persuasion she allowed two or three to be published during her life-time. A volume was published only after her death, in 1890. baffle description. They seldom have titles, and sometimes no more words than poets three centuries ago put into their titles, for she pours her words as a chemist his tinctures, fearful of a drop too much. Two stanzas, of four lines each, imperfectly rhymed, and with about four words to the line, are her favorite form. A fourteen-line sonnet is spacious by the side of such poems. Yet few sonnets have ever compressed so much within their bounds. To read one is to be given a pause that will outlast the reading of many sonnets; for they come with revelation, like a flash of lightning that illuminates a landscape

by night and startles with glimpses into an unimagined world. They bear witness in every word to their high inspiration. But stamped though they be with the celestial signature, they are but fragments, and in the temple of art, which keeps its niches for the perfect statue, they must shine obscurely.

Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Mrs. Celia Leighton Thaxter, and yet others of the New England songsters might be named here, but none has written what is ineffaceable and it seems idle to swell the temporary record.

1833

Turning to New York, we are met at once by a veteran of letters already several times named in this history-Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet-critic, a friend of E. C. Stedman, nearly all the literary men of New York both older and younger. He is slightly the senior of Aldrich, whom he knew before Aldrich went to Boston, and slightly the junior of the New York and Philadelphia group of poetjournalists-Taylor, Stoddard, Boker, etc.,-most of whom are now dead. He is a native of Hartford, Connecticut, and his brief college course of two years was taken at Yale. His newspaper life in New York began in 1855, and for several years during the Civil War he was war correspondent of the New York World, gaining experience which he subsequently turned to good account in his verse. His later life has been spent mainly on the Stock Exchange, a career which has afforded him leisure for his seldom interrupted literary pursuits. His poems comprise Poems Lyric and Idyllic (1860), Alice of Monmouth (1863), The Blameless Prince (1869), Hawthorne, and Other Poems (1877), and later lyrics and idyls.

Stedman, like most of his associates, is to be classed with the poets of the artist type-the poets whose creative impulse is never so strong as to make them forget the requirements of technical perfection. But Stedman chooses his themes rather