In this transition group, poets of external beauty, Spätromantiker yet classicists in their reverence for rule and tradition and in their struggle for perfection, the typical figure is Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907). By birth he was a New Englander, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent that boyhood which he made classic in the Story of a Bad Boy. Three years in New Orleans whither his father had moved for business reasons, years that seem to have made slight impression upon him, and then, his father dying and a college course becoming out of the question, he went with his mother to New York, where he resided for fourteen years, or between 1852 and 1866. It was a period of activity and of contact with many things that were to influence his later life. He held successively the positions of counting-room clerk, junior literary critic on the Evening Mirror, sub-editor of the Home Journal, literary adviser to Derby and Jackson, and managing editor of the Illustrated News. He formed a close friendship with Taylor and Stoddard and Stedman, and he saw something of the Bohemian group that during the late fifties and early sixties made headquarters at Pfaff's celebrated resort, 647 Broadway. Then came his call to Boston as editor of Every Saturday, his adoption as a Brahmin, his residence on Beacon Street, and his admission to the inner circle of the Atlantic Monthly.
Aldrich's literary life was from first to last a struggle between his Bohemian New York education and his later Brahmin classicism. His first approach to poetry had been through G. P. Morris and Willis on the Mirror and the Journal. From them it was that he learned the strain of sentimentalism which was to produce such poems as "Mabel, Little Mabel," "Marian, May, and Maud," and "Babie Bell." Then swiftly he had come under the spell of Longfellow's German romance, with its Emma of Ilmenau maidens, its delicious sadness and longing, and its worship of the night—that dreamy old-world atmosphere which had so influenced the mid century. It possessed the young poet completely, so completely that he never freed himself entirely from its spell. Longfellow was his poet master:
O Poet-soul! O gentle one!
Thy thought has made my darkness light;
The solemn voices of the night
Have filled me with an inner tone.
I'll drink thy praise in olden wine,
And in the cloak of fine conceite
I'll tell thee how my pulses beat,
How half my being runs to thine.
Then had come the acquaintance with Taylor and Stoddard, and through them the powerful influence of Keats and Tennyson.
To study the evolution of Aldrich as a poet, one need not linger long over The Bells (1855), that earliest collection of echoes and immaturities; one will do better to begin with his prose work, Daisy's Necklace, published two years later, a book that has a significance out of all proportion to its value. As we read it we are aware for the first time of the fact which was to become more and more evident with every year, that there were two Aldriches: the New York romanticist dreaming over his Hyperion, his Keats, his Tennyson, and the Boston classicist, severe with all exuberance, correct, and brilliant. The book is crude, a mere mélange of quotations and echoes, fantastic often and sentimental, yet one cannot read a chapter of it without feeling that it was written with all seriousness. When, for example, the young poet speaks of "The Eve of St. Agnes," we know that he speaks from his heart: "I sometimes think that this poem is the most exquisite definition of one phase of poetry in our language. Musical rhythm, imperial words, gorgeous color and luxurious conceit seemed to have culminated in it." But in the Prologue and the Epilogue of the book there is the later Aldrich, the classicist and critic, who warns us that the work is not to be taken seriously: that it is a mere burlesque, an extravaganza.
In his earlier work he is a true member of the New York school. He looks at life and poetry from the same standpoint that Taylor and Stoddard had viewed them in their attic room on those ambrosial nights when they had really lived. Taylor's Poems of the Orient, inspired by Shelley's "Lines to an Indian Air" and by Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," made a profound impression upon him. Stoddard, who soon was to issue his Book of the East, was also to the young poet like one from a rarer world. When in 1858 Aldrich in his twenty-second year issued his gorgeous oriental poem, The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth, he dedicated it to Stoddard, "under whose fingers this story would have blossomed into true Arabian roses." To his next volume he was to add Cloth of Gold, a grouping of sensuous lyrics breathing the soul of "The Eve of St. Agnes": "Tiger Lilies," "The Sultana," "Latakia," "When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan," and others. Even as Taylor and Stoddard, he dreamed that his soul was native in the East:
I must have known
Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled,
For in my veins some Orient blood is red,
And through my thoughts are lotus blossoms blown.
Everywhere in this earlier work sensuous beauty, soft music faintly heard in an atmosphere breathing sandal-wood, and oriental perfume:
Lavender and spikenard sweet,
And attars, nedd, and richest musk.