And, moreover, in addition to all this it is a quivering section of human life. One reads on and on and then—sharply draws his breath at the rapier thrust of the closing lines.
What a world of distance between the early sensuous poet of the New York school and the seer of the later period who could pen a lyric beginning,
O short-breathed music, dying on the tongue
Ere half the mystic canticle be sung!
O harp of life so speedily unstrung!
Who, if 't were his to choose, would know again
The bitter sweetness of the last refrain,
Its rapture and its pain?
Or this in its flawless perfectness:
At noon of night, and at the night's pale end,
Such things have chanced to me
As one, by day, would scarcely tell a friend
For fear of mockery.
Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain!
I know not, faith, not I.
Is it more strange the dead should walk again
Than that the quick should die?
A few of his later sonnets, "Outward Bound," redolent of his early love of the sea, "When to Soft Sleep We Give Ourselves Away," "The Undiscovered Country," "Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme," and "I Vex Me Not with Brooding on the Years," have hardly been surpassed in American literature.
It was from this later period that Aldrich chose almost all of his poems in that compressed volume which was to be his lasting contribution to poetry, A Book of Songs and Sonnets. It is but a fraction of his work, but it is all that will survive the years. He will go down as the most finished poet that America has yet produced; the later Landor, romantic yet severely classical; the maker of trifles that were miracles of art; and finally as the belated singer who awoke in his later years to message and vision and produced with his mastered art a handful of perfect lyrics that rank with the strongest that America has given to song.