There is no life on land or sea
Save in the quiet moon and me;
Nor ours is true, but only seems
Within some dead old World of Dreams.
And this dream world was an abandoned unreality and not a hope for something better.
Taken at its best, his verse is chiefly excellent for its form. As it does not spring from any vivid experiencing of life, it is conventional and reminiscent rather than spontaneous and original. It suggests many measures from many periods. In only a few poems, which purport to be themselves imitations from the East, he writes what seems fresh and new. His real gift was in the composition of little poetic cameos, bits of from four to a dozen lines, the dainty ornaments of literature.
The career of Thomas Bailey Aldrich was closely interwoven with the whole fabric of professional authorship in America. Like Bryant and Willis before him, and like Stedman, Stoddard, and Winter of his own generation, he established himself in New York, although he was a New England boy; but unlike all the others he fulfilled his career in Boston. It was an accident of dollars and cents that kept him out of Harvard and put him into a New York office. A love of literature led him then successively into the adventurous byways of Bohemian New York, the secure dignity of magazine editorship in Boston, and the fair prospects of independent literary success as enjoyed on Beacon Hill.
To be explicit, he was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1836. His father’s pursuit of fortune took Aldrich as a child to many parts of the country, but brought him back to Portsmouth at the age of thirteen. For the next three years he lived there the life which provided the basic facts for “The Story of a Bad Boy.” Lack of funds prevented his entering Harvard, and in 1852 he undertook a clerkship in the office of a New York uncle. In 1855, when he was still only nineteen, he published his first volume of poetry and became junior literary critic on the Evening Mirror. In the next several years he held a sub-editorship in New York on the Home Journal and the Saturday Press and literary adviserships to several minor publishing houses, capping off with the editorship of the Illustrated News, which had become a thing of the past when, in 1866, he was called to Boston to become editor of Every Saturday. This post he held for nine years. For the six years up to 1881 he was an abundant contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and for the next nine, 1881–1890, he was the editor. During the remainder of his life he held no literary position.
During his fifteen years in New York, Greeley and Bryant, two newspaper editors, were perhaps the dominant figures in the literary and intellectual stratum, Willis and Halleck the most popular, Henry Clapp, Jr., and Charles T. Congdon the cleverest, and “Bohemia,” with its rallying point at Pfaff’s restaurant, the visible rallying place for the authors.[30] Aldrich gravitated toward this group, but never really belonged to it. Just why he did not can be inferred from a sentence by Howells, whose nature was very like his own: “I remember that, as I sat at that table, under the pavement, in Pfaff’s beer-cellar, and listened to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat’s, and felt that I had fallen very far.”[31]