A FAMOUS AMERICAN POET AND

HUMOURIST:

MA

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

BY "ARNISTO."

ARK TWAIN once declared that T. B. Aldrich was the

very wittiest man he had ever met. When Twain has said so, we may accept the pronouncement as being irrefutable, and it would also seem, to judge from the following specimen of his humour, that there is something wonderfully akin between the author of "Innocents Abroad" and his witty and poetic countryman.

Mr. Aldrich had received a letter from a friend of his, Professor Morse, whose writing is apparently wholly illegible and here is how Aldrich replied:

"MY DEAR MR. MORSE,-It was very pleasant for me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew), and the signature (which I guessed at). There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter like yours-it never grows old, it never loses its novelty. One can say to one's self every morning: 'There's that letter of Morse's, I haven't read it yet. I think I'll take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t's that look like w's, and those i's that have no eyebrows.' Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept for ever-unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a life-time.—Admiringly yours,

"T. B. ALDRICH."

Born sixty-four years ago in the old seaside town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Mr. Aldrich retains such a light-heartedness and effervescence of humour that it would seem as if he had discovered the elixir of life, such an air has he about him of perpetual youth. So young, indeed, is he

in appearance that a friend of his once commented upon it. "Yes," he replied, with a quizzical smile, "I was born young, and the habits formed in early youth are never shaken off very easily."

He sprang originally from a noble English stock. "There are two ancestors of mine," he once said, with conscious pride, "in Grantham churchyard-a Cromwellian, austere and smileless, and his sunny Southern wife,

"In me these two have met again;
To each my nature owes a part.
To one the cool and reasoning brain :
To one the quick, unreasoning heart."

When Aldrich was seventeen he moved to New York. His uncle was a merchant there, and the future poet's start in life was as a clerk in his relative's counting-house. A continual hankering after a literary life was fostered by miscellaneous reading and observation, by the writing of poems, and by practice and experience of writing prose sketches and articles for journals and periodicals. His associates at this time were the poets Stedman, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor, while he was also more or less in touch with the group that included Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, and William Winter.

In 1866 he removed to Boston, and became editor of Every Saturday, a post which he held for eight years, when he resigned. A year of travel in Europe was noteworthy for the fresh impetus which it gave to his pen, many rich and dainty contributions to literature testifying to the clearness of his vision and the poetic fervour with which he approached objects worthy of his romantic observation.

He afterwards established a pretty country house at Ponkapog, a few miles west of Boston. This last suggested the title of a charming book of travel papers, "From Ponkapog to Pesth." Editorship apparently had not altogether lost its fascination for him, the year 1881 finding him editing the Atlantic Monthly. For nine years he conducted that famous magazine, at intervals making short trips to Europe, and travel

ling occasionally as far as the heart of Russia, and gathering fresh material for essay and song. Since relinquishing the editorship of the Atlantic a considerable portion of his time has been passed in voyaging, and in 1894-95 he made a journey round the world. The predominant note in T. B. Aldrich's poetry is that which tells of Old Romance, with its old-time fire and antique grace, suffused with a tender melancholy of language which is ineffable in its haunting glamour of ancient picturesqueness and mediæval beauty. Old Romance is the vein which he first struck with such quiet certainty, and which he has since worked so magnificently. Handled so deftly, and with such exqusite tenderness, and now and then touched by lights of humour so reserved and quaint, his romantic lyrics open up a vista of never-failing delight and charm to his readers. Take, for example, the following on

All is dead here,
Joy is fled here;

Let us hence. 'Tis the end of all.
The grey arch crumbles,

And totters, and tumbles,

And silence sits in the banquet-hall."

The exacting standard of craftsmanship to which Mr. Aldrich has brought his work is proof abundant of the great faithfulness with which he strives to attain his ideal. His mastery of literary form is unsurpassed by any other American poet. To this, indeed, he attaches the greatest importance, having little sympathy with those poets-Browning, Rossetti, and George Meredith, for instance-whose greatest thoughts are so obscured in mystical language that men will never take the pains to spell them out,

"My idea," he says, "is that if a man has a fine thought and does not know how adequately to express it, he might as well not have the thought at all. I grant you the thought is quite half the battle. But then it is only half. The theme must be worthy; but the expression must be equally worthy."

For this reason he is a great admirer of Tennyson. He once hung outside his garden gate, but didn't dare to venture in. "How I reverence that man," he said on one occasion, and how perfect a word-painter he is! What an impressionist! What a veritable master! No obscurity about him. He is as clear as a trout-brook, and yet his thought is always fine."

Mr. Aldrich has attained much eminence as a sonneteer, the spontaneous ease and crystallised clearness of expression of his most chiselled productions showing how careful and painstaking he is to avoid the fault to which he objects in others. Take, for instance, his sonnet on "Sleep"-one of the loveliest of his many beautiful gems:

SLEEP.

"When to soft sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream, as in a fairy bark,

Drift on and on through the enchanted dark

To purple daybreak-little thought we pay
To that sweet, bitter world we know by day,
We are clean quit of it, as is a lark

So high in heaven no human eye can mark
The thin, swift pinion cleaving through the grey.
Till we awake ill fate can do no ill,

The resting heart shall not take up again
The heavy load that yet must make it bleed;
For this brief space the loud world's voice is still,
No faintest echo of it brings us pain.

How will it be when we shall sleep indeed?"

Like all true singers, Mr. Aldrich has a genuine and unaffected love of Nature. He knows what it is to escape from the fever and fret of city life to the sweet, benign peacefulness of quiet, shady nooks, where the idyllic music of meandering streams is the only sound that falls on the enraptured ear. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that his vivid and graceful descriptions of Nature in all her varied moods are amongst the most pleasing and harmonious of hist delightful lyrics.

Curiously enough, however, Mr. Aldrich's fame as a poet was established by one of his earlier works, and we are quite safe in saying that he has never surpassed, if he has indeed equalled, the beautiful and pathetic poem written when his muse was in its early morn. Our literature contains many exquisite and matchless baby poems-Tennyson, Stevenson, Eugene Field, Swinburne, and George Macdonald all having contributed priceless gems to the rich guerdon of childhood poetry-and the "Baby Bell" of T. B. Aldrich must take rank with the very best of them.

Children are ever attractive; and that which brings back to us the tender memories of childhood's days, with their charming freshness and winsomeness, cannot fail to take captive the universal heart. Mr. Aldrich has done this in Baby Bell," which, by its sympathetic and delicate description of a child's advent and death, has given delight to countless thousands all over the world. On this tender and heart-searching lyric Mr. Aldrich's fame as a poet chiefly