To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop-docile and omnipotent-
At its own stable door.

BECLOUDED

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow

Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

THE SOUL SELECTS

The soul selects her own society,

Then shuts the door;

On her divine majority

Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariots pausing At her low gate;

Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling

Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation

Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.

BEFORE THE DOOR OF GOD

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod;

Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels, twice descending,
Reimbursed my store.
Burglar, banker, father,
I am poor once more!

A CEMETERY

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,
Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.

LAST DIRECTIONS

Ample make this bed,

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise' yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born November 11, 1836, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). After a brief clerkship, he became junior literary critic of The Evening Mirror at nineteen, publishing his first book (The Bells), an immature collection of echoes, at the same time. From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. Nathaniel Willis, Bayard Taylor, Edmund Clarence Stedman, William Winter were his intimates, and their influence reinforced the inherent artificiality of Aldrich's tastes. Abetted by his associates he chose the "flicker rather than the flame"; he praised Stedman but despised Whitman, he worshiped Longfellow and belittled Poe, imitated Willis and could see nothing in Emily Dickinson except her "infelicities."

But though Aldrich mingled with the New York group, he was not part of it; he longed for the more rarefied intellectual atmosphere of New England and when, in 1866, Osgood offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, published in Boston, Aldrich accepted with alacrity. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890. In the meanwhile The Ballad of Babie Bell (1858), an incredibly banal and insincere piece of work, and Pampinea and Other Poems (1861) had appeared, bearing practically no relation to his times. Other volumes followed; Complete Poems being first issued in 1882, though in 1898 Aldrich made a comprehensive revision of all the poems he cared to preserve.

Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. There is no real air in these verses; it is Nature as conceived by a poet reading the Arabian Nights in a hot-house. In company with Stoddard and Taylor, Aldrich dwelt in a literary Orientalism-(Stoddard's Book of the East followed fast upon Taylor's Poems of the Orient)—and Aldrich's Cloth of Gold was suffused with similar "vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles" (to quote Holmes), laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome pro

fusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses and diaphanous gauzes.

The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. He learned to sharpen his images, to fashion his smallest lyrics with a well-bred finesse. "In the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. Boynton, "there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid." Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are some of the epigrams, the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, passionless in tone but exquisite in design.

The best of Aldrich's diffuse poetry has been collected in an inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He died in 1907.

MEMORY

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour-
'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May-
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

"ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME"

Enamored architect of airy rhyme,

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.

Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways,

Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time;

Others, beholding how thy turrets climb

'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days;
But most beware of those who come to praise.
O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all;
Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame,
Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given;
Then, if at last the airy structure fall,
Dissolve, and vanish-take thyself no shame.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

IDENTITY

Somewhere-in desolate wind-swept space-
In Twilight-land-in No-man's land-
Two hurrying Shapes met face to face,
And bade each other stand.

"And who are you?" cried one agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
"I know not," said the second Shape,
"I only died last night!"

REALISM

Romance beside his unstrung lute
Lies stricken mute.

The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anywhere.
To-day we breathe a commonplace,
Polemic, scientific air:

We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.