plugged the speaking tube with a cork and drove it in with the poker. On another occasion, his masterful publisher, Mr. Houghton, who had been submitting to the "Atlantic" the manuscripts of divers "friends of the house" with rather ill-success, said to him jocosely: "I have written a story and I'm going to send it to you under a fictitious name." "Then," said Aldrich, "I advise you to send it to a fictitious editor."

The even tenor of Aldrich's life through the eighties presents few themes for biographical expatiation. It was a placid, sun-kissed lake rather than a flowing river. In 1883 he bought the beautiful, ample house at 59 Mount Vernon Street, which as time went on was to become a treasurehouse of choice books, literary relics, autographs, and objects of art. There through the winters Aldrich, in his hours of ease in his study under the roof, read innumerable French and Spanish novels, or descended with cheerful reluctance to the drawing-room to play the perfect host to the visitors who thronged his hospitable portals. The summers he habitually spent in Europe, in England, Russia, or Switzerland, — talking, reading, and, despite a profound aversion from "sight-seeing," gaining vivid impressions for future poems.

In 1881 he received the honorary degree of Master of Arts from Yale University, a well-merited academic recognition that gave him pleasure. Fifteen years later he was to receive a like honor from Harvard, and in the last year

of his life the University of Pennsylvania conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws.

The relations with affairs which even the most belletristic editor cannot entirely avoid tended to keep permanently alive Aldrich's political consciousness, which at other times was rather fitful in him. Two of his poems of deepest national feeling date from this period. On July 2, 1881, he wrote to Stedman: "I have just returned from Boston, where I found your pleasant note. I made a flying visit to town this morning to lay in some rockets and champagne and ice cream and other explosives for the 4th. I no sooner set foot in the city than I was hurled back to that bewildering April morning in '65, when the news of Lincoln's assassination struck us all to the heart. Where were you that day? At first no one believed that Garfield had been shot. Up to the present moment we in peaceful Ponkapog know nothing of the result. (A whip-o'-will in the cherry-tree is driving me distracted with his plaintive cry.) How far off from murder and the harm of the world we are here!"

The tragic event made a deep impression on his imagination, to which, after the death of the President, "The Bells at Midnight" bore eloquent testimony. Again, on the day after the death of Wendell Phillips in 1884, Aldrich's "Monody" was written at a single sitting, a most unusual thing with him. None of his poems is more thoroughly interfused with the larger ideality, or more admirably worked out in grave and noble poetic speech. Owing to the

speed of its composition and the questionable propriety of its verse form, Aldrich himself had many misgivings about it, yet the piece is indubitably one of his best in its kind. Take the lines that celebrate the great New England group:

"Rich is the land, Ọ Death!

Can give you dead 'like our dead!-
Such as he from whose hand
The magic web of romance
Slipped, and the art was lost!

Such as he who erewhile

The last of the Titan brood -
With his thunder the Senate shook;

Or he who, beside the Charles,
Untouched of envy or hate,

Tranced the world with his song;
Or that other, that gray-eyed seer
Who in pastoral Concord ways

With Plato and Hafiz walked."

How sure and telling the accent! Other notable poems of the period of his editorship were "The Sailing of the Autocrat," written in 1886, "The Last Cæsar," done in 1887, and the magnificent eulogy of Tennyson, composed in 1889.

Aldrich's editorial experience with the "Atlantic" had the effect of refining still further his shrewd and candid critical judgment, and among the rather meagre survivals of his correspondence of these years are several letters that contain critical pronouncements of the first interest. Take as a first example this to Stedman concerning Holmes: