exotic New Orleans, and with the imagined landscapes of Arabia and Spain, deeply stirred his boyish imagination and soon bore fruit in rhyme. His earliest verses, "To the Moon," have not been preserved, but enough specimens of his juvenilia can be recovered to show their quality. Particularly interesting are "Santonio," an attempt at heroic poetry, printed in the poets' corner of the "Portsmouth Journal" for June 19, 1851, when he was less than fifteen years old, and some humorous-pathetic stanzas on the destruction of the old Atkinson house across the way, written about a year later, and to be found printed in Brewster's "Rambles about Portsmouth." Neither is a very remarkable production, but the former has its interest for the correctness of the versification that embodies its imitative adolescent fervor; while the latter, in its crude commingling of pathos and humor, is perhaps prophetic of that exquisite blending of light and shade which is a salient quality of his mature work.

But like most pleasant things, these golden Portsmouth days with their happy pastimes and poetic dreaming were to have an early end. Elias Aldrich had left a little property, but scarcely enough for the adequate support of mother and son. When, therefore, the time came for the boy to go to college, and there began to be sober consideration of ways and means, the project came to seem of dubious practicability. In the event he gave up the prospect of going to Cambridge to study literature with Professor Longfellow, and accepted instead a clerkship in the

counting-room of his uncle, Charles Frost, in New York. Yet until he was thirty-five years old,

his summer home continued to be in Portsmouth. This chapter can draw to its close no more fitly than with a portion of a letter that Aldrich wrote in 1883, regretting his inability to be present at a Portsmouth reunion:

"Dear Mr. President: - When a mother has so large a family as Portsmouth has, a son more or less scarcely counts; but keenly sensible of their loss are the sons who find themselves unable to join the other children, when the impulse seizes them to fly back for a moment to the dear old lady's apron-strings.

"I write in behalf of one of those unavoidably-absent sons a prodigal who would be as glad as he of the parable to get home again. His loyalty to that spot of earth where his eyes first opened on sea and sky, and where, on his arrival, he lost as little time as possible in rigging up a fishing-rod for the smelt at the end of Long Wharf - his loyalty, I repeat, is not to be challenged. Though he has more or less been known as a Bad Boy, he has never been known as an ungrateful one. So far as his slight gift went he has sung the praises of the Old Town by the Sea; in prose and verse he has sung them, until he was sometimes afraid that good folk might weary of the strain. Now and then he has veiled Portsmouth in a fictitious name, but his affection for her never went veiled; and nothing has ever touched him more nearly than when some book or page

of his has caused the stranger to turn aside from his route of travel in order to take a stroll through the streets of Rivermouth.

"The beautiful old town in which we all passed our childhood! How her loveliness deepens and freshens year by year, as if the waters of the Piscataqua, sparkling at her lip, had their rise in those Fountains of Perpetual Youth which Ponce de Leon sought! How our purest memories have crystallized about her! What a strong sentiment it is that periodically impels us to flock back to her from every point of the compass - making her the Mecca of loving pilgrimages! We who are Portsmouth born and bred never get wholly away from the glamour of early association. One night, a year ago, lying half-awake in a hostelry in Russia, I fancied that I heard the nine o'clock bell tolling in the steeple of the Old North Church, and was conscious of being out rather late! - Just as it used to be!"

One May day, some years after, he wrote to Stedman: "The Spring has served me as the girls did n't use to she has failed to keep her appointment with me. Shall you not go to Newcastle this summer? It is a magical place, a fairyland where I seem to have left my boyhood. If you ever see a little shade wandering along shore, picking up shells, and dreaming of a big ship to come and carry him across the blue water, you will know it is I. If you call out 'Hi! young Bailey!' (the name I used to go by) perhaps I'll come to you."

CHAPTER II

THE HALL BEDROOM

1852-1860

ERHAPS not the least propitious fortuity of Aldrich's

PERHAPS

fortunate life was the chance that sent him to New York rather than to Boston or Cambridge to spend his early years as a young commencer in literature. His finely individual talent would have gained little from the overnutriment of academic studies; and in Boston in the fifties the close, bright risen stars of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, and Whittier were likely to dazzle the eye and silence or constrain the song of the poetic beginner. In New York the chief literary potentates of the time, Bryant, Halleck, Willis, and General George P. Morris, were scarcely of such magnitude as to produce this pernicious result. There was, too, in New York, a group of young men of poetic talent, in some cases of poetic genius, ready to welcome and cheer any newcomer in the Muse's Bower. And, finally, there was in the tone of this circle a certain worldliness, a disposition to render unto Cæsar the things that are indubitably his, which was an excellent corrective for the ineffective other-worldliness that was likely to befog the young New England poet in those years, and of which Aldrich, with an odd contradiction of the essential quality