melody, 'which were beyond the compass of the original sonnet form."" Are you sure of that? I have always entertained the conviction that the Petrarchan form of sonnet, with its interwoven rhymes, its capacity for expressing subtle music, was an instrument as superior to the English form as the harp or the guitar is superior to the banjo, and I fancy that most workers in this kind of verse will agree with me. The alternate lines rhyming, and closing with a couplet, gave the poet the command of some of the richest melodic effects within the reach of English versification. The sonnet that ends with a couplet misses that fine unrolling of music which belongs to the sonnet proper. The couplet brings the reader up with a jerk. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the couplet has the snap of a whiplash, and turns the sonnet into an epigram. To my thinking, this abruptness hurts many of Shakespeare's beautiful poems of fourteen lines for they are simply that. One must go to Milton, and Wordsworth, and Keats (in three instances) in order to find the highest development of the English SONNET. . .

Sincerely yours,

To E. C. Stedman

T. B. ALDRICH.

MT. VERNON ST., Nov. 15, 1900.

MY DEAR EDMUND, — I had been wanting to ask you for one autograph copy of the "Prelude," but hesitated, because I know that such requests are sometimes the straws that finish off the camel. I value that fine piece of

blank verse all the more for coming to me unsought. I received a while ago a copy of the regular edition of the "Anthology," but as it bore no indication to the contrary, I supposed that it was sent by H. M. & Co., who favor me from time to time with their publications. I have just read your Introduction, which seems to me most admirable from every point of view, and have gone more carefully through the body of the book, and find it richer than I thought it at a first glance. If it were not for Tennyson and Browning, our Yankee poets could hold their own against the Victorians.

It is easier to find little flaws in your compilation than it would be to produce a work one half as good. As no ten men can be brought to agree exactly touching a single poem, how can a collector of one or two thousand poems expect to please everybody? Of course I differ with you on certain selections; I take exception to one or two of the critical dicta in your Biographical Notes, and here and there the touch of your hand in the rounding of a paragraph; but, as I have already said, I don't see how any one could have made a finer American Anthology. I wish, though, that you had not set Lanier in your choice gallery of portraits. Chronologically he is out of place, and in point of poetic accomplishment he does n't deserve to be there. I don't believe that there are twenty-five persons in the United States who would place Lanier anywhere but in the rear rank of minor poets; and I don't believe there are five critics who would rank him with Poe, Bryant,

Emerson, Whittier, and Lowell. (I mention Poe, though I've an idea that if Poe had been an exemplary, conventional, tax-oppressed citizen, like Longfellow, his few poems, as striking as they are, would not have made so great a stir.) To my thinking that right-hand lower corner of your frontispiece would have been more fitly occupied by Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose "Burns," "Marco Bozzaris," and "Red Jacket" are poems which promise to live as long as any three pieces in the Anthology. To be frank, I think Lanier was a musician, and not a poet. If this were merely my personal opinion, I would n't express it. I have never met five men of letters who thought differently. . . .

Ever faithfully yours,

T. B. ALDRICH.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LAST YEARS

1901-1907

HE end of the century and of the happy post-merid

THE

ianal decade of Aldrich's life came together. Fate, that seldom fails to balance a man's account, was preparing to collect heavy arrears of sorrow. On Christmas Day, 1900, the elder of the twin sons was married. To our poet's imagination this marriage brought the promise of the further enrichment of his own life. In the early summer of 1901, the Aldriches sailed for England to spend some months on the Devon coast. On their return in September they were met at the wharf by a message telling them that the son whom they had left in such joyful estate, whose letter received just as they were sailing from Liverpool announced his intention to welcome them at the wharf, had been smitten with a sudden hemorrhage of the lungs and had been hurried to the Adirondacks. They hastened to his side, and for a time he seemed better. There amid the mountains for two years and a half the fight went on with alternate seasons of hope and sad certainty. Whoever has read the letters in this book knows the strong tenderness of Aldrich's family affections, but only his intimates know how tragical was his grief in these cruel years. Be