CHAPTER III

ARRIVAL

1860-1865

HE summer of 1860 found Aldrich free for the nonce

THE

from all journalistic and editorial ties, happy as a lark in his freedom, and similarly employed in song. For the sake of an effective chapter beginning it would be pleasant to allude to the thunder-clouds of civil war that were darkening over the country and trace their effect in the deepening of the young poet's mood. This will have to be done a page or two farther on, but for the present the veracious historian must content himself with portraying a mind happily preoccupied with poetical projects, and more concerned with rhymes than rebellions.

In July he cruised comfortably down to Portsmouth in his uncle's yacht, and there entered upon another of those idyllic seasons that played so important a rôle in the furnishing of his imagination. A letter to Stoddard will help us to revive the spirit of that vanished summer:

Sunday Morning, August, 1860.

DEAR DICK, A mummy could n't have been more silent than I ever since my arrival in these latitudes. But the spirit of the epistolary pen has seized me this morning

and I am going to fill a page or so for the improvement of your mind. Don't fancy that pen and I have been strangers these five weeks. Bayard Taylor could n't write more verse than I have in the same number of days. I have two $30 poems on hand, sold two to the "Atlantic," and sent one to "Harper." "The Song of Fatima" in the September number of the "Atlantic" is mine. A lyric, "The Robin," will be in the October number. I am forty lines into a blank-verse story. So you see I have been doing better things than writing letters. Is the "little party" with you yet? Has she been writing great, big passionate little stories and picturesque poems all summer? I would like to compare poetical notes with her. . . . Good Lord, how contented I am here! I hate a city more than I do the devil. I would like to have this sea and sky and forest around me forever. . . . I shall have a host of things to tell you and Lizzy about the yacht trip. Give my love to her and the Taylors, to Mrs. Penelope and Mr. Ulysses. Your friend, TOM.

"Sea and sky and forest," however, lose something of their charm with the falling of the leaves, and in the autumn Aldrich went back very contentedly to his little room at 105 Clinton Place. He seems to have had during this winter of 1860-61 no regular connection with any periodical, and to have employed his time as the singing impulse urged. In the summer he had written to Fields from Portsmouth again proposing the publication of a volume of his poetry:

"You know that any time these five years I have wanted Ticknor & Fields to publish a small volume of poems for me - the idea, therefore, will not win your heart by its novelty! Sometime in September I shall have a small book ready for the types. It will contain poems published in the 'Atlantic' and 'Harper,' several of which have made me new friends. Rudd & Carleton have brought out two volumes of mine: they sold 2200 copies of 'True Love' and 3000 of 'Babie Bell'; and are willing to try me again, but I would rather have your imprint if possible. It would be of such service to me. I write to you before binding myself with Rudd & Carleton. What cheer?"

Fields, however, took the view that the time was still unripe for such a venture, at least so far as his own house was concerned, and when early in 1861 "Pampinea,1 and Other Poems" was published it was over the imprint of Rudd & Carleton. Upon its cover the volume bore the title "Poems of a Year," which led a wicked reviewer to describe it as "Poems of a Yearling." Yet it merited the title vastly less than its predecessors. It contained of pieces that have been retained "Pythagoras," "Pampinea" (a poetic recollection of his past summer), "Hesperides," "The Crescent and the Cross," "Piscataqua River,” and "The Lunch"; and the poems since discarded - largely longer pieces, in the ballad vein not uncolored with macaberesque were more mature in both temper and execution than their fellows in his previous collections. Of all

1 Later spelled Pampina.

the poems in the volume perhaps the one that lingers longest in the memory is the smooth yet ardent celebration of the well-beloved river of his boyhood adventures. Few readers will dissent from this view of Longfellow's :

"As each guest at a feast selects the wine that pleases him most, so each reader of a volume finds out his favorite lyric. Mine is 'Piscataqua' of 1860. With all their beauties the others play mostly in the realm of Fancy; but this lives, moves, and has its being in the realm of Imagination, 'clothing the palpable and familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn.' The river will always be more beautiful for that song!"

Yet, despite its poetic quality, or perhaps because of it, because it so nearly attained full ripeness without quite reaching it, -Aldrich was always more anxious to suppress the "Poems of a Year" than any other of his early volumes. Throughout his later life he bought and destroyed every copy that he discovered in the auction catalogues. All told he played Herod to some twenty-five copies.

With the cheerful liberty of a free lance Aldrich went down again to Portsmouth very early in the spring of 1861, and now we begin to find the sombre shadow of the war upon the page in earnest. In December, 1860, he had written a poem entitled "The Man and the Hour," afterwards printed in the "Poems of a Year," which concluded with this eloquent foreshadowing, we may believe, of the career of Abraham Lincoln:

"Men of this land and lovers of these States!
What master spirit from the dark shall rise:
And with a will inviolate as fate's,

God-like and prudent, merciful and wise,
Do battle in God's name and set us right
Ere on our glory ruin broods and night!”

And throughout the spring and summer, the season that saw the fall of Fort Sumter and the disaster at Bull Run, the poet had no other thought than that of serving his country on field or wave. In April he wrote a letter to Governor Goodwin applying for an appointment on the staff of the colonel in command of the New Hampshire regiment. There seems to have been some delay in the decision, and when some weeks later a telegram arrived announcing his appointment to the staff of General Lander, Aldrich was away from home and the message never reached him. In consequence the appointment went to Fitz James O'Brien, with the result that, as Henry Clapp used to say, "Aldrich was shot in O'Brien's shoulder."

Lander, too, an intimate friend of our poet, gave his life in the country's service, dying early in 1862 as the result of a wound that was given no time to heal. Aldrich's collection of 1863 contained this elegy, which was never afterwards reprinted:

"Take him, New England, now his work is done.

He fought the Good Fight valiantly - and won.
Speak of his daring. This man held his blood
Cheaper than water for the Nation's good.

Rich Mountain, Fairfax, Romney - he was there.