EDWIN BOOTH From a drawing by G. H. Boughton ALDRICH IN 1866 From a ferrotype WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS IN 1866 From a ferrotype 84 PINCKNEY STREET ALDRICH IN 1868 MARK TWAIN IN 1874, DRAWN BY HIMSELF THE FIRST LIBRARY AT PONKAPOG From a sketch by C. Graham BAYARD TAYLOR AND A FACSIMILE OF HIS MANUSCRIPT 136 ALDRICH IN 1880 140 THE OFFICE OF THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY" 144 With a facsimile of the manuscript of the inscription "THE CRAGS," TENANT'S HARBOR 190 From a sketch by Talbot Aldrich FACSIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE SHAW MEMORIAL ODE With a portion of a note from Augustus Saint-Gaudens 196 REDMAN FARM, PONKAPOG 66 MISS NANCE O'NEIL AS JUDITH" FACSIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF "FRED- " IDENTITY," WITH THE DRAWING BY ELIHU VEDDER ALDRICH'S BOOK PLATE Designed by Talbot Aldrich 212 230 240 256 260 THE LIFE OF THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH CHAPTER I "TOM BAILEY" 1836-1852 OR those who knew him the death of Thomas Bailey Fo Aldrich carried a poignancy that seldom attends the passing of those who have lived out their threescore years and ten. He was a lover of life. Like all poets of his sensitive kind, he knew the melancholy thought of dissolution, -the end of pleasantness, of warmth and light, but even after the great sorrow of his last years the aging anticipation of death was alien from him. Lowell himself was not more remarkable for perennial youthfulness, and far more than Lowell, Aldrich looked astonishingly young, "a habit," as he liked to say, "acquired in early youth." Blond, erect, and ruddy, with a peculiar boyish alertness of bearing, he seemed at seventy to defy mortality, to be himself as immortal as a lyric. To his biographer, curiously inquiring into the vanished days of that singularly fortunate life, the image that overlays all others is that of "Tom Bailey," the bad boy, who was yet "not such a very bad boy." The exquisite lyric poet, the inimitable story-writer, the accomplished editor, the witty, urbane man of letters, all take in the mind from that Portsmouth boyhood a coloring of sincerity and soundness, of mischief and mirth, which makes his whole life seem not only its fulfilment but in a queer sense its prolongation. It is, then, with a certain surprise that one becomes aware of the wide segment of American literature, the variety of intellectual movements, that his life touched. And it is precisely in this that one prime interest of his letters lies. Through them, as through the candid eyes of Tom Bailey, we watch the flow and ebb of the literary tides of more than half a century. The safe full of old letters that has been the centre of the writer's daily thought for more than a year echoes with mute voices and teems with ghostly life. These packets of yellowing letters, full of friendship, the casual records of the details of daily living, of work and play, of pleasant and sad times, embody the very form and pressure of periods and manners and opinions that have gone irrevocably into the night. Old Portsmouth, with her parochial personages, the privateers of 1812 still rotting at her dreamy wharves; literary Bohemia in the brownstone New York of N. P. Willis and General George P. Morris, of Fanny Fern and Ada Clare; Boston, in her Augustan age, when Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes might be met any night at dinner; the eighties and nineties, prehistoric decades of the woodcut and the dialect story, - all live |