many rich and dainty gatherings from the same source
in later years. In the intervals of these wanderings he lived in Boston
and Cambridge; occupying for a time James Russell Lowell's historic
house of Elmwood, in the semi-rural university city; and then
established a pretty country house at Ponkapog, a few miles west of
Boston. This last suggested the title for a charming book of travel
papers, 'From Ponkapog to Pesth.' In 1881 he was appointed editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, and continued to direct that famous magazine for nine
years, frequently making short trips to Europe, extending his tours as
far as the heart of Russia, and gathering fresh materials, for essay or
song. Much of his time since giving up the Atlantic editorship has been
passed in voyaging, and in 1894-5 he made a journey around the world.

From the beginning he struck with quiet certainty the vein that was his
by nature in poetry; and this has broadened almost continually, yielding
richer results, which have been worked out with an increasing refinement
of skill. His predilection is for the picturesque; for romance combined
with simplicity, purity, and tenderness of feeling, touched by fancy and
by occasional lights of humor so reserved and dainty that they never
disturb the pictorial harmony. The capacity for unaffected utterance of
feeling on matters common to humanity reached a climax in the poem of
'Baby Bell,' which by its sympathetic and delicate description of a
child's advent and death gave the author a claim to the affection^ of a
wide circle; and this remained for a long time probably the best known
among his poems. 'Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book' is another of the
earlier favorites. 'Spring in New England' has since come to hold high
rank both for its vivid and graceful description of the season, for its
tender fervor of patriotism, and for its sentiment of reconciliation
between North and South. The lines on 'Piscataqua River' remain one of
the best illustrations of boyhood memories, and have something of
Whittier's homely truth. In his longer narrative pieces, 'Judith' and
'Wyndham Towers,' cast in the mold of blank-verse idyls, Mr. Aldrich
does not seem so much himself as in many of his briefer flights. An
instinctive dramatic tendency finds outlet in 'Pauline Paulovna' and
'Mercedes'--the latter of which, a two-act piece in prose, has found
representation in the theatre; yet in these, also, he is less eminently
successful than in his