Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[35] essentially a New Englander all his days. It is true that he never sympathized with the occupations of the New England mind in his time, and that his dedication of his art to beauty is not in the tradition of that ‘reformatory and didactic’ section, and that, on the other hand, New York left its metropolitan imprint on nearly all his work. Yet most of his career belongs to New England, and he himself liked to say that if he was not genuine Boston he was at least Boston-plated; nor is it quite fanciful to assert that his somewhat painful artistic integrity is largely a re-orientation of New England principle and thoroughness. In him, Puritan morality, after passing through Hawthorne, half artist and half moralist, becomes wholly artistic.

Aldrich's Salem was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the ‘Rivermouth’ of The story of a bad boy, sleepy, elm-shaded, full of traditions, bordered by the ocean, where he spent many an hour, as he wrote reminiscently, ‘a little shade wandering along shore, picking up shells, and dreaming of a big ship to come and carry him across the blue water.’ Three years of his boyhood he lived in New Orleans, imbibing sights and moods quite other than those of the North Shore boy, travelling, too, up and down the Mississippi and receiving impressions never to be forgotten. A professed and hot-headed Southerner, he returned to Portsmouth to prepare for college, but, on the death of his father, gave up Harvard and went to New York at the age of seventeen, where he entered upon a career as counting-room clerk, contributor to periodicals, and assistant editor of the Home journal under N. P. Willis.¹ During these early years he published several volumes of poems. The first, The bells (1855), does little more than indicate his juvenile masters— Chatterton, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Poe, Willis, among whom Tennyson is perhaps the most important in the light of his later work. The fourth, The ballad of Babie Bell, and other poems (1859), marks his first success—Babie Bell itself he wrote when but nineteen. Then came the war, and adventurous war correspondence, but Aldrich was by nature nearly as timeless as Hawthorne, and in 1862 returned to his versecraft by no means transformed. Two or three of his poems, including The Shaw Memorial ode, show the influence of war idealism, but most of