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1Author:  EDITED BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.Requires cookie*
 Title:  Out of his head  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: “On the seventeenth of August, in the year 16—, the morning sun, resting obliquely on the gables and roof-tops of Portsmouth, lighted up one of those grim spectacles not unusual in New England at that period. In Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whose death was briefly announced in The Times of Wednesday, America has lost the most brilliant man of letters of the generation that succeeded the Concord group. He was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in November, 1836, when Longfellow and Emerson were in their prime, and he reaped the benefit of their labours by coming into an age which they had familiarized with literature and cultivation. Mr. Aldrich early became a journalist, and was connected with the New York Evening Mirror, Willes's Home Journal, and other papers. The outbreak of the war saw him as newspaper correspondent, and in 1865 he became the editor of Every Saturday. Nine years in that post were followed by seven of miscellaneous work, till in 1881 he reached the height of his career as journalist by becoming editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a position he held till 1890. Meanwhile he had written much original matter both in prose and verse. His genius was many-sided, and it is surprising that so busy an editor and so prolific a writer should have attained the perfection of form for which Mr. Aldrich was remarkable. Among his novels “Prudence Palfrey” and “The Stillwater Tragedy” are the best known. From his country home at Porkapog, Mass., he sent out the charming “Porkapog Papers,” as graceful and delicate as their title was ungainly. He described with the skill of a Hawthorne his native town by the sea, and in “Marjorie Daw” and other works he proved himself an “American humourist” of a characteristic type. One of his books, “The Story of a Bad Boy,” has achieved notable distinction; it has been translated into French in a series entitled “Education et Récréation,” and into German as a specimen of American humour. It is, however, as a poet that Mr. Aldrich was chiefly entitled to recognition, and on his poetry that his fame will rest. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman regarded him as “the most pointed and exquisite of our lyrical craftsmen”; and the words are well chosen. He was the doyen and the leader of the school of American poetry which is now being displaced by Mr. Bliss Carman and others, who are apparently more virile than the preceding generation. His was the poetry of exquisite finish and not of great force or profundity. To say that his lyrics are vers de société in the highest form is not to rate their content too low nor their manner too high; and it is in lyric song rather than in the longer poems, such as “Wyndham Towers,” that Mr. Aldrich excelled. Some of his poems—that on the intaglio head of Minerva, “When the Sultan goes to Ispahan,” and “Identity”— are in every anthology of American literature, and have won their author fame throughout the English-speaking world. Suddenly Loses Strength After Partially Recovering From an Operation.
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