O Poet-soul! O gentle one! Thy thought has made my darkness light; The solemn voices of the night Have filled me with an inner tone.
I'll drink thy praise in olden wine, And in the cloak of fine conceite I'll tell thee how my pulses beat, How half my being runs to thine.
Then had come the acquaintance with Taylor and Stoddard, and through them the powerful influence of Keats and Tennyson.
To study the evolution of Aldrich as a poet, one need not linger long over _The Bells_ (1855), that earliest collection of echoes and immaturities; one will do better to begin with his prose work, _Daisy's Necklace_, published two years later, a book that has a significance out of all proportion to its value. As we read it we are aware for the first time of the fact which was to become more and more evident with every year, that there were two Aldriches: the New York romanticist dreaming over his _Hyperion_, his Keats, his Tennyson, and the Boston classicist, severe with all exuberance, correct, and brilliant. The book is crude, a mere _mélange_ of quotations and echoes, fantastic often and sentimental, yet one cannot read a chapter of it without feeling that it was written with all seriousness. When, for example, the young poet speaks of "The Eve of St. Agnes," we know that he speaks from his heart: "I sometimes think that this poem is the most exquisite definition of one phase of poetry in our language. Musical rhythm, imperial words, gorgeous color and luxurious conceit seemed to have culminated in it." But in the Prologue and the Epilogue of the book there is the later Aldrich, the classicist and critic, who warns us that the work is not to be taken seriously: that it is a mere burlesque, an extravaganza.
In his earlier work he is a true member of the New York school. He looks at life and poetry from the same standpoint that Taylor and Stoddard had viewed them in their attic room on those ambrosial nights when they had really lived. Taylor's _Poems of the Orient_, inspired by Shelley's "Lines to an Indian Air" and by Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," made a profound impression upon him. Stoddard, who soon was to issue his _Book of the East_, was also to the young poet like one from a rarer world. When in 1858 Aldrich in his twenty-second year issued his gorgeous oriental poem, _The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth_, he dedicated it to Stoddard, "under whose fingers this story would have blossomed into true Arabian roses." To his next volume he was to add _Cloth of Gold_, a grouping of sensuous lyrics breathing the soul of "The Eve of St. Agnes": "Tiger Lilies," "The Sultana," "Latakia," "When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan," and others. Even as Taylor and Stoddard, he dreamed that his soul was native in the East: