Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/55

Aldrich 37 for a single-hearted devotion to art that is too rare in the history of American literature. His faith as an artist was that, while many fine thoughts have perished through inadequate expres- sion, even a light fancy may be immortal by reason of its "per- fect wording." There is here a suggestion of embeUishment that marks the limit of Aldrich's reach. It was well enough for him to object to "Kiplingese" and to the negligee dialect of James Whitcomb Riley, but he himself went to the other ex- treme in his solicitude for beautiful form. Even more than his master Tennyson, he loved fine form so ardently that he cared too little whether the embodied thought was equally distin- guished. That he realized his danger is indicated by his verses At the Funeral of a Minor Poet. Some thought the poet's workmanship, he says, more costly than the thing Moulded or carved, as in those ornaments Found at Mycenae; and yet in defence it may be said that Nature herself works thus, lavishing endless patience "upon a single leaf of grass or a thrush's song"; or, as he puts it in one of his prose papers, " A little thing may be perfect, but perfection is not a little thing." Many of Aldrich's poems, however, have substance enough to deserve the embalming power of fine form. Their extra- ordinary neatness, precision, and delicacy, their fascinating melody, are again and again conjoined with a mood or concep- tion so subtly true or so vividly felt that we discern in them the classic imprint. Latakia, On Lynn Terrace, Resurgam, Sleep, Frost-Work, Invita Minerva, The Flight of the Goddess, Books and Seasons, Memory, Enamoured Architect of Airy Rhyme, Palabras Carinosas, are poems that we may re-read repeatedly with an ever renewed sense of their beauty. They offer no profound criticism of life; but much great literature does not. Aldrich's other work — his long narrative poems, of which he regarded Wyndham Towers and Friar Jerome as the best; his Judith of Bethulia, a dramatic poem ; and his occasional poems, such as the Ode on the Unveiling of the Shaw Memorial on Boston Com- mon — is work in kinds in which other American poets have done better. But none of them has done better than he in