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36 Later Poets his best work apparently owes nothing to the incitements of those stirring days. To him, indeed, the victory of 1865 meant not Appomatox but marriage, an excellent editorial position in Boston, and the publication of his collected poems in the re- nowned Blue and Gold series of Ticknor and Fields — an event in Boston, as Bliss Perry remarks, equivalent to election to the French Academy. In New York he had been associated with the foremost writers of the "school" there — most intimately with Bayard Taylor, the Stoddards, Stedman, William Winter, and Fitz- James O'Brien. These and other members of the group agreed in condemning Boston and respectability in general, and es- pousing beauty and an enfranchised moral life. Yet their freedom was one of manners rather than of morals; even the Bohemians — headed by the satiric Henry Clapp — who fore- gathered at Pfaff 's below the pavement at 647 Broadway and gave free rein to their impulses, seem to have had the usual impulses of the Hebraizing Anglo-Saxon if not of the Puritan. Aldrich was not a Bohemian of any type ; nor was he by tempera- ment a Manhattan journalist, but rather a gently mirthful New Englander, who felt eminently at home in the company of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and others whom he met through Fields, and who preferred the "respectable" social standing of a knight of the pen in Boston to the incomplete Bohemianism of New York. For nine years he edited Ticknor and Fields's Kvery Saturday, while in the next room Fields and WilHam Dean Howells edited The Atlantic Monthly; then, upon How- ells's resignation in 1881, he entered upon a nine-years' edi- torship of the Atlantic. Travel was an item of importance in these later years. He wandered through Spain, one of his old castles in the air, and through the rich Orient, where his poetic fancy was always at ease, and he travelled round the world twice. Travel, and reading in foreign literature, added to an attractive cosmopolitanism in his spirit that marks him off from some of his Boston friends. He retained to the end a boyishness of disposition that made him personally winning, together with an intellectual liveliness that earned him a na- tional reputation as a wit and the friendly admiration of no less a man than Mark Twain. He died in Boston in 1907. Aldrich 's unfailing good fortune was only a fitting reward