I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The
publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was
already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one
of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before
I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never
impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every
Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We
were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished
priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had
always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with
every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office
which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all
I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I
should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which
his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he
is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors
so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and
will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in
the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the
poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and
simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible
only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we
can feel only

"When a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek."

When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair
than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his
place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the
attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we
were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own
joke of it; we compared note