Distance in the cosmic order is a standing-apart, which is only another expression of the expansion and abundance of creative life; but at every remove its reflex is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and curving, making orb and orbit.  While in space this attraction is diminished—­being inversely as the square of the distance—­and so there is maintained and emphasized the appearance of suspension and isolation, yet in time it gains preponderance, contracting sphere and orbit, aging planets and suns, and accumulating destruction, which at the point of annihilation becomes a new creation.  This Grand Cycle, which is but a pulsation or breath of the Eternal life, illustrates a truth which is repeated in its least and most minutely divided moment—­that birth lies next to death, as water crystallizes at the freezing-point, and the plant blossoms at points most remote from the source of nutrition.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

(1836-)

A poet in verse often becomes a poet in prose also, in composing novels; although the novelist may not, and in general does not, possess the faculty of writing poems.  The poet-novelist is apt to put into his prose a good deal of the same charm and the same picturesque choice of phrase and image that characterize his verse; while it does not follow that the novelist who at times writes verse—­like George Eliot, for example—­succeeds in giving a distinctly poetic quality to prose, or even wishes to do so.  Among authors who have displayed peculiar power and won fame in the dual capacity of poet and of prose romancer or novelist, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo no doubt stand pre-eminent; and in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes very strikingly combine these two functions.  Another American author who has gained a distinguished position both as a poet and as a writer of prose fiction and essays is Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

[Illustration:  THOMAS B. ALDRICH]

It is upon his work in the form of verse, perhaps, that Aldrich’s chief renown is based; but some of his short stories in especial have contributed much to his popularity, no less than to his repute as a delicate and polished artificer in words.  A New Englander, he has infused into some of his poems the true atmosphere of New England, and has given the same light and color of home to his prose, while imparting to his productions in both kinds a delightful tinge of the foreign and remote.  In addition to his capacities as a poet and a romancer, he is a wit and humorist of sparkling quality.  In reading his books one seems also to inhale the perfumes of Arabia and the farther East, blended with the salt sea-breeze and the pine-scented air of his native State, New Hampshire.