He was born in the old seaside town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 11th, 1836; but moved to New York City in 1854, at the age of seventeen.  There he remained until 1866; beginning his work quite early; forming his literary character by reading and observation, by the writing of poems, and by practice and experience of writing prose sketches and articles for journals and periodicals.  During this period he entered into associations with the poets Stedman, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor, and was more or less in touch with the group that included Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O’Brien, and William Winter.  Removing to Boston in January, 1866, he became the editor of Every Saturday, and remained in that post until 1874, when he resigned.  In 1875 he made a long tour in Europe, plucking the first fruits of foreign travel, which were succeeded by many rich and dainty gatherings from the same source in later years.  In the intervals of these wanderings he lived in Boston and Cambridge; occupying for a time James Russell Lowell’s historic house of Elmwood, in the semi-rural university city; and then established a pretty country house at Ponkapog, a few miles west of Boston.  This last suggested the title for a charming book of travel papers, ‘From Ponkapog to Pesth.’  In 1881 he was appointed editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and continued to direct that famous magazine for nine years, frequently making short trips to Europe, extending his tours as far as the heart of Russia, and gathering fresh materials, for essay or song.  Much of his time since giving up the Atlantic editorship has been passed in voyaging, and in 1894-5 he made a journey around the world.

From the beginning he struck with quiet certainty the vein that was his by nature in poetry; and this has broadened almost continually, yielding richer results, which have been worked out with an increasing refinement of skill.  His predilection is for the picturesque; for romance combined with simplicity, purity, and tenderness of feeling, touched by fancy and by occasional lights of humor so reserved and dainty that they never disturb the pictorial harmony.  The capacity for unaffected utterance of feeling on matters common to humanity reached a climax in the poem of ‘Baby Bell,’ which by its sympathetic and delicate description of a child’s advent and death gave the author a claim to the affection^ of a wide circle; and this remained for a long time probably the best known among his poems.  ‘Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book’ is another of the earlier favorites.  ‘Spring in New England’ has since come to hold high rank both for its vivid and graceful description of the season, for its tender fervor of patriotism, and for its sentiment of reconciliation between North and South.  The lines on ‘Piscataqua River’ remain one of the best illustrations of boyhood memories, and have something of Whittier’s homely truth.  In his longer narrative pieces, ‘Judith’ and ‘Wyndham Towers,’ cast in the mold of blank-verse idyls, Mr. Aldrich does not seem so much himself as in many of his briefer flights.  An instinctive dramatic tendency finds outlet in ‘Pauline Paulovna’ and ’Mercedes’—­the latter of which, a two-act piece in prose, has found representation in the theatre; yet in these, also, he is less eminently successful than in his lyrics and society verse.