The men who gathered at Pfaff's were very conscious of Boston, though their consciousness came out in various ways. The most violent said that the thought of it made them as ugly as sin; others loved it though they left it, as Whitman did "the open road"; and some, on the outskirts of "Bohemia," were not too aggressively like Stedman, who admitted much later, "I was very anxious to bring out my first book in New York in Boston style, having a reverence for Boston, which I continued to have." Aldrich was of like mind, and readily accepted Osgood's invitation to "the Hub" and to the editorship of _Every Saturday_. Years after he wrote to Bayard Taylor, who could understand: "I miss my few dear friends in New York--but that is all. There is a finer intellectual atmosphere here than in our city.... The people of Boston are full-blooded _readers_, appreciative, trained." And later, to Stedman: "In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn't find more than two or three such in New York, and I lived there fifteen years. It was an excellent school for me--to get out of!" Boston was his native heath, in spite of his own saying: "Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated." Aldrich's literary career began and ended with the writing of poetry, but what he did in the interims of poetical silence contributed to the peculiar character of his work even though it was a source of distraction and sometimes of prolonged interruption. As a reader and editor he was schooled from very young manhood in the exercise of a peculiarly fine artistic taste, a taste so exacting in detail that the _Atlantic_ under his direction was described by a foreign critic as "the best edited magazine in the English language." He did not reserve the exercise of this rectitude of judgment for the work of others, but applied it with perhaps increased austerity to himself. His verse will consequently endure close examination, and the later collections will show the virtues and defects of scrupulous rejection and of the revision in each succeeding publication of the work which he chose to preserve.