The virtues of work so carefully perfected are evident. His effects are, in the end, all calculated, for he gave no quarter to what he had produced with zest if it did not ring true to his critical ear. His poetic machinery is therefore well oiled and articulated. His metaphors are sound and his diction happily adjusted. "The vanilla-flavored adjectives and the patchouli-scented participles" criticized by his kindly senior, Dr. Holmes, are pared away. So in the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent there is a fine simplicity, but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid. And herein lie the shortcomings of Aldrich's poetry--that it is the poetry of accomplishment. As a youth in New York, writing while Halleck's popularity was at its height, he was not independent enough to be more original than his most admired townsman. The verses in "The Bells: a Collection of Chimes" are most of them clearly imitative; and from the day of "Babie Bell" on, whatever of originality was Aldrich's belonged to the library and the drawing-room and the literary club rather than to the seas, woods, and mountains. It is logical, then, that his longer narrative poems have least of his own stamp in them. From a literary point of view they are well enough, but they are literary grass of the field and have no more claim on the primary attention of a modern reader than do the bulk of prose short stories written in the same years by Aldrich and his fellows. The only one that stands out is "Pauline Pavlovna," and that because it has the dramatic vigor and the startling unexpectedness of conclusion which mark the best of his prose tales. It is logical, too, that in his more ambitious odes--such as "Spring in New England" and the "Shaw Memorial Ode," which open and close the second volume of his poems--he did not appear to the best advantage. Memorials of the Civil War are adequate only if written with epic vision, but the best that Aldrich did with such material was to make it the ground for heartfelt tributes to the nobility of his fallen friends. Read Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" beside Aldrich's slender lyric based on the same man and the same memorial, and the difference is self-evident. Aldrich's biographer has commented on the rarity of his æsthetic sense, "among modern poets with their preoccupations, philosophical, religious and political." In this not unjust criticism of Aldrich--which marks a distinction rather than a superiority--lies the reason why he should have left the writing of national odes to poets who were sometimes capable of such preoccupation.