In writing on personal and local and occasional themes Aldrich dealt with more congenial material. When celebrating his fellow-authors and the places he loved he could invoke beauty with an unpreoccupied mind; and he did so with unvarying success, addressing the choicest of the limited public in which he was really interested. The kind of folk he cared for "Drank deep of life, _new books_ and hearts of men," like Henry Howard Brownell. As a youth he wrote delightedly of a certain month when he could see "her" every day and browse in a library of ten thousand volumes. He was a literary poet for literary people. As such he was most successful in poems which ranged in length from the sonnet to the quatrain. In the tiny bits like "Destiny," "Heredity," "Identity," "Memory," "I'll not confer with Sorrow," "Pillared Arch and Sculptured Tower," he achieved works as real as Benvenuto's jewel settings. It was a fulfillment of the wish recorded in his "Lyrics and Epics": I would be the lyric Ever on the lip, Rather than the epic Memory lets slip. I would be the diamond At my lady's ear Rather than a June rose Worn but once a year. No more charming tribute was ever paid Aldrich than this of Whittier's narrated by a friend who had been visiting for a week with the poet in his old age: "Every evening he asked me to repeat to him certain short poems, often 'Destiny,' and once even 'that audacious "Identity,"' as he called it; but at the end he invariably said, 'Now thee knows without my saying so that I want "Memory,"' and with his wonderful far-off gaze he always repeated after me: 'Two petals from that wild-rose tree.'" * * * * * In his address at a meeting held in memory of Edmund Clarence Stedman in January, 1909, Hamilton Mabie struck the main note in two complementary statements: "Mr. Stedman belongs with those who have not only enriched literature with works of quality and substance, but who have represented it in its public relationships," and, "Stedman was by instinct and temperament a man of the town." He elected to live in Manhattan just as deliberately as Aldrich elected to live in Boston; and in this distinction lies something much broader than the mere difference between the two men.