In this transition group, poets of external beauty, _Spätromantiker_ yet classicists in their reverence for rule and tradition and in their struggle for perfection, the typical figure is Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907). By birth he was a New Englander, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent that boyhood which he made classic in the _Story of a Bad Boy_. Three years in New Orleans whither his father had moved for business reasons, years that seem to have made slight impression upon him, and then, his father dying and a college course becoming out of the question, he went with his mother to New York, where he resided for fourteen years, or between 1852 and 1866. It was a period of activity and of contact with many things that were to influence his later life. He held successively the positions of counting-room clerk, junior literary critic on the _Evening Mirror_, sub-editor of the _Home Journal_, literary adviser to Derby and Jackson, and managing editor of the _Illustrated News_. He formed a close friendship with Taylor and Stoddard and Stedman, and he saw something of the Bohemian group that during the late fifties and early sixties made headquarters at Pfaff's celebrated resort, 647 Broadway. Then came his call to Boston as editor of _Every Saturday_, his adoption as a Brahmin, his residence on Beacon Street, and his admission to the inner circle of the _Atlantic Monthly_. Aldrich's literary life was from first to last a struggle between his Bohemian New York education and his later Brahmin classicism. His first approach to poetry had been through G. P. Morris and Willis on the _Mirror_ and the _Journal_. From them it was that he learned the strain of sentimentalism which was to produce such poems as "Mabel, Little Mabel," "Marian, May, and Maud," and "Babie Bell." Then swiftly he had come under the spell of Longfellow's German romance, with its Emma of Ilmenau maidens, its delicious sadness and longing, and its worship of the night--that dreamy old-world atmosphere which had so influenced the mid century. It possessed the young poet completely, so completely that he never freed himself entirely from its spell. Longfellow was his poet master: O Poet-soul! O gentle one! Thy thought has made my darkness light; The solemn voices of the night Have filled me with an inner tone. I'll drink thy praise in olden wine, And in the cloak of fine conceite I'll tell thee how my pulses beat, How half my being runs to thine. Then had come the acquaintance with Taylor and Stoddard, and through them the powerful influence of Keats and Tennyson.