The music sang itself to death, The lamps died out in their perfume: Abbassa, on a silk divan, Sate in the moonlight of her room. Her handmaid loosed her scented hair With lily fingers; from her brow Released the diamond, and unlaced The robe that held her bosom's snow; Removed the slippers from her feet And led her to an ivory bed. Had Aldrich persisted in such work, he would have become simply another Stoddard, an echoer of soft sweetness, out of print in the generation following his death. But for Aldrich there was a restraining force. The classicist, the Brahmin, within the sentimental young poet was to be awakened by the greatest of the classicists and the Brahmins, Dr. Holmes, himself. "You must not feed too much on 'apricots and dewberries,'" he wrote in 1863. "There is an exquisite sensuousness that shows through your words and rounds them into voluptuous swells of rhythm as 'invisible fingers of air' lift the diaphanous gauzes. Do not let it run away with you. You love the fragrance of certain words so well that you are in danger of making nosegays when you should write poems.... Your tendency to vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles stifles your strength in cloying euphemisms."[76] Wise criticism, but the critic said nothing of a deeper and more insidious fault. There was no originality in Aldrich's earlier work. Everywhere it echoed other poetry. Like Taylor and Stoddard, the poet had so saturated himself with the writings of others that unconsciously he imitated. One can illustrate this no better perhaps than by examining a passage which Boynton in a review of the poet cites as beauty of the highest order. It is from the poem "Judith": Thy breath upon my cheek is as the air Blown from a far-off grove of cynnamon, Fairer art thou than is the night's one star; Thou makest me a poet with thine eyes. Beautiful indeed it is, but one cannot help thinking of Keats' "Eve's one star" and Marlowe's: Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars; Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter. * * * * * Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. One has, too, an uneasy feeling that the whole poem would never have been written but for Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" and Tennyson's narratives.