Aldrich's later life was a prolonged struggle against the poetic habits of this New York period of his training. The second side of his personality, however, that severe classical spirit which made war with his romantic excesses, more and more possessed him. "I have a way," he wrote in 1900, "of looking at my own verse as if it were written by some man I didn't like very well, and thus I am able to look at it rather impersonally, and to discover when I have fallen into mere 'fine writing,' a fault I am inclined to, while I detest it."[77] Imitation was his besetting sin. It was his realization of this fact more than anything else that caused him to omit from later editions such wide areas of his earlier work. Of the forty-eight poems in _The Bells_ he suffered not one to be reprinted; of his second volume he reprinted only two fragments: "Dressing the Bride" and "Songs from the Persian"; of the forty-seven lyrics in his third volume he admitted only seven into his definitive edition, and of the twenty in his fourth volume he spared but five. Of the vast number of lyrics that he had produced before the edition of 1882 only thirty-three were deemed of enough value to be admitted into his final canon. It was not alone on account of its lack of finish that this enormous mass of poetical material was condemned. The poet had been born with nothing in particular to say. Nothing had compelled him to write save a dilettante desire to work with beautiful things. His life had known no period of storm and stress from which were to radiate new forces. His poems had been therefore not creations, but exercises to be thrown aside when the mood had passed. Exquisite work it often was, but there was no experience in it, no depth of life, no color of any soil save that of the dream-world of other poets. The Aldrich of the later years became more and more an artist, a seeker for the perfect, a classicist. "The things that have come down to us," he wrote once to Stedman, "the things that have _lasted_, are perfect in form. I believe many a fine thought has perished being inadequately expressed, and I know that many a light fancy is immortal because of its perfect wording."[78] He defended himself again and again from the charge that he was a mere carver of cherry stones, a maker of exquisite trifles. "Jones's or Smith's lines," he wrote in 1897, "'to my lady's eyebrow'--which is lovely in every age--will outlast nine-tenths of the noisy verse of our stress and storm period. Smith or Jones who never dreamed of having a Mission, will placidly sweep down to posterity over the fall of a girl's eyelash, leaving our shrill didactic singers high and dry on the sands of time."[79] He has summed it up in his "Funeral of a Minor Poet": Beauty alone endures from age to age, From age to age endures, handmaid of God, Poets who walk with her on earth go hence Bearing a talisman. And again in his poem "Art":