Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) was a poet, short-story writer, critic, and editor whose use of the surprise ending influenced the short story’s development.
Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Aldrich worked in New York City as a merchant’s clerk from the age of 13, before writing freelance articles and becoming editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1881–90.)
Aldrich’s most successful book, The Story of a Bad Boy (1870,) was an autobiographical novel about his childhood experiences in New Hampshire. Prudence Palfrey (1874) and The Queen of Sheba (1877) were romantic novels. The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) is a detective story.
Aldrich’s best-known prose is the collection of short stories Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873.) His volumes of poems Cloth of Gold (1874,) Flower and Thorn (1877,) Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1884,) and Windham Towers (1890) reflect the cultural atmosphere of New England and his frequent travels to Europe.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear as the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts that work no harm do terrify us more than men in steel with bloody purposes.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Anticipation
The ocean moans over dead men’s bones.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Night
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Age
The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Boredom, Bores
Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Books
In her eyes a thought Grew sweeter and sweeter, deepening like the dawn, A mystical forewarning.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Eyes
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Birds
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Failures, Failure, Mistakes
Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Sleep
When the Sultan Shah-Zaman Goes to the city Ispahan, Even before he gets so far As the place where the clustered palm-trees are, At the last of he thirty palace-gates The pet of the harem, Rose-in-Bloom, Orders a feast in his favorite room—Glittering square of colored ice, Sweetened ith syrup, tinctured with spice, Creams, and cordials, and sugared dates, Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces, Limes and citrons and apricots,
And wines that are known to Eastern princes.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Eating
What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Sleep
Upon the cunning loom of thought We weave our fancies, so and so.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Thoughts
Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Civilization
When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak—little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Sleep
Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Candor, Sincerity
O Liberty…! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Topics: Freedom
Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows
In yonder West: the fair, frail palaces,
The fading Alps and archipelagoes,
And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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