Thomas Bailey Aldrich 26 min read

Walking home across Boston Common near midnight, a man slips into a strange June reverie.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 1873 sketch sets a tranquil, starlit mood on the empty Common, bronze foliage, steady gaslight, the Old South tolling the hour, before drifting into fantasy. A gentle, atmospheric piece of Victorian-American romantic writing, more prose-poem than plot. Read it for the quiet, dreamy craftsmanship of a bygone New England literary sensibility.

In its time

Published in 1873, during the 1870s, under the sea and around the moon.

Reading it

26 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).