Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Aldrich is making a case for seduction over delivery: art should flirt, not lecture. The first clause is almost offhand - "I like" - but it smuggles in a whole aesthetic program. Suggestion isn’t just a stylistic preference; it’s a way of recruiting the reader as a co-author. When he says he’d rather be "suggested rather than told in full", he’s defending the charged gap between what’s on the page and what blooms in the mind. The line understands a basic psychological truth: explanation can be a kind of anesthesia. Give people every detail and you don’t clarify so much as close the circuit.

The subtext is quietly combative. Aldrich is pushing back against the 19th century’s appetite for exhaustive moral clarity - the kind of fiction and verse that spelled out its lessons, its motives, its meanings. As a poet associated with genteel letters but writing in an era sliding toward realism and naturalism, he’s staking out territory for ambiguity, atmosphere, and restraint. The "mind rests satisfied" is not a compliment; it’s an accusation. Satisfaction here is artistic failure, the moment the audience stops working.

That final image - imagination needing "its own wings" - is soft rhetoric with sharp implications. Wings imply motion, risk, and height. Aldrich wants readers airborne, not seated, and he knows the paradox: the less an artist pins down, the more powerfully the work can possess you. Suggestion doesn’t withhold; it activates.