Born at Kennett Square, Chester County, Pa., Jan. 11, 1825; died at Berlin, Dec. 19, 1878. An American poet, traveler, writer of travels, translator, and novelist. He was named after James A. Bayard, and in early life sometimes signed himself “J. Bayard Taylor.” He was apprenticed to a printer in 1842. He traveled on foot in Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, etc., 1844–46, writing letters to American papers; was connected with the New York “Tribune,” and its correspondent in California 1849–50; and traveled in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria and Europe 1851–52, and in Spain, India, China and Japan 1852–53, joining Perry’s expedition in Japan. On his return, having traveled more than fifty thousand miles, he began his series of lectures. He traveled in Germany, Norway, and Lapland in 1855; traveled later in Greece, etc.; was secretary of legation and chargé d’affaires at St. Petersburg 1862–63; resided afterward on the Continent; visited Egypt and Iceland in 1874; and was appointed United States minister at Berlin 1878. His principal works are “Ximena, etc.” (1844: poems), “Views Afoot” (1846), “Rhymes of Travel” (1849), “Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire” (1850), “Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs” (1851), “A Journey to Central Africa” (1854), “The Lands of the Saracen” (1854), “Poems and Ballads” (1854), “A Visit to India, China, and Japan” (1855), “Poems of the Orient” (1855), “Poems of Home and Travel” (1855), “Northern Travel” (1857), “Travels in Greece, etc.” (1859), “At Home and Abroad” (1859–62), “The Poet’s Journal” (1862), “Hannah Thurston” (1863: a novel), “John Godfrey’s Fortunes” (1864), “The Story of Kennett” (1866), “Colorado” (1867), “Byways of Europe” (1869), “Joseph and his Friend” (1870), “The Masque of the Gods” (1872), “Beauty and the Beast” (1872), “Lars, etc.” (1873), “School History of Germany to 1871” (1874), “Egypt and Iceland” (1874), “The Prophet” (1874: a tragedy of Mormonism), “Home Pastorals” (1875), “The Echo Club, and other Literary Diversions” (1876), “Boys of Other Countries” (1876), “The National Ode” (1876), “Prince Deucalion” (1878), “Studies in German Literature” (1879), “Critical Essays, etc.” (1880), and “Dramatic Works” (1880: with notes by M. H. Taylor), He edited Tegner’s “Frithjofs Saga” in 1867 (translated by Blackley), and translated Goethe’s “Faust” in the original meters (1870–71).

Personal

	Here too, of answering love secure,
	Have I not welcomed to my hearth
	The gentle pilgrim troubadour,
	Whose songs have girdled half the earth;
	Whose pages, like the magic mat
	Whereon the Eastern lover sat,
	Have borne me over Rhine-land’s purple vines,
	And Nubia’s tawny sands, and Phrygia’s mountain pines!

  Here under the flowers that grew in German soil, lies the mortal frame tenanted for fifty-three years by the richly-endowed genius whom men knew as Bayard Taylor. Thy name will be spoken by coming generations, who never looked into thy kindly, winning face, never grasped thy faithful hand, never heard a word from thy eloquent lips. Yet no: the breath of the mouth is exhaled and lost, but thy word, thy poet-word, is abiding. On behalf of those whom thou hast left behind, urged by my affection as thy oldest friend in the Old World, as thou didst often call me, and as a representative of German literature, I send after thee loving words of farewell. What thou hast become and shalt continue to be in the realms of mind, after ages will determine. To-day our hearts are thrilled with grief and lamentation, and yet with exaltation too…. As from one power to another, so wast thou the accredited envoy from one realm of mind to another, and even in thy latest work thou dost show that thou livedst in that religion which embraces all confessions, and takes not the name of one to the exclusion of the rest. Nature gave thee a form full of grace and power, a spirit full of clearness and chaste cheerfulness, and the grace of melodious speech to set forth the movements and emotions springing from the eternal and never-fathomed source of being, as well as from the fleeting and never-exhausted joys of wedded and paternal love, of friendship, of the inspiration of nature, of patriotism, and of the ever-ascending revelations of human history.

	Dead he lay among his books!
	The peace of God was in his looks.
	As the statues in the gloom
	Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
	So those volumes from their shelves
	Watched him, silent as themselves.
	Ah! his hand will nevermore
	Turn their storied pages o’er;
	Nevermore his lips repeat
	Songs of theirs, however sweet.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Thou hast sung, with organ tone,
	In Deukalion’s life, thine own;
	On the ruins of the Past
	Blooms the perfect flower at last.
	Friend! but yesterday the bells
	Rang for thee their loud farewells;
	And to-day they toll for thee,
	Lying dead beyond the sea;
	Lying dead among thy books,
	The peace of God in all thy looks!

  Bayard Taylor’s death slices a huge cantle out of the world for me. I don’t yet know it, at all; it only seems that he has gone to some other Germany, a little farther off. How strange it all is: he was such a fine fellow, one almost thinks he might have talked Death over and made him forego his stroke.

  No one could possibly look upon the manly young fellow at that time (1847), without loving him. He was tall and slight, with the bloom of youth mantling a face full of eager, joyous expectation. Health of that buoyant nature which betokens delight in existence was visible in every feature of the youthful traveler.

	“The fresh air lodged within his cheek
	As light within a cloud.”

  We all flocked about him like a swarm of brothers, heartily welcoming him to Boston. When we told him how charmed we all were with his travels, he blushed like a girl, and tears filled his sensitive eyes. “It is one of the most absorbingly interesting books I ever read!” cried one of our number, heightening the remark with an expletive savoring of strength more than of early piety. Taylor looked up, full of happiness at the opinion so earnestly expressed, and asked, with that simple naïveté which always belonged to his character, “Do you really think so? Well, I am so glad!”

	In other years—lost youth’s enchanted years,
	Seen now, and evermore, through blinding tears
	And empty longing for what may not be—
	The Desert gave him back to us; the Sea
	Yielded him up; the icy Norland strand
	Lured him not long, nor that soft German air
	He loved could keep him. Ever his own land
	Fettered his heart and brought him back again.
	What sounds are these of farewell and despair
	Borne on the winds across the wintry main!
	What unknown way is this that he has gone,
	Our Bayard, in such silence and alone?
	What new strange quest has tempted him once more
	To leave us? Vainly, standing by the shore,
	We strain our eyes. But patience! when the soft
	Spring gales are blowing over Cedarcroft,
	Whitening the hawthorne; when the violets bloom
	Along the Brandywine, and overhead
	The sky is blue as Italy’s, he will come …
	In the wind’s whisper, in the swaying pine,
	In song of bird and blossoming of vine,
	And all fair things he loved ere he was dead!

  He spoke of his appointment to Berlin, in the tone of a man who was modestly conscious of his worth; who knew that the distinction, brilliant as it was, had been fair earned, but who was none the less grateful for it. He knew that he was fit for the place, and that the honor bestowed on him was one to which he in turn was able to do honor. He had a just pride in hearing his name associated with the names of Irving, of Motley, of Marsh, of Lowell,—one and all men who had earned their fame in literature before they became diplomatists. He was far too frank and open-natured to care to hide his pleasure. With all his varied and ample experience, with all his knowledge of the world and mastery of social conventionalities, Mr. Taylor retained to the last a certain freshness and candor in expressing his inmost feelings, which belongs only to those souls that have no mean secrets to keep, no false pride or false modesty. He was pleased, and he was not ashamed of being pleased. It is only a man very sure of himself who can venture to take the world into his confidence as he did. Then, as often before, I thought it most honorable to him. It was consistent with great dignity of demeanor, and whoever fancied he could take advantage of it soon found out his mistake. He submitted readily and generously to all sorts of slight impositions. He gave five francs for some service which fifty centimes would have rewarded amply. He would never look too closely into matters where only his own interest was at stake, but where others were concerned, where it was his business to defend interests which had been confided to him, he could be hard, astute, immovable. That was one of his peculiar merits as a minister. In most points no two men could be more unlike than Mr. Taylor and Prince Bismarck, but they had this in common: that they told the truth fearlessly, and found it served their purpose where the most ingenious mystifications would have failed of their end.

	Ah then—farewell, young-hearted, genial friend!
	Farewell, true poet, who didst grow and build
	From thought to thought still upward and still new.
	Farewell, unsullied toiler in a guild
	Where some defile their hands, and where so few
	With aims as pure strive faithful to the end.

  To think of him is to recall a person larger in make and magnanimity than the common sort; a man of indescribable buoyancy, hopefulness, sweetness of temper,—reverent, loyal, shrinking from contention yet ready to do battle for a principle or in the just cause of a friend; a patriot and lover of his kind, stainless in morals, and of an honesty so pure and simple that he could not be surprised into an untruth or the commission of a mean and unworthy act.

  People who knew Bayard Taylor but superficially were apt to accuse him of what they were pleased to call literary vanity. To me this charge seems to be based upon an imperfect comprehension of the rare simplicity and earnestness of the man. Of course he believed in himself and in his own poetic mission, and he was not disposed to admit into the circle of his more intimate friends any one who questioned the genuineness of his poetic talent. But who likes to have his merits questioned in his own presence? and who chooses his friends among his hostile critics? It is not to be denied that the conventional code of etiquette requires that a man should deprecate his own worth, and, especially in the case of an author, that he should put a very modest estimate upon his own productions. Bayard Taylor was too frank and honest to conform to this rule. If you told him that you thought his “Pæan to the Dawn” in the “Songs of the Orient” was a wonderful poem, his fine eyes would light up with pleasure, and he would describe too in vivid colors the situation which had suggested the song to him.

  Never can I forget the conversation between Carlyle and Bayard Taylor, when the latter visited London on his way to take his place as minister at Berlin. Several years before, Bayard had called upon Carlyle, and audaciously announced that he meant to write the life of Goethe. The old man could not allow any such liberties taken with his literary hero without a challenge, and set a sort of trap for this ambitious American. “But,” said he, “are there not already Lives of Goethe? There is Blank’s Life of Goethe; what fault have you to find with that?” The tone was that Blank had exhausted the subject. Bayard immediately began showing the inadequacy and errors of Blank’s book, and withal his own minute and critical knowledge of Goethe, when Carlyle broke out with a laugh, saying of the Life he had mentioned, “I couldn’t read it through.” From that moment he was cordial, and recognized the man before him.

  On the 17th a rapid change began, which was cruelly deceptive in its first form; for though his attendants knew the contrary, a sudden relief conveyed to Bayard Taylor the delusive hope that he had passed through a crisis and was now to get well. It was in reality a premonition of the immediate end. It was followed by extreme pain, which brought with it a bitter disappointment. On the 19th, after restlessness and wandering of mind, he was in his chair, where he now spent most of his time. His will flamed out in one final burst. “I want,”—he began, and found it impossible to make his want known or guessed until suddenly he broke forth, “I want, oh, you know what I mean, that stuff of life!” It was like Goethe’s cry, the despair of one groping for that which had always been his in large measure. At two in the afternoon he fell asleep, and at four o’clock gently breathed his last.

  Passing from Taylor the author to Taylor the individual, we have in him a signal example of high, unspoiled manhood. His whole life was a practical epic, the keynote of which sounded the dignity of labor consecrated by ennobling ends. Self-trustful, with a healthy, well-poised mind, appreciating his own gifts, and knowing of what they were capable, he was still never arrogant or overbearing. As a companion, all who really knew, loved him. His heart dominated even his great intellect.

  Memory recalls to me that I was a schoolboy on College Hill, Poughkeepsie, when Taylor first lectured in that town, and when I first saw him at a supper party under my father’s hospitable roof. He possessed what old Fuller quaintly called a “handsome man-case,” and was, I think, the tallest of American poets, standing over six feet. Later in life he came to resemble a Teuton in look and bearing, and was greatly changed from my early recollections, when he possessed a slight figure and something of the Grecian type in head and face, as represented in an early portrait of him seated on the roof of a house in Damascus, painted by Thomas Hicks.

  Bayard Taylor was at this period [about 1853] a bird of passage, on his way to other countries, and we did not see very much of him, though he spent an evening with us. But there are people whom you may like very much, and know to a considerable extent very quickly; and Bayard Taylor was I think one of these. He was quite a young man—not out of the “twenties” I am sure—and full of that hopeful enthusiasm and energy which are so becoming at that age. He had already travelled much and was planning further daring adventures. There was such an undercurrent of courage and chivalry about him that I have often thought how well suited to him was his Christian name…. In his youth Bayard Taylor was decidedly handsome, with a glow in his complexion which reminded one of his neighbors the Red Indians. He was tall and slim, with every limb expressive of agility.

  Taylor wrote with such rapidity that he could complete a duodecimo volume in a fortnight. His industry of hand was amazing. He seemed never to weary, and his handwriting was exceptionally neat and fine. A comparison of letters written in his seventeenth year and in his fiftieth shows almost no change of hand. His penmanship and his style were formed early and changed little. In the long manuscript of “Faust” there is scarcely a misformed or carelessly made letter. He was a genuine artist in black and white, and his highest happiness was to sit from morn till dewy eve, smoking a cigar that was not too good, and filling page after page with his neat chirography. A surprising instance is recorded of his facility and speed. In a night and a day he read Victor Hugo’s voluminous “La Légende des Siècles,” and wrote for the “Tribune” a review of it which fills eighteen pages of his “Essays and Literary Notes,” and contains five considerable poems which are translations in the metre of the original.

Poetry

  Ximena; | or | The Battle of the Sierra Morena | and | other Poems, | By James Bayard Taylor. | “I am a Youthful Traveler on the Way.” Henry Kirke White | Philadelphia:—Herman Hooker, 178 Chestnut Street | MDCCCXLIV.

  My very soul revolts at such efforts (as the one I refer to) to depreciate such poems as Mr. Taylor’s. Is there no honor—no chivalry left in the land? Are our most deserving writers to be forever sneered down, or hooted down, or damned down with faint praise, by a set of men who possess little other ability than that which assures temporary success to them, in common with Swaim’s Panacea or Morrison’s Pills?

  He has written the tragedy of Mormonism, and taken Joe Smith and Brigham Young for his heroes. His experiment has not, to our taste, been remarkably successful, but it is creditable to his intellectual pluck. If he had succeeded, he would have achieved an extraordinary feat; but it must be confessed that, though we should certainly have boasted of his performance, we would not perhaps have admitted that he had attempted it at his peril. Of course Mr. Taylor has had in a measure to adapt his material to poetic conditions. He has changed the names of his personages, elaborated his plot, left certain details gracefully vague, and, for the most part, steered clear of local color. But his desire has evidently been to adhere to reality as much as was practically convenient and to enjoy whatever benefit there might be in leaving to his drama the savor of the soil…. It perturbs our faith a little to learn that the prophet is Mr. Joe Smith, and the dénouement is to be the founding of Salt Lake City by Mr. Brigham Young; we reflect that there is a magic in associations, and we are afraid that we scent vulgarity in these. But we are anxious to see what the author makes of them, and we grant that the presumption is in favor of his audacity. Mormonism we know to be a humbug and a rather nasty one. It needs at this time of day no “showing up,” and Mr. Taylor has not wasted his time in making a poetical exposure.

  The richness of his vocabulary never impels him to sacrifice truth of representation to the transient effectiveness which is readily secured by indulgence in declamation. One sometimes wonders that the master of so many languages should be content to express himself with such rigid economy of word and phrase in the one he learned at his mother’s knee. Among Taylor’s minor poems it is difficult to select those which exhibit his genius at its topmost point. Perhaps “Camadeva” may be instanced as best showing his power of blending exquisite melody with serene, satisfying, uplifting thought. The song which begins with the invocation, “Daughter of Egypt, veil thine eyes!” is as good as could be selected from his many pieces to indicate the energy and healthiness of his lyric impulse. His longer poems would reward a careful criticism.

  Far be it from us to say he was not a poet. There are passages not a few in his books which would make it difficult to question his claim. Certainly he had a poetic mind. G. P. R. James described him as “the best landscape painter in words that he had ever known,” and he was sometimes more than that. The poets of his own day—Longfellow, Whittier, and Bryant among them—regarded him as a poet, and his masterly translation of “Faust” is by itself almost enough to establish the position. Yet the world was so far right that he was something else in the first place, and a poet only in the second place.

  His fanciful conceit that Shelley’s spiritual influence had entered his own mind seems pardonable in one who, even before his acquaintance with the works of that poet, had voiced in his “Angel of the Soul” the same passionate appeal for the solution of life’s mystery that Shelley had expressed in the introductory passage of his “Alastor” But while at even this early period his study of Shelley inspired him, and moved him to such songs as “The Ode to Shelley” and “Ariel in the Cloven Pine,” it is but fair to point to another master-singer who might be said to have had, if not an equal, at the least a partial, influence on his lyrical expression. While in Germany he read, for the first time in the original, Schiller’s poems. Appealing to his ear with their rhythmical beauty, they stirred his imagination, and through those early years of struggle for a “poetical individuality,” as he himself termed it in letters of that time, there is in his verse the same exuberance of diction, the same fervor and passionate chase after the ideal, as is to be found in Schiller’s “Poems of the First Period.”

Faust, 1870–71

  Your letter reached me on Tuesday last; the books on Friday. I go to bed usually as near ten as I can that I may rise at five; your volumes kept me up till nearly two in the morning of Saturday; the like of which has not happened to me in five years…. The second part of “Faust” I studied seriously a year or two ago, using the commentary of Carrière. Your translation and notes would have saved me a world of trouble. You impart clearness to what is obscure, and give a thread of continuity to what might seem fantastic and unorganized. Here is seen the energy of Goethe’s political feelings; his contempt for the follies and crimes of misgovernment of German princes was the sincere expression of the thoughts which he carried along with him all his life; only their vices were so deeply seated that he to the last appears to me to have despaired of German union.

  He was a poet. It may be said, indeed, that his poetic power lay at the foundation of all his linguistic attainments. He apprehended foreign speech and foreign life in all its forms through that poetic faculty which is of the nature of intuition. Not that labor was wanting, but labor served to bind and complete what had been caught at and appropriated by the appreciative and penetrative power of a poetic mind. Moreover, in the growth of his own nature, Bayard Taylor had come to think and create in sympathy with Goethe. No doubt the study which was given to “Faust” had much to do with the subsequent development of Bayard Taylor’s genius, but it did not lay the foundation of that development; it came when from other causes his mind was ripe for Goethe’s thought. When, therefore, he was absorbed in the work of translation, he was very far removed from a mechanical task, however delicate. On the contrary he was in a creative mood, constructing part by part a great poem which lay alongside of “Faust,” singularly harmonious with the original, as all critics granted, because the harmony consisted in the very subtle likeness of the movement of his mind with that of Goethe’s.

  The scholarly character of this performance is now established. That to which more than one of his predecessors had given a lifetime, he apparently completed in three years. He had borne it in mind, however, for two decades, and it was his habit to think upon a task until able to execute it at a dash and with great perfection. The result was an advance upon any previous rendering of the entire work…. The characteristics of Taylor’s “Faust” are sympathetic quality, rapid poetic handling, absolute fidelity to the text. Now and then his realistic version of the first part has an unusual or quaint effect, detracting from its imaginative design.

Views Afoot, 1844

  The last chapter fills me with great wonder. How could you accomplish so much, with such slight help and appliances? It shows a strength of will—the central fire of all great deeds and words—that must lead you far in whatever you undertake.

  There is something which we like well in the title of this unpretending work; it is straightforward and expressive, suiting well with the character in which the writer presents himself to the world…. Most ancient men would say, that for a journeyman printer, without property, without friends, without encouragement, to undertake the tour of Europe, was the wildest of all human visions; and we doubt not that Mr. Taylor received rich presents of this kind of sympathy from those who knew his adventurous design. But those prudent and estimable persons were looking, all the while, to external advantages for the purpose, and making no account of inward resources; when experience shows that, whether to trudge through Europe, or to foot it through life,—for John Wesley says there is no carriage-road to heaven,—the strong mind and strong heart are more than a match for them all…. It is not necessary to give much account of a popular work like this, which is already in the hands of many, and which many more might read with profit and pleasure, not merely for the animated and intelligent account of most interesting countries which it contains, but for the example of energy in the pursuit of improvement here presented, without the self-complacency with which that bold trait of character is too often attended.

	Then BAYARD TAYLOR—protégeé of Natty,
	Dixon-like “walked” into the “literati;”
	And first to proper use his genius put,
	Like ballet-girls, by showing “Views a-Foot!”

  I say, then, most earnestly, to every youth anxious to go abroad, traverse Europe, and pay his way by writing for some journal, “Tarry at Jericho, till your beard be grown.” I never knew but one of your class—Bayard Taylor—who achieved a real success in thus traveling; and he left home a good type-setter, with some knowledge of modern languages; so that he stopped and worked at his trade whenever his funds ran short; yet, even thus, he did not wholly pay his way during the two years he devoted to his delightful “Views Afoot.” I know it, for I employed and paid him all that his letters were fairly worth, though not nearly so much as his letters now righteously command. He practiced a systematic and careful economy; yet he went away with money, and returned with the clothes on his back, and (I judge) very little more. My young friend, if you think yourself better qualified than he was, go ahead, and “do” Europe! but don’t ask me to further your scheme; for I hold that you may far better stay at home, apply yourself to some useful branch of productive industry, help pay our national debt, and accumulate a little independence whereon, by and by, to travel (if you chose) as a gentleman, and not with but a sheet of paper between you and starvation.

  The success of his book was undoubted, and was merited at the time, though it would attract but little attention now. If he had known more than he did, it would have been less interesting; he was lucky in not being too far ahead of his readers. He told them in a pleasant way of common things which were novelties to them. He was not accepted as a traveler among those who had traveled themselves…. He overlooked much that was important, and beheld too much that was merely trivial.

  The poetic fervor of the book and its restrained vigor of style, the tenacity of purpose, the struggle, the courage, and the pluck that it revealed, fascinated the public, and sufficiently account for its great popularity.

General

  Putnam has sent us a few copies of your poems, and I cannot help writing a hasty line to say how grandly the ballads swell and tramp along, and how fine the other poems seem in this dress. Why, Bayard, man, you have done the thing in getting out this book. Your prefatory remarks I like hugely. George Lunt, to whom I handed the open book a few hours ago in the store, told me he had read and re-read your ballads over and over again, and knew not the hand that penned the lines. You have a capital reputation now in poetry, and must be careful of your muse. A good beginning is everything. I stand at a desk where I can gauge a man’s depth in the public reading estimation, and I know no youngster who stands dearer than J. B. T., doffing the J.

  Were it only for his active life of enterprise and for the additions he has made to our knowledge, Mr. Taylor should be held in grateful esteem. His positive merits as a writer, however, deserve a warmer recognition. His descriptions are clearly and vividly portrayed, and his books are weighted with but little of the ordinary traveller’s burden of unimportant personal details. They are interesting as mere narratives, and of permanent value for the facts they record. His Oriental poems have a natural warmth of color and vivacity of expression. He will be chiefly remembered, however, among poets, for his faithful and admirable translation of Faust, a work that testifies to his skill, poetic feeling, and mastery of expression.

  The author of this somewhat ante-dated volume is not unknown in Europe; in America not to know him is to proclaim oneself unknown. By turns, and sometimes all at once, he has figured as printer, journalist, dramatist, poet, special correspondent. That he has been a diplomatist we are almost certain; that he has figured as a tourist in every land under the sun, let the multitude of ephemeral travels which bear his name on the title-page testify. In a word, he is “one of the most remarkable men” of his country. But whether as a writer in the “Tribune,” as translator of Goethe, as Bayard Taylor of Central Africa, Bayard Taylor of California, Bayard Taylor of Japan, or Bayard Taylor the Secretary of Legation, he has, while doing everything well, in none soared above respectable mediocrity.

  Taylor was too high a character, and he filled too large a place in our literature, to be subjected, in the helplessness of death, to the wrong of having his work tampered with, even by tender hands, devoted to fulfilling a purpose of his own. The master’s hand is as stiff as the pencil which he held, his blood is as dry as the colors upon his palette: let the pupils stand before his unfinished work in the stillness of reverence; but let no one impose a tone or a tint upon the canvas, lest the world of to-day and the world of to-morrow should say that the picture is not his.

  He could roll off a poem on any subject to order. But it is mechanism. How, indeed, could he infuse life when he had no living faith or hope? Turning over these manifold poems, some of them of striking symmetry and finish, we confess to a feeling of sadness and disappointment. His poetry never took hold of the popular heart. His “Centennial Ode” was as great a failure as Sidney Lanier’s. There is no thought, no soul, no mens divinor in it—a symphony of unmeaning sounds, but no inner music. He is best in his poetical descriptions of natural scenery. He had a good eye for this, and he manages to catch the expression. His translations are invariably good. Indeed, to speak phrenologically, he had imitation large but ideality small. So, too, the best reflections in his prose works are unconsciously copied from the vast stores of his reading, though he himself is perfectly honest. Still, he must pay the penalty of the versatile genius of the journalist in having most of his writings classed as ephemeral.

	He brought us wonders of the new and old;
	We shared all climes with him. The Arab’s tent
	To him its story-telling secret lent,
	And, pleased, we listened to the tales he told.
	His task, beguiled with songs that shall endure,
	In manly, honest thoroughness he wrought;
	From humble home-lays to the heights of thought
	Slowly he climbed, but every step was sure.

  The value of “Hannah Thurston” as a bit of truthful local characterization has never been sufficiently acknowledged by the critics, while its defects as a work of art are plain. The life, at least, was distinctly American and local.

  Some of his voluminous books of travel have become classics in their way. They are singularly free, upon the whole, not merely of poetical exaggeration, but even of a tendency in that direction,—being remarkable rather for clearness of statement and practical information. Not that the poet could aways hide himself behind the homespun mask of utilitarianism; for through it his brilliant mind flashed, as it were, arch humors and wonderful suggestions! Now and then, mere photographic details are followed by word-pictures so vivid, eloquent, and full of vraisemblance that they seem absolutely rhythmical. Each flowing period sets itself to music. Read, for example, his wonderful description of the “Taj Mahal!” Where, in recent English literature, has it been surpassed?… As a novelist Taylor hardly impresses us as being one “to the manner born.” That indefinable ease, grace, and confidence, that steady-going power of the masters of prose fiction, he did not and he could not display. His novels were fairly successful for a time, and accomplished in some measure the purposes for which they were penned. They had not in them the stuff of perpetuity.

  As a poet, the qualities of his mature style were now fairly displayed. From the beginning, rhythm, the surreusis of liquid measures, had much to do with his sense of the beautiful in verse, and reacted upon his imagination. He revelled in the effect of the broad English vowels, the “hollow ae’s and oe’s,” and in the consonantal vigor of our language. He enjoyed reading aloud the poetry of Darley, of Byron and Shelley, and read his own with such melody and resonance that one who listened to its chanting sound was no more able than himself to tell whether it was of his poorest or his best. Its dominant quality, therefore, was often that of eloquence, as in the verse of Croly and Campbell. Poe quoted from one of his early pieces, to show that eloquence and imagination may go together. I have said that Bryant was “elemental” in his communion with sea and forest and the misty mountain winds. Taylor, as to the general range of his poetry, was ethnical and secular.

  Seldom does achievement lag so far behind the desire as in the case of the “Deukalion.” Taylor sought to make it a poem fitly chronicling the entire upward and onward march of man, but overwork and failing powers are sadly manifest. Yet, after all, neither vain excuse nor word of deep disappointment need embitter our memories of one who produced (albeit in three years) a metrical version of Faust that for practical purposes is faultless, and who wrote (in four days) “The Masque of the Gods,” our best addition to the loftiest or religious division of the drama, the highest form of literature.

  Bayard Taylor, so beloved, so full of high hope, and so pathetically foredoomed to a fame that must grow scantier with advancing years.

  The predominant trait of Taylor’s mind was a certain love of Nature in her larger forms: it was not so much the love of a naturalist as the love of a painter; his poetry was always picturesque. This quality, which is felt, rather than perceived, is conspicuous in the “Metempsychosis of the Pine,”—which he never surpassed…. His popularity as a traveller was greater than his popularity as a poet,—a circumstance which disappointed him and stimulated him into writing more poetry. Of the value of his contributions to the literature of travel, I am no judge. I read his books as they appeared, and was interested in them on his account, but they have left no definite impression on my mind. It was as a poet I most admired him, and it is as a poet, I think, that he will be chiefly remembered.

  Taylor’s novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse, eloquent, and faulty. “John Godfrey’s Fortune,” 1864, gave a picture of Bohemian life in New York. “Hannah Thurston,” 1863, and “The Story of Kennett,” 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance,” a satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived character, though drawn with some exaggeration. “The Story of Kennett,” which is largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and reality than the others and is full of personal recollections. In these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor’s pictorial skill is greater, on the whole, than his power of creating characters or inventing plots.

  His early life had been warped by sentimentality, and cribbed by repression. Two centuries of Quaker ancestry had condemned him to slow development. From the first there was a purely literary strain in his blood, but the nice sense of proportion and of harmony was slowly arrived at. He was, he said, ten years behind every other American author; but when those who had the start of him flowered and ceased he was stepping on with quick impatience to more novel experiments and to more conspicuous results. The really great things of which he was capable were still before him when he died, with more unfilled renown and unaccomplished growth within him than any other man in American letters…. Consider the work he did in the fifty-four years of his life; his far travels, his wide experience in all departments of journalism, his services as a diplomatist in Russia and in Germany, the variety of his literature,—essays, descriptive and critical, history and biography, novels and short stories, translations, odes, idyls, ballads, lyrics, pastorals, dramatic romances, and lyrical dramas,—and it is clear that his career comprehends the orbit of contemporary American life and letters. He was not our highest and most influential writer; he was rather a meistersinger,—a guild-singer,—a man of talent, and master of the mechanics of his craft. But on all sides he touched the life of his time. He was one of the most widely-known American authors. Art had graven him in romantic garb upon the public mind. Astonishing memory and prodigious industry in him had taken the place of genius, and they had won a signal triumph.

  Taylor’s exuberant rhetoric is both his strength and his weakness…. In all his later writings he never surpassed the glowing passionate imagery of his “Poems of the Orient.” He seemed to have caught the very spirit of the far East and interpreted it as none of our writers before or since. It was like an infusion of tropical blood into the somewhat stiff and formal body of our American verse…. The great gulf fixed between the so-called “Sacred Poems” of Willis and Taylor’s “Poems of the Orient” represents only a dozen years in time, but an indefinite period in the development of the poetic spirit. By this publication Taylor at once placed himself at the head of our minor poets. In his higher strains he seemed to unite the lyrical music of Poe with the artistic finish of Longfellow.