Taylor's career to be noted in illustration of TH CHAPTER XI. ' BAYARD TAYLOR. HIS poet, the last and youngest of those here made the subjects of distinct review, is no longer a living comrade. The consecrating hand that removed him enables us to free our judgment from conditions. bias of rivalry or affection. recent The question of suc cess. "Far off is he, above desire and fear; No more submitted to the change and chance He was taken in his prime, with work spread out before him, yet not until after years of unceasing production. We find ourselves observing one whose ideal was higher than anything which his writings, abundant as they are, express for us, and one who none the less has claims to be estimated in some degree by that ideal. His life was noteworthy; it was a display of heroic industry, zest, ambition, the bravest self-reliance, and from slight beginnings he achieved much. But he was one whose success must be gauged from within. What was his dream? Did he realize it? If not, what hindered him? These questions must be asked; and, in trying to answer them, we see the peculiar advantages which the career of Taylor proffers for an understanding of the literary movement, the social and working life, in which he was involved. Not that he was our most famous singer, nor one whose score was completed, AUTHORSHIP IN NEW YORK. but what American poet ever touched life and letters more variously? He let nothing go by him, he essayed everything, and he furnishes examples of what to do and what to avoid. Moreover, his story enables us to study American authorship under somewhat different conditions from those which have affected the Cambridge group, and with it a period whose bisecting line is indicated by the date of the beginning of our civil war. 397 The task laid upon the pioneers of letters in New New York. York has been sufficiently hard, always the need See p. 53. of devotion, toil, patient laying of foundations on which others shall build. Inherited names and resources, and the advantage of university life, have favored the growth of the New England school. Poets who have strayed into New York- and here they are more seldom born than imported — have carried Obiter the harp with one hand and some instrument of labor cantata. with the other, and have sung their songs in such noonings as they could obtain. Almost without exception they have been thrown upon journalism for a support, and have experienced whatever good and evil that profession brings to the aesthetic sense of its practitioner. Bayard Taylor was not only a sturdy and courageous example of a poet born out of New England, but must be studied with the period already named. Younger than our chief poets still living, he stood with a few companions who found their music The Civil broken in upon by the tumult of a national war. War. Thus, we are to consider the writings of one who dates half-way between the elder and the rising generations; who was not of Cambridge, nor of Concord, but from the Middle States; and in whose works, although the product of a life of action, we always find the influences of the study and the hearth. A versa tile author. Born in Square, Penn., Jan. 11, 1825. Early life and long ings. I. TAYLOR was the most versatile of authors. This was the result of constitutional tendency, increased by the exigencies of American life and his own life in particular. He was one, I think, whose natural gift could as well be understood through his personal qualities as from his works. His presence and story were so unreservedly before us as to afford paradigms of the birth and breeding of a poet. A critic takes kindly to verse which has a man behind it. He strives to put himself in harmony with the singer's youth, manhood, and intellectual prime, to measure his ideals no less than his performances, to feel his aids and restrictions, to breathe, as it were, the very breath of his inspiration. It is worth while to bear in mind the region from which this poet came, and the kinship that exists between the fields, the trees, the air, and all living and sentient things belonging to a given spot of earth. The happy pastoral county of a central State produced Bayard Taylor from its oldest and purest Quaker stock. Here lie the broad undulating meadows and woodlands of a section wholly characteristic of the temperate zone. Here nature has no extremes of grandeur or picturesqueness, nor any gloomy aspects, but is simple, attractive, strong; here it blends, as in English rural landscape, all attributes in just proportion. The sons of such a soil are rounded and even in their make, sound of brawn and brain, open to many phases of life, not likely, once having touched the outer world, to content themselves with one experience or one purpose. Young Bayard throve upon the nourishment which Nature offered him. His sensibilities were those of EARLY EXPERIENCES. her poets and artists. The trees, the flowers, the grasses, he knew them all; he was no sportsman, but "named all the birds without a gun." His farming duties often were forgotten in rovings and reveries, and moods uncomprehended either by himself or by those about him. Then the eager devouring of books, old-fashioned novels, history, travels; above all, of the poetry within his reach. His youth was that of the traditional American boy, and here, as always, the story of Rasselas repeats itself. The fairest native valley palls upon the lad who as yet has nothing by which to measure its worth. Tranquillity for the old; for the young, a longing for a new and larger range. But time rights all things: as no town-bred person ever really knows the country, so no country-lad in older years forgets the secrets Nature taught his childhood. Taylor had through life the frank and somewhat homely simplicity of the yeoman, cosmopolite as In time he learned how glad his youth had been, and again and again returned to the fields of Kennett. But the boy's impatience of his confines was early shown. After the schooling at a country academy, where he studied well, came the revolt from farm-life and the alternative selection of a trade. Of course he chose to be a printer, and at the age of seventeen became an apprentice in West Chester. Already he had found his gift of making verses, and now took fire with the thought of being a poet. The publication of his juvenile pieces grew out of his desire to see the world. he was. A thin little book, now so hard to find, entitled Ximena, was dedicated to Griswold, in gratitude for "kind encouragement" shown the author. It shows the course of his early readings: Byron, Scott, Moore, Mrs. Hemans, Bryant, are echoed here and there. A Sonorous quality. His "Trav "Views A foot," 1846, to "Egypt blank-verse poem is inscribed to Whittier, whose name was a household word in the Quaker home. Though this book contained no new note, it did show the ambition and facile gift of the writer. One quality is apparent which afterward marked his verse, -a peculiar sonorousness, especially in the use of resonant proper nouns, the names of historic persons and places. "Ximena" was printed at a venture, for the purpose of increasing the savings with which to undertake a tramp over Europe, at that time an almost fanciful design. From the proceeds he was enabled to see those patrons in Philadelphia who advanced him, on the pledge of his future labors, the little sum which encouraged him to set out upon his travels. After reaching New York he hastened to the Tribune office, at that time the Mecca of rustic enthusiasts, few of whom placed too modest a valuation upon their own powers. However, it was no common youth, this stripling of nineteen, who won the interest of Horace Greeley, and already had found practical friends in Willis, Griswold, Godwin, and the kindly editor of "Graham's Magazine." Here I may as well consider the sentiment of the journeys which employed so large a portion of his els" from life, and the quality of their record. The latter began in 1846 with the famous Views Afoot, and ended with Egypt and Iceland in the Year 1874, a date only five years previous to the sudden close of his career. The gist of the matter is that Taylor was a poet A national instinct was expressed in the going out of this wiry, erect, impetuous young "to see the world." The same desire that brings "Roaming a Western youth to the Atlantic shore has sent our coast-born lads on strange voyages to many lands. and Iceland," 1874. (Eleven vols.) with a hungry heart." upon his travels. man, Grant White averred that while the air of England was |