two beds to his establishment for the purpose of making sure his license to sell beer and spirits. I suppose that there are not half a dozen restaurants in New York where ale and beer may not be had for the asking.

When the girl had stayed her hunger, I led her to talk, to which she seemed not at all unwilling. She proved to be one of those simple, good-natured, common-sensible, but not quick or clever, women who abound in England. She told me a story, with a man in it, of course. When was a woman's story without one? A man's story sometimes, although rarely, may have no woman in it; but a woman's without a man, never. This one had no incident, no peculiarity, which gave it the slightest interest. It was the baldest possible narration of fact. She had been at service, and her child was born about four months ago; that was all. But there was also an entire absence of the pretensions and the complaints common in such cases; universal in the United States, but more rarely heard in England, I believe, where there is less sham upon all subjects. In this case, at least, there was not a word of reproach, and no talk of betrayal or of ruin. On the contrary, she said frankly, "I've no call to find any fault with him." I respected the girl for this candor. "But," she added, "I did think he need n't have run away just before my baby was going to be born. The poor little kid would n't have done him any harm." I more than heartily agreed with her here, when I found that she had neither seen the father of her child nor heard from him for nearly six months. But I could not but respect her simplicity, her uncomplaining endurance, and her cheerfulness; for she spoke hopefully, and with such slight but loving reference to her baby that I was sure that when it left her breast she VOL. XLIII. NO. 256. 16

would hunger before it did. To be sure, she had health and strength and youth and courage, and some humble friends who did not cast her off; but for all that that selfish and cowardly fellow knew, she might have been dead, or worse, lying ill and starving with his child on straw in a garret. Her feeling toward him seemed to be that of mild contempt, because he had lacked the manliness to face the consequences of his own conduct. She made no claim upon him whatever. From what I saw and heard I came to the conclusion that an unmarried mother is not in general treated so cruelly by her friends among the lower classes in England as in corresponding circumstances she is with us. As I made a slight contribution to the comfort of the little one, she begged me to go home with her and "see the little kid," with regard to whose prettiness she gave me very confident assurances. But although it was stipulated on her part that my proposed visit was to be one of domiciliary inspection merely, to this invitation I did not seriously incline. We went out into the glaring, gas-lit, bustling Strand. She shook hands with me in a hearty way, and with no profusion of thanks from her we parted. I turned after I had walked a few steps, and saw her standing still amid the hurrying throng, looking earnestly after me. I nodded to her, went on my way, and saw her no more.

I observed, as she was talking with me, that she did not maltreat her h's. I found other instances of a like correctness of speech among people of her low condition of life in England; but they are very rare; rarest of all in London. The others that I met with were, if I remember rightly, chiefly in Kent and in Lancashire.

But here I must stop, and leave my tale of London streets half told.

Richard Grant White.

I MET Bayard Taylor first in 1848. We were both young men, for we were born in the same year, 1825, he in January and I in July, and we both had one thing in common, a love of poetry and a belief that we were poets. We may have doubted some things, but that supreme thing we did not and would not doubt. It was a consolation to me, and a glory to him. I was familiar with his writings before he could have been with mine, and, knowing something of his history from the newspapers, I was prepared to like him, if we should ever meet. He had been to Europe, and had published his Views Afoot, which had made his name widely known, while I had merely printed a few verses in the magazines. The Union Magazine, which had been started in New York a year before, was the immediate cause of our acquaintance. It was edited by Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, an estimable woman and a charming writer, who had read a little manuscript volume of verse which I had inflicted upon her good nature, who had kindly loaned me books from her library, and who had accepted some of my verses for her periodical. was the most judicious friend whom I had yet made, and she was also a friend of Bayard Taylor, who was one of her most valued contributors. She talked with me about him, and just before she went to Europe, leaving him to fill her editorial chair, she advised me to call upon him during her absence.

She

I have tasked my memory to recover the reason of my first calling upon Bayard Taylor, and I believe I may say that it was to learn the fate of a manuscript which he had received either from Mrs. Kirkland or from myself. I found him in the editorial room of the Tribune, which, I think, was on the same floor as the composing-room. It was certainly on an upper floor of the Tribune building, if not the uppermost floor of all. Compositors were at work close by the

desk at which he was seated, which was lumbered with books and newspapers, not forgetting the necessary editorial shears. It was one of two desks which were placed back to back, for the accommodation of himself and a fellow-editor, who was charged with the shipping news of the paper. "Is Mr. Bayard Taylor here?" I asked, in a general way, of the two persons who were occupying these desks. The one who was nearest me looked up from his work, and replied, "I am he." 66 My name is Stoddard," I said," and I have come to see whether you can use -." Here I named an early production of mine, which, I believe, was addressed to Oblivion (if so, it has reached its destination), and he assured me that he not only could use it, but that it would appear in a certain number of the Union Magazine, which he specified, and which I was glad to learn was not a remote one. He must have risen during his conversation, for I saw that he was taller than myself. I have before me now a vision of him in his young manhood, tall, erect, activelooking, and manly, with an aquiline nose, bright, loving eyes, and the dark, ringleted hair with which we endow, in ideal, the heads of poets. There was a kindness and a courtesy in his greeting which went straight to my heart, and assured me that I had found a friend. What conversation other than that I have indicated passed between us I have forgotten, though I know that he must have asked me to come and see him, both in the editorial room and at his own room, for I visited him at both places soon afterward.

Bayard Taylor and I met at night gen-. erally, for neither could call the day his own; he had his work to do on the Tribune, and I had mine to do in a foundry. Apart from politics, his was the cleaner of the two, but not the least laborious, I am sure. He wrote fifteen hours a day, he told me, scribbling book notices,

leaders, foreign news, reports, — turning his hand and pen to everything that went to the making of a newspaper thirty years ago. There was but one night in the week when he could do what he pleased, and that was Saturday night, which we always spent together when he was in town. I looked forward to it as a school-boy looks forward to a holiday, and was happy when it came. I have forgotten where his rooms were, but as near as I can recollect they were in a boarding-house on Murray Street, not far from Broadway. They were sky parlors, as the saying is, for he liked a good outlook; and besides, they suited his purse, which was not plethoric with shekels. In the first of these rooms, which was set apart for his books, there was a little table, at which he wrote late into the night, resting his soul with poetry after the prosaic labors of the day. It was poetry which had made us friends, and we never spent a night together without talking about it, and without reading the poems we had written since our last meeting. If the Muses had favored me, I brought their favors with me, and mouthed them out in innocent audacity. I thought well of my attempts, no doubt, but never in my wildest moments did I dream of comparing myself with him. He had an imag ination which surpassed mine, a com mand of the fervors and splendors of language, and an intuitive knowledge of rhetoric and of sonorous harmonies of rhythm. I have been looking over his poetical works, and I find that there are but few of his early poems which I did not read, or which he did not read to me, in manuscript. His mind was so fertile and his execution so rapid that he generally had one or more new poems to show me when we met. I sit with him now in thought, and hear him read the Metempsychosis of the Pine, Hylas, Kubleh, and Ariel in the Cloven Pine. The last impressed me so deeply that I wrote a companion piece, in which I tried to embody the personality of Caliban.

The conversation and the poetic practice of Bayard Taylor were the only intellectual stimulant I had, and if I wrote

better than I had done previous to making his acquaintance I felt that it was largely due to him. There was an enthusiasm about him which was contagious. We were a help to each other, and we were a hindrance, also, I can see now, for we admired too indiscriminatively, and criticised too tenderly. My favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and we pretended to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to earth in our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent imitation of his diction; my comrade's worship of his master took the form of an Ode to Shelley, which I thought, and still think, the noblest poem that his immortal genius has inspired. It is followed in the volume before me (Poems of Home and Travel, 1855) by an airy lyric on Sicilian Wine, which was written out of his head, as the children say, for he had no Sicilian wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage. He had cigars, however, and he tempted me into the use of the Indian weed. He tempted me, also, into the eating of oysters before we parted for the night, and it was our custom to repair to a restaurant near by, and to supply ourselves with that succulent brain food. These Saturday nights of ours were more to me, I think, than they could possibly have been to Bayard Taylor; for if his days were passed in mental drudgery, they were passed in the society of gentlemen, while mine were passed in hard, physical labor amongst common workmen and apprentices. I had no friend except himself, and no companionship but that of books and my own thoughts. If I had not enjoyed myself at those seasons, I must have been more or less than human. Cowley said of Hervey: "To him my Muse made haste with ev'ry Strain, Whilst it was New, and Warm yet from the

Brain.

As

He loved my worthless Rhymes, and like a Friend
Would find out something to Commend.
Hence now, my Muse, thou canst not me delight;
Be this my latest Verse

With which I now Adorn his Herse,
And this my Grief without thy Help shall write."

If Bayard Taylor had been in easy

circumstances in 1849, I hardly think he would have gone to California as the correspondent of the Tribune. But his circumstances were not easy, so he went manfully, and wrote a capital book about his experiences in the new Eldorado, and, better still, a number of California ballads, of which any poet might have been proud. They were so popular, I remember, that one of the best of them, Manuela, provoked an amusing parody from Phoebe Cary, which delighted the parodied poet, who was good-natured enough to take as well as to give.

The American Parnassus was a Bedlam in the autumn of 1850, and Bayard Taylor was the innocent cause of its madness. The Prince of Showmen had imported Jenny Lind to sing before his admiring countrymen, and, to flatter their national vanity, he offered a prize of two hundred dollars for an original song for her. All the versifiers in the land set at once, to work to immortalize themselves and to better their fortunes, and as many as six hundred confidently expected to do so. Bayard Taylor came one afternoon early in September, and confided to me the fact that he was to be declared the winner of this perilous honor, and that he foresaw a row. "They will say it was given to me because Putnam, who is my publisher, is one of the committee, and because Ripley, who is my associate on the Tribune, is another." "If you think so,” I answered, "withdraw your name, and put my name in place of it. You shall have the money, and I will bear the abuse." He laughed, and left me, as I thought, to do what I had suggested; but he concluded to acknowledge the authorship himself, and stand the consequences. The decision of the committee was published next day, and the indignation of the disappointed competitors was unbounded. They rushed to all the editors whom they knew, or could reach, and these sharp-witted gentlemen, having an eye for mischief as well as fun, published their prose and their verse, which ranged from an epigram up to an epic. The choice of the committee had fallen upon only two out of the

whole number of manuscripts which had been sent to them, and being in some doubt as to which of the two was the most suitable for the occasion, they showed both to Jenny Lind, who chose the shortest one, as containing the feeling she wished to express in her greeting to America. It happened to be the one that Bayard Taylor had written, and it was accordingly set to music by Jules Benedict, and sung by her at her first concert in Castle Garden. I have recovered this unfortunate lyric, but I shall not quote it here, for Bayard Taylor desired to have it forgotten. "Did you see the Brooklyn announcement of my lecture?" he wrote to me in Novem ber. "(Bayard Taylor, the successful competitor of the Jenny Lind prize.') Is that song to be the only thing which will save my name from oblivion?”

I have been reading over the letters that Bayard Taylor wrote me at this time, and have been pained almost as deeply as when I first read them. They are darkened by the sickness and death of the woman he loved. Her health began to decline after his return from California. She was so ill in June that her physician had no hope, but in August she was able to make a summer trip with her parents. "Mary seems much improved by the mountain air," he wrote from New York, "and has herself strong hopes of her recovery. I dare not see anything but darkness yet, — I will not hope against hope and be deceived at last. We went to West Point, which was distractingly noisy and unpleasant; but, by a special godsend, Willis touched there accidentally the same day, and took us to a farm-house back of the Highlands, where his family was staying, -a beautiful, quiet spot. I stayed two days, and then came here. I was up again yesterday, and will go again on Tuesday, when they think of leaving. Mary has agreed with me that it is best for us to be married at once, so that she can be with me here. The winter will not be so hard in the city as in the country, and then if she is to be taken from me we will at least have a few days together. It will be a sad bridal, I fear."

He mentioned one of her relatives who was opposed to their marriage, and added, "But were we to die for it we could not do otherwise." He wrote me again in October from Kennett Square. There was no hope; the worst was certain. She might linger, but death was the end. "What agony we have endured in talking all this over I can never tell, but we now look to the end with calmness, if not with resignation." He visited her again in November. She was very weak when he reached home, and had been growing weaker ever since. "I found it a hard trial to see her going from me with so slow and certain a decay. My own health is already shattered, and if this were to last much longer it would kill me outright." As the end drew near, he strove to console himself by looking forward to what we might accomplish in the future. "We must both cling the closer to that worship which is the consecration of our lives, the unselfish homage of that spirit of art and beauty which men call Poetry. Without that, I should be nothing in my present desolation. Let us work our way, whatever the toil and sorrow, from vestibule to chancel, from chancel to shrine, from the lowest footstool of the temple to the high priest's place beside the altar. The same incense that reaches us will sanctify and embalm our griefs: they will share in our canonization." Twelve days later (December 27, 1850) she passed through the valley of the shadow of death. "It is over. Perhaps you may already know it, but I wish to tell you so before we meet. She died on Saturday last, and was buried in the midst of that cruel storm on Monday. She is now a saint in heaven. She had no foes to pardon, and no sins to be forgiven."

Such was the close of this brief episode in the early love-life of Bayard Taylor. How deeply he was moved by it the readers of his poetry know, for in spite of his profound reticence it would force itself into his remembrance. It found a voice in that saddest of all dirges, the unnamed lyric, beginning, Moan, ye wild winds, around the pane,'

in his Autumnal Vespers; and in The Phantom, where he describes himself sitting in the old homestead, where shadow and sunshine are chasing each other over the carpet at his feet. The arms of the sweet-brier have wrestled upward in the summers that have gone, and the willow trails its branches lower than when he saw them last. They strive to shut the sunshine out of the haunted room, and to fill the house with gloom and silence. Remembered faces come within the door-way, and he hears voices that remind him of a voice that is dumb. "They sing, in songs as glad as ever,

The songs she loved to hear;
They braid the rose in summer garlands,
Whose flowers to her were dear.

"And still, her footsteps in the passage,
Her blushes at the door,
Her timid words of maiden welcome,
Come back to me once more.

"And, all forgetful of my sorrow,
Unmindful of my pain,

I think she has but newly left me,
And soon will come again.

"She stays without, perchance, a moment, To dress her dark-brown hair:

I hear the rustle of her garments,
Her light step on the stair!

"O fluttering heart! control thy tumult, Lest eyes profane should see

My cheeks betray the rush of rapture Her coming brings to me!

"She tarries long; but lo! a whisper Beyond the open door,

And, gliding through the quiet sunshine, A shadow on the floor!

"Ah!t is the whispering pine that calls me,
The vine, whose shadow strays;
And my patient heart must still await her,
Nor chide her long delays.

"But my heart grows sick with weary waiting
As many a time before;

Her foot is ever at the threshold,
Yet never passes o'er."

Bayard Taylor sailed for Europe in the summer of 1851, and we corresponded until his return, towards the close of 1853. He wrote me from Constantinople on July 21, 1852, and wished that I might enjoy with him the superb view of two continents and their proudest city, which he saw whenever he lifted his head, and that he might relieve his heart by letting loose a fountain of talk