Bayard Taylor.

THE
LIFE, TRAVELS, AND LITERARY CAREER
OF
BAYARD TAYLOR.

“Crown Love, crown Truth when first her brow appears,

And crown the hero when his deeds are done:

The Poet’s leaves are gathered one by one.

In the slow process of the doubtful years.

Who seeks too eagerly, he shall not find:

Who seeking not pursues with single mind

Art’s lofty aim, to him will she accord,

At her appointed time, the sure reward.”

BY
RUSSELL H. CONWELL,

AUTHOR OF “LIFE OF PRESIDENT HAYES,” “WHY AND HOW THE CHINESE EMIGRATE,”
“HISTORY OF THE GREAT FIRE IN BOSTON,” “HISTORY OF THE GREAT FIRE
IN SAINT JOHN, N. B.,” “LESSONS OF TRAVEL,” ETC., ETC.

BOSTON:
B. B. RUSSELL & CO., No. 57 CORNHILL.
DETROIT: R. D. S. TYLER & CO. PORTLAND: JOHN RUSSELL.
PHILADELPHIA: QUAKER CITY PUBLISHING HOUSE.
NEW YORK: CHARLES DREW. CHICAGO: ANDREWS & DORMAN.
INDIANAPOLIS, IND.: FRED L. HORTON & CO.
1879.

Copyright,
By B. B. RUSSELL & CO.,
1879

BOSTON:
Printed by Albert J. Wright, 79 Milk Street.

TO THE MISTRESS OF MY HOME.

“My tears were on the pages as I read

The touching close: I made the story mine,

Within whose heart, long plighted to the dead,

Love built his living shrine.”

“For she is lost; but she, the later bride,

Who came my ruined fortune to restore;

Back from the desert wanders at my side,

And leads me home once more.”

—Poet’s Journal.

PREFACE.

It is a solemn yet pleasant duty to compile in comprehensive order the records of a life so eventful and influential as that of Bayard Taylor. It is solemn, because the sad tears which began to flow at his death, are coursing freely still. Pleasant, because there is no task more satisfactory than that of recounting the deeds of a virtuous, industrious, heroic life. No test-book of morals, or of general history, is so effective in educating the young as the annals of well-spent years, gathered for that purpose. There is more or less influence in fables and mythological tales; and there is considerable power in a well written, skilfully plotted work of fiction; but the direct and unavoidable appeal of a noble life, which has closed with honor and deserved renown, is far more potent and permanent in the culture and reformation of the world, than all other forms of intellectual and moral quickening. No apology is needed for writing such a biography. It would be inexcusable to leave the world in need of it. When the time comes for a book more complete in its arrangement and details, and more select in its diction, this will find its proper place in library and reading-room. Until that time it may be at work renewing the memories of a friend, refreshing the recollection of his sweet words, and calling the attention of the stranger to the American who has paid to Europe some of the literary debt we have owed so long.

The writer does not expect that this book will occupy the permanent place in literature, which he sincerely hopes will reward those authors who may follow him on this same topic. Written amid the pressing calls of a busy profession, and in the season when lyceum lecture engagements, which he could not postpone, have kept him continually away from his home; he has attempted nothing more than to give an outline of a remarkable life, for the purpose of satisfying the present demand. Errors may be found by critics, such as all hastily written volumes are liable to contain; but should this work, as a whole, incline the reader to honor the manhood, love the poetry, and revere the memory of one whom the writer for many years has admired and loved, it will answer the purpose for which it has been written.

The author cannot do less than acknowledge, in this place, his great obligations to the father and mother of Mr. Taylor, to Mrs. Annie Carey, his sister, and to Dr. Franklin Taylor, his cousin, for their generous courtesy and most important assistance in gathering the facts for this volume.

All the poetical quotations in this book are from Taylor’s poetical works.

The account of the funeral found in this volume was written subsequent to the other portions of the work, as the obsequies and burial took place after the first edition was printed and sold.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE
LIFE, TRAVELS, AND LITERARY CAREER
OF
BAYARD TAYLOR.

CHAPTER I.

Mr. Taylor’s Career.—Difficulty and Importance of the Work.—The Romance of his Life.—Variable Experience.—His Success as Novelist, Orator, Traveller, and Poet.

The nearness and magnitude of Bayard Taylor’s life make it one exceedingly difficult to comprehend and classify. His adventures were so many, his struggles so severe, his experience so varied, and his final success so remarkable, that the materials are too abundant, and often serve to clog and confuse the student of his career. An artist who views the mountain from its base, loses many of the finest effects and most charming outlines, because of his very close proximity to them. So, in looking upon the wonderful career of such a versatile and gifted man, at a time so near his death, we are less able to form a comprehensive idea of his life, as a symmetrical whole, than we shall be when the years have carried us farther away from him, and the outlines of his greatness are more distinct. Whether it were better to wait until a part of the life has been forgotten, and until the more harsh and angular features have been lost in the general outline, or whether it were more desirable to describe the life in all its actual details, and in the natural ruggedness which the close view reveals, is, however, a mere matter of taste. To those who love to read of a man in whose work there was no unevenness and in whose experience nothing unbroken is seen, the life of one so long dead that the writer is compelled to fill up the forgotten years with ideal events and motives may furnish the choicest theme. But to those students who love scientific scrutiny, who would estimate the life for what it is really worth as an example, the biography which is written amid all the facts, and by one who comes in actual contact with them, is perhaps esteemed the most valuable, although, as a whole, less symmetrical.

Bayard Taylor’s life was rugged and cragged with startling events, when viewed from the kindly poetical stand-point of his character. He felt all the extremes of joy and sorrow. He knew all the pains and honors of poverty and wealth. He was loved by many, he was betrayed by many. He lived in the most enlightened lands, he also sojourned among the most barbarous people. He saw man in peace and in war. He rode the ocean in calm and in storm. He was the welcomed guest in the lowliest huts, and in the most gorgeous palaces. He sweltered in the sands of tropical deserts, and he was benumbed by the fierce winds of the Northern ice-fields. He boldly entered the haunts of wild beasts, and loved the company of harmless and faithful domestics. He was a man of many virtues and some faults, each of which made his life more eventful and fascinating.

The literary position which he held at the time of his death, and which was so romantically attained, was one of almost universal favor. He was respected by all and loved by many. As a writer of fiction he attained but little celebrity, and it appears that he had little expectation of achieving any high honors in that field. As a writer upon travels, and as a delineator of human character as found in strange places, and in but partially known countries, he was second to none. His books upon travel will be read for a century to come, whether thousands or few visit the localities and tribes he has described. As an orator, he never held a high rank. He was chaste, concise, and clear in his choice of words, and had an incisive, pungent way of stating his ideas. He could instruct the student and amuse the populace, but had not the power to agitate and carry away large bodies of men, and seems never to have been very ambitious to do so. As a translator of German literature, he was fast becoming recognized in all English-speaking countries as an excellent authority, and it is deeply to be regretted that he was called away with so many uncompleted translation, and unfinished plans for translations, from the standards of German literature. But it is as a poet that he receives the greatest homage. Yet how little he printed! Unless there shall be found laid away many poems unpublished, he may be classed as one of the least prolific poets of his generation. His lines are so simple, so true to life, such incarnate sentences, so expressive, that, to one who has had a similar experience with the poet, every stanza is a panorama, vivid and indelible. We shall see as we pursue the tale, how sensitive he was to everything poetical, and how deeply he was moved by all those finer and more subtle emotions, which only a poet can feel. His love was deep and abiding. His friendship, like the oaks of his Cedarcroft woodland. His old home was to him the sweetest place in all the beautiful lands he saw. His life was full of romantic incidents, and he recognized them and appreciated them, for the poetry they suggested. We venture to say that his poetry will live in every household, if all his other works should be forgotten.

CHAPTER II.

German Ancestry.—English Ancestry.—The Pennsylvania Germans.—The Quakers.—How his Forefathers came to America.—The Effect of Intermixture of Races.—The Hereditary Traits seen in his Books.

The ancestry of Bayard Taylor were connected with some of the best blood of England and Germany. His grandmothers were both German, and his grandfathers both English. The German line comes from that body of emigrants, consisting of large numbers from Weimar, Jena, Cassel, Göttingen, Hanover, and perhaps Gotha, who sailed from Bremen and Hamburg between 1730 and 1745. The continued quarrels among the dukes and princes of Germany,—the wars in progress and impending, wherein the peace of the people was incessantly disturbed,—caused a universal uneasiness among the people of those small nations. They never were quite sure of a day’s rest. If they sowed unmolested, there was a grave doubt whether some complication with France, England, or Poland might not bring foreign invaders or allies to destroy or devour the crops. The wars were so incessant, and the quarrels among the petty lords so frequent, that the people became disheartened. They were weary of building for others to destroy, and of rearing sons to be sacrificed to some individual’s ambition. All those German provinces, or duchies, had to accommodate themselves to the religion of their princes, and, at times, the winds that played about the hills of the Black Forest were far less uncertain. To the fathers of these emigrants, who sought America as a haven of religious and political rest, George Fox and his Quaker disciples had taught the doctrines of “The Holy Spirit,” and, under various guises, the tenets of that belief still survived in the German heart.

Those Germans who settled in the counties of Pennsylvania, lying to the south and south-west of Philadelphia, came to this country during the disturbances in the Fatherland, caused by Augustus, Maria Theresa, Frederick, and the scores of other princes who were in power, or seeking to secure it, in the numerous states and free cities of Germany. It is no light excuse, no desire for mere wealth, no hasty search for the fountains of youth, that causes the solid, earnest, patriotic people of Saxony, Baden, or Bavaria to leave forever the home of their nativity. It is a little curious to see how these races, which so cordially and hospitably received the Quaker missionaries from England, should at last unite with them in the settlement of the New World, and, by their intermarriage, produce such offshoots of the united stock as Bayard Taylor and his cotemporaries.

The Quaker ancestry of the poet,—the Taylors and the Ways,—run back through a long line of industrious men and women, more or less known in Central Pennsylvania, to the colony which William Penn sent over from England to cultivate the great land-grant, which King Charles II., of England, gave him, in consideration of his father’s services as admiral in the British navy. They, too, were driven from their homes by the incessant turmoil either of wars or religious persecutions. Their preachers had again and again been imprisoned, while some had died the death of martyrs. Even Penn himself was often in chains and in prison, for being a peaceable believer in the truth of the Quaker doctrines; but so blameless were the lives of these people, and so forgiving their Christian behavior, that the term “Quakers,” which was at first applied to them in derision, became at last a title of respect and honor. “The fear of the Lord did make us quake,” was a common expression with George Fox, the founder of the sect, and the name “Quakers” originated in sneers at that devout sentence.

It is easy to trace in the history of the State of Pennsylvania, the influence of the Quaker spirit, and its impression upon the institutions of the American nation is also strikingly apparent. But when one takes up the life of one of their descendants, and studies his habits, his style of thought, and his ideas of social and political institutions, the hereditary Quaker element, in a modified form, is detected in every motion and expression. It would seem as if any reader, to whom the author is unknown, would detect at once, in any volume of Taylor’s poetry or travels, the fact that he came from Quaker stock. As will be more clearly shown in a subsequent chapter, the teachings of the Quakers, and their manner of expression by gesture and phrase, have unconsciously and charmingly crept into the bosom of his best works. It is a great boon to be born of such a physical and mental combination as that of the German soldiers, with all their coolness and bravery, and the even-tempered, God-fearing Quakers, with all their grace and wisdom. Such intermixture has given to our young nation much of its surprising enterprise and originality, and must, at last, when consolidated into a compact people, produce a nation and a race wholly unlike any other on the earth.

It is not known that any of Bayard Taylor’s ancestry were literary men, or that any of them were endowed with special genius, beyond that which was necessary to clear the forests, cultivate the soil, manage manufacturing enterprises, and carry on small mercantile establishments. Solid people, with wide common-sense, industrious hands and generous hearts, they have modestly held their way, doing their simple duty, and, Quaker-like, making no display.

CHAPTER III.

Birth at Kennett Square.—Old Homestead.—The Quaker Church.—The Village.—His Father’s Store.—Life on the Farm.—Mischievous School-boy.—Inclination to write Poetry.—Practical Joker.—Studious Youth.—His Parents.—His Brothers and Sisters.

Bayard Taylor was born at Kennett Square, Penn., Jan. 11, 1825. His mother, whose maiden name was Rebecca Way, was then twenty-nine years of age, and his father was thirty-one. The house then occupied was a two-story stone-and-mortar structure, such as are yet very common in the farming regions of central Pennsylvania. The house was long and narrow, having a porch that extended along the whole front. The rooms were small and low, but it was considered by the farmers of that time as a very comfortable and respectable home. It was located at the junction of two highways, and near the centre of the little hamlet called the “Square,” and sometimes the “Village.” But few families resided there in 1825, and the people were all more or less engaged in the cultivation of the soil. The little rude Quaker meeting-house, so box-like and cold in its aspect, was doubtless the centre of attraction, and the desire to be near the house of God, led those devoted Quakers to build their dwellings on that portion of their lands which lay nearest the church.

The village has increased in growth, and now has a population of six or seven hundred, with several churches belonging to other denominations, and very flourishing schools. But the old homestead building, in which Bayard was born, was destroyed by fire in 1876.

At the time of his birth, his father kept a miscellaneous stock of merchandise in one room of his house, and supplied the necessities of the farmers, so far as the small capital of a country store could anticipate their wants. Situated thirty-five miles from Philadelphia, to which place he was compelled to send the produce he received, and in which place he purchased his simple stock of goods, the merchant had a task on his hands which cannot be appreciated or understood in these days of railways, telegraphs, and commercial travellers. One of his neighbors, living in 1872, used to relate how Mr. Taylor, having had a call for two hay-rakes, which he could not supply, drove all the way to West Chester, the distance of a dozen miles, to get those tools for his customer.

At the time of Bayard’s birth, his parents had been married seven years. Their life had already been subject to many trials, and was fated to meet many more. Of a family of ten children, only one-half the number survived to see mature years. The losses by mercantile ventures, by failing crops, by sickness and accidents, often swept away the hard earnings of many a month. Yet they struggled on, industrious and cheerful, keeping themselves and their children ever busy.

When Bayard was two or three years old, his father purchased a farm about a mile from the village, and giving up his mercantile avocations, turned his whole attention to farming. On that farm Bayard spent the opening years of his life, and on one section of it did he build his beautiful home of “Cedarcroft.”

“The beginning and the end is here—

The days of youth; the silvered years.”

How deeply he loved his home, how sincere his affection for the rolling fields, the chestnut and the walnut woodland, the old stone farm-house, the clumsy barn, the old highway, the acres of corn and wheat, the distant village and its quaint old church, can be seen in a thousand expressions finding place in his published works. His poetical nature opened to his view beautiful landscapes and charming associations which others would not detect. The birds sang in an intelligible language; the leaves on the corn entered into conversation; the lowing of the cows could be interpreted; and the rocks were romantic story-tellers. He loved them all. That farm was his Mecca in all his travels. When he left, he says he promised bird, beast, trees, and knolls, that he would return to them. To the writer, who went to Cedarcroft after the poet’s death, and who has so long loved and admired his poetry, it seemed as if the trees patiently awaited his return. All things in nature must have loved and trusted him, or they would not have confided to him so many of their secrets.

Of the pastoral life in Pennsylvania he speaks with pleasing directness in his volume entitled “Home Pastorals.” In one place the aged farmer says:—

“Well—well! this is comfort now—the air is mild as May,

And yet ’tis March the twentieth, or twenty-first, to-day;

And Reuben ploughs the hill for corn: I thought it would be tough;

But now I see the furrows turned, I guess it’s dry enough.

I’m glad I built this southern porch; my chair seems easier here:

I haven’t seen as fine a spring this five and twenty year.

And how the time goes round so quick: a week I would have sworn,

Since they were husking on the flat, and now they plough for corn!

Across the level Brown’s new place begins to make a show;

I thought he’d have to wait for trees, but, bless me, how they grow!

They say it’s fine—two acres filled with evergreens and things;

But so much land! it worries me, for not a cent it brings.

He has the right, I don’t deny, to please himself that way,

But ’tis a bad example set, and leads young folks astray:

Book-learning gets the upper hand, and work is slow and slack,

And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack.

Well—I suppose I’m old, and yet it is not long ago

When Reuben spread the swath to dry, and Jesse learned to mow,

And William raked, and Israel hoed, and Joseph pitched with me,

But such a man as I was then my boys will never be!

I don’t mind William’s hankering for lectures and for books,

He never had a farming knack—you’d see it in his looks;

But handsome is that handsome does, and he is well to do:

’Twould ease my mind if I could say the same of Jesse, too.

’Tis like my time is nearly out; of that I’m not afraid;

I never cheated any man, and all my debts are paid.

They call it rest that we shall have, but work would do no harm;

There can’t be rivers there, and fields, without some sort o’ farm.”

No description in prose can as well describe his occupation as a boy, as his own lines, in the poem of the “Holly Tree.”

“The corn was warm in the ground, the fences were mended and made,

And the garden-beds, as smooth as a counterpane is laid,

Were dotted and striped with green, where the peas and the radishes grew,

With elecampane at the foot, and comfrey, and sage, and rue.

From the knoll where stood the house, the fair fields pleasantly rolled,

To dells where the laurels hung, and meadows of buttercup gold.”

Such was the farm when he left it, in words of the poet’s choosing, and what he found when, after a quarter of a century of wanderings, he can best describe.

“Here are the fields again, the soldierly maize in tassel

Stands on review, and carries the scabbarded ears in its armpits.

Rustling, I part the ranks,—the close, engulfing battalions

Shaking their plumes overhead,—and, wholly bewildered and heated,

Gain the top of the ridge, where stands, colossal, the pin-oak.

Yonder, a mile away, I see the roofs of the village,—

See the crouching front of the meeting-house of the Quakers,

Oddly conjoined with the whittled Presbyterian steeple.

Right and left are the homes of the slow, conservative farmers,

Loyal people and true; but, now that the battles are over,

Zealous for Temperance, Peace, and the Eight of Suffrage for Women.

Orderly, moral are they,—at least, in the sense of suppression;

Given to preaching of rules, inflexible outlines of duty:

Seeing the sternness of life; but, alas! overlooking its graces.

Let me be juster: the scattered seeds of the graces are planted

Widely apart; but the trumpet-vine on the porch is a token:

Yea, and awake and alive are the forces of love and affection,

Plastic forces that work from the tenderer models of beauty.”

There must be many things in the events of common life which find no voice in poetry, as every life has its prose side. At all events, there were some duties connected with agricultural work which young Bayard never enjoyed. He never was ambitious to follow the plough, or do the miscellaneous odd jobs which perplex and weary a farmer’s boy. Yet, like Burns, he worked cheerfully, and wrung more or less poetry out of every occupation. He was a spare, wiry, nervous boy, quick at work, study, or play, and consequently had many leisure moments, when other boys were drudging along with ceaseless toil. His schoolmates, and the only school-teacher now living (1879) who taught him in his boyhood, all agree that he was a mischievous boy. He loved practical jokes, and, in fact, jokes of every kind. But he was ceaselessly framing verses. When his lesson was mastered, which was always in an incredibly short space of time after he took up his book, he plunged recklessly into poetry. Verses about the teacher, about snowbanks, about buttercups, about pigs, about courting, funerals, church services, schoolmates, and countless other themes filled his desk, pockets, and hat.

Often he wrote love letters, couched in the most delicate phraseology, and signing the name of some classmate to them, would send them to astonished ploughboys and blushing maidens. One old gentleman in West Chester, Penn., always claimed that a set of Bayard’s burlesque verses, sent out in that way, induced him to court and marry a girl with whom he had no acquaintance, until the explanation of his tender epistle was demanded by her father. What volumes of poetry he must have written, which never saw the type, and how much more of that which he was in the habit of repeating to himself was left unwritten! The life he led, from his earliest school days, until he was fifteen years of age, was that of every farmer’s boy in America, who is compelled to work hard through the spring, summer, and autumn, and attend the district school in the winter. The only remarkable difference between Bayard and many other boys, was found in his strong desire to read, and his genius for poetry. He gathered the greater part of his youthful education from books, which he read at home, and by himself.

He had a noble father, and a lovely mother, God bless them! and they made it as easy for Bayard as they could in justice to the other children. They might not have fully understood the signs of genius which he displayed; but they put no needless stumbling-blocks in his way. No better proof of this is needed, than the excellent record of the other children, all of whom hold enviable positions in society. One brother, Dr. J. Howard Taylor, is a physician, and connected with the health department of the city of Philadelphia; another, William W. Taylor, is a most skilful civil engineer; while a third, Col. Frederick Taylor, was killed at the battle of Gettysburg, when leading the celebrated Bucktail Regiment of Pennsylvania. Two sisters are living,—Mrs. Annie Carey, wife of a Swiss gentleman; and Mrs. Lamborn, wife of Col. Charles B. Lamborn, of Colorado. Growing up in such a family, as an elder brother, involved much patient toil, and great responsibility. The best tribute to him, in those days, was paid by an old lady, of Reading, Penn., who knew him in his youth, and who summed up her evidence to the writer in the words, “He did all he could.”

CHAPTER IV.

Unfitness for Farming.—Love for Books.—Goes to the Academy.—Appearance as a Student.—Love for Geography and History.—Enters a Printing-office.—Genius for Sketching.—Correspondence with Literary Men.—Their Advice.—Hon. Charles Miner.—Putnam’s Tourist Guide.—Determination to go to Europe.—Dismal Prospects.

Joseph Taylor was too intelligent and observing not to notice how unfit was his son Bayard for tending sheep, hoeing corn, and weeding beds of vegetables. The intellectual inclination exhibited by the boy in every undertaking, and his frail form, led Mr. and Mrs. Taylor to look about for some occupation for their son more fitting than the hard drudgery of a farm. The eagerness with which he devoted himself to the study of such books as could then be secured; his schemes for obtaining volumes considered by his parents, until then, wholly beyond their reach; his poems and essays, learned in the hayfield, and written out after the day’s work was done, all confirmed them in the feeling that it was their duty to give up his assistance on the homestead, and permit him to follow the leading of his genius. It was with no little anxiety that they sent him “away to school”; for they felt then that they might not have their son, as a companion, at home again. Mr. Gause then taught an excellent high school at West Chester, the county seat, and to that they sent him for a short time. One of his classmates at that school, now residing in Baltimore, says he remembers distinctly how awkward and rustic Bayard appeared when he first entered the school, and how radical and rapid was the change from the ploughboy to the student. He became a universal favorite, and was so able to teach, and so ready to help, that he had a large number of scholars following him about half the time, for the purpose of getting assistance at their lessons. Yet he found much time to read other books than those containing his studies, and as in a village of the size of West Chester, there were some small libraries, his desire for reading could be gratified. Geography was his favorite study, and, in the pursuit of information, he sought out and read so many books relating to the places mentioned in the text-book, that his classmates used to say that “Bayard knows all about his geography without even reading his lessons over.”

He was soon well acquainted with the history of the world, and had the most interesting events connected with the wars of Europe fresh in his mind. He read about Edinburgh, London, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden; of William the Conqueror, Peter the Great, Charlemagne, and Mahomet; of the adventures of the Crusaders, of the wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War, and Napoleon’s campaigns; and, with each volume, built higher those castles in the air, which many youths construct on the excitement of such themes. It seems astonishing how a boy of fourteen years could appreciate so much of the books he read, when we recall the dulness and dryness which characterized almost every history then extant, and the exceedingly difficult subjects of which they treated. He read, one day, for a few minutes, in Unionville, in 1839, from a book that lay on the mantel-shelf, and although the subject was that of art and the beauty of Raphael’s Madonna and child, he understood it so well, and remembered it so clearly, that, in 1845, when at Dresden, where the picture was exhibited, he was able to recall the words of that description, and the name of the writer.

The circumstances in which his parents were placed, made it impossible for them to support him long at school, neither was he inclined to be a charge upon them. He desired to be able to earn money for himself, both to relieve his parents of the expense, and to furnish means for purchasing books. He was a bold youth. He seemed to fear nothing. He had a sublime faith in his own success, which was not egotism nor pride, but an inspiration. Very often, when he had read a book, he would sit down and write to the author; which fact was not, in itself, so astonishing as the fact that he wrote letters so bright and sensible, that in nearly every case he obtained a courteous, and often a lengthy reply. In this way, he made the acquaintance of many men well known in the literary circles of America, several of whom were of great assistance to him a few years after. When he was but ten years old, and still on the old farm, he read “Pencillings by the Way,” which was a narrative of foreign travel, written by Nathaniel P. Willis, and published in the New York “Mirror,” of which Mr. Willis was then an associate editor.

Young Bayard soon after entered into a correspondence with Mr. Willis on literary matters, and continued the interchange of letters until the death of Mr. Willis, in 1867. In the same manner young Bayard secured the attention, advice, and assistance of Rufus W. Griswold, who edited the “New World” and the “New Yorker,” and who, in 1842 and 1843, edited “Graham’s Magazine,” in Philadelphia. Dr. Griswold was also a poet, and in fact had been in every branch of literary work, from writing items in Boston for a weekly paper, through type-setting, reporting, and compiling, to writing sermons as a Baptist minister. He had led a wandering life, had seen much of the world, and was well acquainted, as an editor and reviewer, with all the best works of history, travel, and poetry. From him Bayard received much sensible advice and much encouragement. To him Bayard sent some of his earliest poems, and thus secured their publication.

It is probable that Bayard became acquainted with Henry S. Evans, editor of the West Chester “Village Record,” through some of his poetical contributions to that paper. However that may be, he sought the office of that paper for an opportunity to learn the printer’s trade, when it had been decided by his parents to let him go. The “Village Record” had long been a respected and favorite journal for that county, and had, under the editorial management of Hon. Charles Miner, been the intellectual training-school of many influential and noted men. Mr. Evans was conducting the paper with much ability, and it was then usually considered a great opportunity for any young man if an opening was found for him in the office of that periodical.

Yet Bayard did not like the work of a printer, and especially despised the work which naturally fell to his lot as a new apprentice. He took to sketching; and having added the instruction of a teacher, for a few weeks, to a natural tact for drawing, he “illustrated” almost everything within reach which had a smooth surface. He caricatured the printers and editors, and brought out the worst features of his associates in horrible cartoons. He sent to delinquent correspondents pictures of ink-bottles and long quills. He sketched himself in the mirror, and sent the copy to inquiring friends. Far too intent upon drawings, poetry, and travels to make much progress as a printer, he became tired of the occupation and longed to be free. There came to his hands some time before he entered the printing-office, a small book, intended partly for home reading and partly as a guide-book for European travellers, entitled “The Tourist in Europe.” It was written by George P. Putnam, of New York, and told the routes, and described the wonders to be seen, in a very fascinating way to one like Bayard, whose imagination was already excited to the most enthusiastic pitch. The boy appears to have studied that book with the greatest and most persevering zeal. He used it for a plan of reading, and taking it by course, borrowed books relating to the places mentioned by Mr. Putnam, until one by one he had learned the history, occupation, literary achievements, and habits of every city or town of note in the whole of Europe. He made up his mind that he was going to Europe. Just how or when was a mystery. But that he was going soon he had no doubt. He spoke of his trip to England and Germany with the confidence of one who has his ticket and letter of credit already in his pocket. Yet he was a penniless boy, who had scarcely seen a ship, and who knew but a few phrases outside of his native tongue. His friends laughed at him, and gravely told his relatives that if Bayard did not curb his rambling disposition he would become a beggar and a disgrace. Even that chosen schoolmate, whose dark eyes and tresses held more influence over his thoughts and movements than the world knew, or he himself would publicly acknowledge, laughed incredulously as he told her of his projected visits to the castles, towers, shrines, and battle-fields of Europe and Asia.

The months rolled heavily away, and his fingers wearied with the type, and his heart became sad because of the long delay. He began to be ashamed of his boasts, but patiently waited. For two years he studied, planned, prophesied, yearned for a trip to Europe; having in the meantime made a short and hazardous tramp to the Catskills, with money saved from his clothing allowance as an apprentice. He ventured to write to some ship-owners in Philadelphia, to ascertain if he could work his passage. He often mentioned his proposed trip to his employer, and asked to be released from his engagement and agreement as an apprentice. Mr. Evans only smiled and said that Bayard need not trouble himself about that at present; it would be all right when the time came for him to go. Thus, with a conviction that he should certainly go, and yet heart-sick at the delay, Bayard reached his nineteenth birthday.

CHAPTER V.

Visited by his Cousin.—Decides to go to Europe with his Cousin.—Correspondence with Travellers.—Lack of Money.—Unshaken Confidence.—Publication of Ximena.

Bayard had a cousin Frank, or Franklin, whom he held in great respect, and whose subsequent life, as will be seen hereafter, justified the high esteem in which Bayard held him. This young man, a few years older than Bayard, had, by much patience and perseverance, succeeded in obtaining sufficient money to support himself in an economical manner in Germany, and had made up his mind to attend the lectures at the university in Heidelberg.

“Are you really going, Frank?”

“Yes, Bayard, I am going sure.”

“Then I am going with you.”

“But, Bayard, how are you going to get the money to pay your expenses?”

“I do not know where it is coming from, not even for my outfit, but I am going with you.”

Bayard had written to a great many people, of whom he had heard, asking them about the expense and outfit for a tour in Europe. Some of them had made the journey, and some had completed their preparations; but they all placed the amount so high as to appear like a fabulous sum to the poor apprentice. None placed the fare at less than five hundred dollars, while some of the estimates were as high as eighteen hundred dollars. Of course this poor boy could not earn nor borrow either of these amounts. Yet he was confident that in some way he would be able to overcome the difficulty.

Dr. Griswold, of whom mention was made in the last chapter, had suggested that it might be wise for Bayard to publish, in small book-form, his sonnets and other poems, and sell them to friends and admirers; and when he found that Frank was going, he determined to try that method of raising a little money. He went to some of his old friends and neighbors for assistance to print his little volume; but so little was their faith in the boy they had known from his birth, that they told him they would not encourage him in a scheme so absurd and impracticable. But Bayard only became the more determined with each defeat. He renewed his application to friends more distant, and, as is usually the case, he found they had more confidence than those who looked upon him as the boy they knew on the farm. From those distant friends, living in Philadelphia and West Chester, he at last obtained such assistance as to be able to print a few copies of his poems. He christened his first volume “Ximena, and other Poems,” and finding many kindly disposed persons who would like to help him to the small sum asked for the book, but who would have been ashamed to present him with so diminutive an amount, he was enabled to dispose of enough in a few days to pay his expenses and a profit of twenty dollars. Acting upon the advice of Nathaniel P. Willis, he applied to the editors of the various newspapers in Philadelphia for employment as a travelling correspondent; but letters from Europe were becoming stale, and correspondence was overdone, so that he was met with discouraging refusals on every hand. Fortunately, some one suggested to him the names of the “Saturday Evening Post,” and the “United States Gazette.” He was, however, without hope of anything from them. He has since said to his friends, that he then thought as he could not fare any worse than he had done, it would do no harm to try again. His confidence in his final success was so great, that he had made a settlement with Mr. Evans, of the “Village Record,” and had left the employment of a printer before he had found or thought of a way to secure funds for his intended trip. He had no money, no outfit, no employment; and yet he was sure he should go. In that condition, and in a state of mind bordering on wonder, because the way which was to open had so long remained shut, this thin, awkward youth walked confidently into the office of the “Saturday Evening Post.” Mr. S. D. Patterson was then its editor, and, while he was disposed to assist the young man, he did not have much faith in his success as a correspondent. Mr. Patterson, however, gave Bayard some encouragement, and the youth, with lighter step, went to the office of the “United States Gazette.” Not finding Mr. J. R. Chandler at his editorial room, Bayard went to the editor’s residence. Mr. Chandler was sick in bed; but he was able to converse with Bayard, and received him very pleasantly. The young man had never met Mr. Chandler before; but he stated his cause with such frankness and clearness, and showed such confidence in his final triumph, that Mr. Chandler took out his pocket-book and gave Bayard fifty dollars, saying that if he sent any letters of sufficient interest they would be inserted in the columns of the “Gazette.” Mr. Chandler did not, at the time, care for letters from Europe, and did not expect to publish any; but, acting from the promptings of a generous heart, he freely gave the assistance desired. Of Mr. Chandler’s honorable career, more will be said in another chapter.

On returning to Mr. Patterson, Bayard found him willing to do as he had proposed, and the sum of fifty dollars was added to the gift of Mr. Chandler. Then, as if fortunes, like misfortunes, come not singly, he found a customer for some manuscript poems in a friend of Dr. Griswold,—George R. Graham. From him Bayard received twenty dollars, making the round sum of one hundred and forty dollars with which to begin his journey to the Old World. Bayard now felt independent and happy. At least he could get across the Atlantic Ocean. He might have to work as a compositor, or as a common laborer, or even beg for his bread after he arrived on the other side; he did not know, and seemed to care but little. He had encountered a hard fortune here, and conquered, and he felt sure that he could do as well there. Happy, proud day was it for him when he returned with the money to his home at Kennett Square. Sad day for Mary Agnew. But as she and Bayard were only playmates and schoolmates, she must not appear to be especially grieved.

The next thing to be done was to obtain a passport from the United States Government. It could only be obtained in Washington, and as they could not afford the expense of the stages, Frank and Bayard started for Washington on foot. It would seem as if such a journey of one hundred and twenty miles,—in which they walked thirty miles to Port Deposit, thence in a rickety tow-boat to Baltimore, and from that city to Washington, they tramped all night without food or drink,—would have discouraged any one from attempting to walk through the countries of Europe. For they must have returned from this first walk footsore and lame in every joint. Yet they came back as full of hope as when they started out, having seen Mr. Calhoun, then Secretary of State, and many other celebrities then inhabiting the capital city,—June, 1844.

Oh! those farewells! To the parents who had watched over him so long, it seemed like losing him forever, so far away and mythical did Europe seem to be. Their lips consented, but their hearts kept rapping no, no, no, in rebellious throbs. The brothers and sisters wept with a grief never before so keen, and a dread never before so deep. But to the youth, before whom the great unexplored world lay in its beauty, and who could not then realize, as he did so keenly afterwards, that in all the world he would find no spot so sweet and interesting to him as would be the one he was leaving, it was a joy over which the sadness of parting for a time was but as the shadow of a cloud on the summer sea. High hopes, great aspirations, drove him along, while romantic castles and fortresses, brilliant rivers, heavenly gardens, majestic mountains, wise people, delightful music, gorgeous galleries of art, and indescribable landscapes, beckoned him to come. Giddy with anticipation, trembling with conflicting emotions, he stood in the shade of the oak and the hickory of the old home that morning, bidding his loved ones good-by. He was a hero. There was the sense of present loss, and of danger to come; but it weighed not with him as against the great ambition of his life.

Did he bid Mary Agnew farewell? Perhaps! The mature poet will tell us, in his own sweet way, by and by.

CHAPTER VI.

The Contest with Enemies.—Departure from Philadelphia.—Friendship of N. P. Willis.—Discouraging Reception.—Interview with Horace Greeley.—Searching for a Vessel.—Steerage Passage for Liverpool.—Fellow Passengers.—The Voyage.—The Beauty of the Sea.—Landing at Liverpool.

“How rosed with morn, how angel innocent,

Thus looking back, I see my lightsome youth!

Each thought a wondrous bounty Heaven had lent,

And each illusion was a radiant truth!

Each sorrow dead bequeathed a young desire,

Each hovering doubt, or cloud of discontent,

So interfused with Faith’s pervading fire,

That to achieve seemed light as to aspire!”

—Taylor.

Bayard was not an exception to the universal rule, found true by nearly every scholar, and every successful statesman. He was ridiculed by a thoughtless throng. His success in the matters he undertook subjected him to the slights and backbiting of envious simpletons, and everywhere the looks and shrugs of his acquaintances told with what contempt they looked upon his endeavors to be a poet, and to see the world. It was the same old trial, and only those young men who, like Bayard, are able to stand firm against ridicule and envy, ever reach the acropolis of their ambition. No record has been found of the effect these things had upon Bayard, or upon the two noble young men who were his companions; but we do know that they turned not from their purpose. Bayard’s sensitive nature, his warm heart, his innocent ambition must have felt the stings, and, at times in after life, he spoke as one who had not forgotten. How grand and honorable the exceptional appearance of the few who were generous and faithful to the poor boy on the threshold of his life!

Taking with them only such baggage as they could carry in their hands, these three young men,—Bayard Taylor, Franklin Taylor, and Barclay Pennock.—started for New York the last week in June, 1844. There had been but little delay, notwithstanding the day for departure had been set before Bayard knew where the funds were to come from to defray his expenses.

There was a strong hope in Bayard’s mind that Mr. N. P. Willis, who had written him such encouraging letters, would be able to assist him in securing employment as a travelling correspondent of some of the New York daily papers. Mr. Willis was widely known, and greatly respected in New York, and, on the arrival of Bayard at his office, he entered heartily into the work of procuring such a situation for his young friend. But foreign correspondence had been as much overdone in New York as in Philadelphia. So many writers had tried to make a name by imitating the first successful correspondents, that the people were weary with the monotonous story. It was as well known then as it is now, that copyists and imitators are not what a live, active, original newspaper requires. Correspondence from almost anywhere could be made interesting and amusing, if the writer would only write naturally, and describe the things he saw in just the light they appeared to him. No one thought that this boy would do anything else but follow in the old track. Hence they wished for none of his writings. One gentleman told him that it was useless to make engagements, for a youth, going into a strange country in that hap-hazard way, would not live to write any letters. Mr. Willis’ generous assistance availed Bayard nothing with a people who had so often been compelled to form their own opinion of the people they wished to employ, and who considered themselves the best judges.

In the editorial room of the New York “Tribune” sat the editor, whose name is being written higher, on the list of America’s great men, by every succeeding year. To his quick eye, there was promise of noble things in the countenance of the boy. He had himself been a venturesome, ambitious, penniless boy, and, like Bayard, he had boldly pushed his boat into the dangerous billows. He may have remembered Benjamin Franklin’s hazardous trip, as a boy, to Philadelphia, for Bayard was mentioned by Mr. Willis as a young man from the Quaker city. Whatever may have been his thoughts, he treated Bayard with his usual consideration, and informed the youth that he was ready to publish and pay for all letters that were worth inserting in the “Tribune.” But he solemnly warned Bayard against attempting to write anything until he knew enough about the country to write intelligently. Bayard told Mr. Greeley that he would try to get acquainted with the people of Germany and their institutions, and, as soon as he felt competent, would send a few letters for Mr. Greeley’s criticism. The busy editor nodded as the boy thanked him, bade him good-day, and, doubtless, instantly forgot there had ever been such a visitor; and left the fact in oblivion, until it was brought to mind some months afterwards by the arrival of a letter from Germany.

Mr. Willis told Bayard, as he said afterwards, to keep up his courage, and go forward: “The way to Valhalla is broad and smooth to the hero, but narrow and dangerous to the coward.” It appears by the brief account which is given in the introduction to his “Views Afoot,” published by Putnam & Sons, New York, that the party had a difficult task to find a vessel in which the accommodations, rates of passage, and port of destination were within their plan. They intended at first to take a vessel direct for the Continent; but in such of them as were bound for continental ports, the fare was too high. They were, however, on the point of taking passage in a Dutch sailing vessel, the consignees of which were acquaintances of Mr. Willis, and consequently made some reduction in the fares, when an opportunity offered itself for a steerage passage in a vessel bound for Liverpool. In that way, they would be conveyed to England for the sum of twenty-four dollars. But such a passage! Think of it, ye disconsolate, fault-finding tourists, who lie in the soft beds of a steamer, with fresh air and plenty of light! Think of it, ye sufferers that occupy the great forward hall of a steamship, and who curse your fate that you are compelled to take a steerage passage! What would you do or say should you be crowded into a cabin of rough planks, eight feet long, and seven feet wide, with nine passengers and eight narrow berths, in a clumsy, dirty little sailing vessel? Yet this was the young adventurer’s choice, rather than expend the small sum of twenty-five dollars from his small store. These three boys were compelled, by the terms of passage, to furnish their own provisions and bedding, and the fact that the unexpected honesty and kindness of a warehouse clerk prevented their starting off without enough food to last through the voyage, is another proof that “fortune favors the brave.”

As there was one more adult passenger in the steerage than there were berths, Bayard and his cousin Frank good-naturedly agreed to occupy one together. To the writer, who has frequently crossed the treacherous Atlantic, there seems to be no experience so inconceivably miserable and sickening as a steerage passage in a sailing vessel must be to the landsman. But when to the usual discomforts of dampness, darkness, sea-sickness, and strange company, are added the cramps caused by being packed with another passenger like a sandwich into a narrow box, and the absence of fresh air, no tortures of the Inquisition would seem to equal it. Bayard often referred to his first discouraging sensation of sea-sickness. Coming, as it always does to the passenger, just as he is taking his last sad look at the fading shores of his native country, it is always a disheartening experience. Bayard shed tears as he began to realize that he was actually afloat upon the wide ocean, and could not if he would return to the land. He has since well said, that had he known more of life, and the dangers of travel, his alarm and discouragement would have been much greater than they were, and of longer duration. Youth borrows no trouble; hence it is happy and victorious.

Of that voyage, and its sufferings, in the ship “Oxford,” beginning on the first day of July, and ending at Liverpool on the twenty-ninth of the same month, he made but brief mention; yet his experience in getting the ship’s cook to boil their potatoes, in eating their meals of pilot-bread, and in the company of their English, Scotch, Irish, and German cabin-mates, was most charmingly told in his letters to the “Gazette” and to the “Post,” as well as in “Views Afoot,” to which reference has already been made. His German companion was not only a social advantage, but furnished the adventurous youths with a pleasant opportunity to get some of the German phrases, and to hear descriptions of the country they were to visit. They were also favored by the captain’s permission to use books from the cabin library, which contained several entertaining books of travel and of fiction. The closing days of the voyage appear to have been pleasant in some respects, for the beauty of the sea made a lasting impression upon his mind, and might possibly have been still in his memory when he wrote the lines in his “Poems of Home and Travel,” running thus:—

“The sea is a jovial comrade,

He laughs wherever he goes;

His merriment shines in the dimpling lines

That-wrinkle his hale repose:

He lays himself down at the feet of the Sun,

And shakes all over with glee,

And the broad-backed billows fall faint on the shore

In the mirth of the mighty Sea.”

It may be that the beauty and joy of the sea appeared more remarkable because of the great contrast between its free and wild life, and the crowded and stifled existence of the mortals who witnessed its gambols. At all events he was not so delighted with the sea that he could not shout with the others, when the dark outlines of Ireland’s mountains appeared through the mist. The sleepless nights, the company of howling Iowa Indians, the musty cabin, the terrible nausea—all were forgotten in the sight of land, and as the goal grew nearer, the more like a dream became all the disagreeable experiences of the voyage, until when, after tacking from northern Ireland to Scotland, from Scotland to Ireland, and from Ireland to the Isle of Man, they sailed up the Mersey to Liverpool, the inconveniences of the voyage had wholly faded out, and only the few agreeable incidents remained a reality. They passed the dreaded officials of the custom-house without difficulty, and by the advice of a “wild Englishman,” who was one of their travelling companions, they went to the Chorley Tavern, and there enjoyed a bountiful dinner, as only passengers by sea can enjoy them when first they step on shore. Bayard was impressed by the sombre appearance of the city, and amused by the use of the middle of the streets for sidewalks, and by the pink each man carried in his buttonhole.

CHAPTER VII.

Departure from Liverpool.—Travels Second-Class.—Arrival at Port Rush.—The Giant’s Causeway.—Lost and in Danger.—Dunluce Castle.—Effect upon the Travellers.—Condition of the Irish.—Arrival at Dumbarton.—Scaling the Castle Walls.—Walk to Loch Lomond.—Ascent of Ben Lomond.—Loch Katrine.—Visit to Stirling.

Bayard and his companions, including the German student, with whom there had sprung up an intimate friendship, left Liverpool on the same day on which they arrived there, having found that they would reach Scotland via the Giant’s Causeway, as soon as they could by waiting for the more direct line. With an exercise of common-sense, such as characterizes too few Americans in this day of fashionable travel, they took passage second-class, finding themselves in no way the worse for the temporary inconvenience, while their fare was but one-sixth the amount of a first-class passage. It was not a comfortable night’s voyage on the way from Liverpool to Port Rush, in the north of Ireland, starting at ten o’clock in the evening, and arriving at eleven o’clock the next night. It may be that the cold and wet, the crowd of Irish passengers, the unvaried diet of bread and cheese, served the purpose of making the shores and bluffs more attractive, as the mind naturally seeks and usually obtains some comfort and recreation in the most doleful surroundings. It is a glorious thing to look upon those basaltic hexagons of the Giant’s Causeway, under any circumstances. Those enormous natural columns, set side by side, so close as to make a floor along their tops, so strange, so unaccountably symmetrical, fill the soul with awe, and half persuade the least credulous beholder that there were giants in the days of yore, and that they really did build a thoroughfare of these huge prisms across to Scotland. Any traveller contemplates those matchless piles with surprise, and every sojourner is delighted beyond estimation by the contour and echoes of the vast caverns, into which the ocean rolls with such enchanting combinations of sound and motion. But to young men who had seen but little of the world and its natural wonders, and who had suffered a kind of martyrdom for the sake of visiting them, those resounding caverns, and those mighty ruins of gigantic natural temples, must have been inspiring beyond measure. Every traveller recalls with the most clear and grateful remembrance, the first landscapes of Europe, on which rest his ocean-weary eyes. To these young men the landscapes were about their only joy, and they appreciated them accordingly. Bayard seems to have been very enthusiastic. He scrutinized everything and questioned everybody. He let nothing pass him unnoticed, although in his books he left much unmentioned. He clambered into the lofty recesses of the Causeway, and let himself down into the strange niches. He halloed in the caves for the thundering echoes; he drank three times at the magical Giant’s Well. He strayed from the highway that led from Port Rush to the Causeway, to look into the weird nooks which the sea has carved in the mutable shore. Dunluce Castle, with its broken walls and ghastly towers—home of proud Lord Antrim—and home as well of that family’s terrible banshee, was the first old ruin which Bayard visited. It stands on the verge of the cragged cliffs, with the sea beating about its base, and bellowing in the cavern under it. It is located near the highway which leads from Port Rush to the Causeway. Across the narrow footway, and into these ruins, Bayard rushed most eagerly. The same old man who now shows travellers the battlements, and tells to wondering hundreds the tales of tournament and banqueting-hall, was there then, and rehearsed the tale to him. The boy is gone. But the old man, whom Bayard mentions as an old man then, lives on in his dull routine, yet living less in a half century than Bayard lived in a single year.

All this was fresh and glorious to the youth, and gave him a very pleasant foretaste of the rich experiences in store for him. But, as if the fates conspired to chill his intellectual joys with physical discomforts, a rain came pouring upon them as they returned, the wind blew in fierce gusts, darkness, deep and black, settled upon the land; they lost their way, and floundered about in muddy ravines, and barely escaped destruction as they trod the edges of the precipices above the wildest of seas. They became separated from each other, and the howling of winds and waves among the crags was so hideous that they could not for a long time hear each other’s call, and the worst of fears for each other were added to their own dismay. But they somehow blundered upon the path as it emerged from the wild rocks, and together walked the beach to their hotel, soaking and half frozen. But all those trying experiences fade when the skin is dry, and the sweet sleep of healthy youth comes with its comforting oblivion; only the gorgeous landscapes, and the romantic places, like the memories of boyhood, remain to shape the dreams.

Bayard was shocked by the miserable condition of the Irish peasantry, and his description of their huts, and their appearance, given in his letters, shows great sympathy for their distress, and great disgust at their degraded customs. On his way to Greenock from Port Rush, he fell in with a company of them, who chanced to take the same steamer, and he did not enjoy their drunken and beastly songs and riots. But on his trip from Greenock, up the Clyde to Dumbarton, he had more acceptable companionship, and in his book he refers, with a most touching simplicity, to the music of a strolling musician on board the boat, who played “Hail Columbia” and “Home, Sweet Home.”

Old Scotland! Noble old hills! Charming lakes, and enchanting valleys! How like the awakened memories of loved faces, they come back to us when we hear the word “Dumbarton”! What exciting tales of Baliol, of Wallace, of Bruce, of Queen Mary, of Cromwell, come again as we recall the sugar-loaf rock, on which the remnant of the old fortress stands! Those bright youths must have feasted on the associations connected with Dumbarton. As they peered from Wallace’s tower, handled Wallace’s sword, and gazed over the wide landscape, with the sites of battle-fields, castles, palaces, the home of Bruce, the cottage of Wallace, the beautiful valleys of the Clyde and Leven, the majestic Ben Lomond, and the crests of the Highlands, they grew in intellectual stature, and breathed a moral atmosphere as pure as the air that encircled the flagstaff at the summit. There is no education like the actual contact with the scenes connected with heroic self-sacrifice, to train young men for patriots and poets. No discipline is more necessary to the development of a broad and virtuous manhood among any class of young men, than studious travel in foreign countries. To young Bayard, lacking other culture than the few years at the district school, the few months at the academy, and the studious perusal of histories and poems, this experience was of vast importance. Its beneficial effects were seen throughout his life, and frequently show themselves in his editorials, poems, novels, and narratives.

At Dumbarton, Bayard had his first narrow escape, and he said that when he reached the ground, after daring to scale, for flowers, the precipice up which Wallace climbed with his followers for glory and fatherland, he was in such a tremor of terror, in view of his having so narrowly escaped death, that he could scarcely speak. The unusual strength of a little tuft of wild grass, growing in a crevice of the cliff, had saved him from being dashed to pieces. It must have given him a very vivid impression of the daring feats of those old Scotch warriors, who not only faced these perpendicular walls, but fearlessly encountered the foes at the top.

From Dumbarton, Bayard and his friends walked through the valley of the River Leven to Loch Lomond. All his letters and contributions to the newspapers speak of this walk as one of the most enjoyable of all his rambles. In his “Views Afoot,” with which every reader is or should be familiar, he mentions it as a glorious walk. The pastoral beauty of the fields, the clearness of the stream, the ivy-grown towers, the dense forests, the early home of Smollett, whose dashing pen astonished the kingdom in 1748, the summer parks of Scottish noblemen, the mild, soothing August sunshine, were a combination rarely found, and when found as rarely appreciated.

These young travellers had been diligent readers, and, when the steamer hurried them over the lake, the appearance of Ben Lomond and Ben Voirlich, of “Bull’s Rock,” and Rob Roy’s Cave, of Inversnaid and Glen Falloch, called up the shades of the Campbells, Macgregors, Malcolms, Rothesays, Macfarlanes, Macphersons; making each beach and rock along Loch Lomond a feature of romantic interest.

With youthful enthusiasm, Bayard clambered to the rugged top of Ben Lomond, having waded through deep morass and thorny thicket, to reach it, and, from that lookout, gazed around on the peaks of lesser mountains, down upon the sweet Lomond lake, away to the oceans on either side of Scotland, discerning the smoke over Glasgow, the dark plains of Ayr, and, but for a mist, the embattled towers of Stirling and Edinburgh. After a short stop, he descended with his old companions, and a new one (he was constantly finding new friends), along the slippery, stony slopes; and, after a dinner of oatmeal cakes and milk at a cottage near the base, trudged and waded on through that wild tract of woodland and swamp to Loch Katrine. There was the home of poetry. The great forests, through which the Clan-Alpine horns had echoed, the dense forest, through which the scarfs and bows did gleam in the old days of the Highland clans, had disappeared. The blossoming heather and bare rocks made a sorry substitute. But to Bayard, whose life was set to poetry, who had so often studied and declaimed of Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu, and who had often dreamed of the Ellen’s Isle, and the gathering clans, as Walter Scott described them, it must have been an enchanted spot. One may recite and analyze for half a century that poem, and may flatter himself that he has detected all its beauty, and understands all its historic references; but one hour on Loch Katrine is worth more than all that. There the reader lives the poem, and it is a part of his being ever more. Bayard felt compensated there for all the sufferings, by sea and by land, which he had experienced. He gazed fondly upon the glassy, land-locked water; he studied closely the features, manners, and songs of the Highland boatmen, those descendants of the old clans; he sketched, with the keenest interest, Ben Ann, Ben Venue, the gate of the Trosachs, and the curved lines of the sandy shore, and he awoke the echoes at the Goblin’s Gave and Beal-nam-bo. Rich experiences! In such does the youth develop fast into a cultured manhood.

From Loch Katrine, the party walked by way of Loch Vennachar, Coilantogle Ford, and Ben Ledi, to Doune,—the home of royalty during the sixteenth century, and whose old castle is still a majestic ruin. Thence through the plains to Stirling Castle, crowned and battle-honored, and looking down on the valleys of the Forth and Allan Water, and out upon the bloody fields of Bannockburn and Sheriff-muir. Having inspected the dungeons and halls of the castle, looked with horror upon the spot where royalty murdered a friend, and threw the body to the dogs; and after contemplating the grave of the girlish martyrs, they hastily took the shortest route to Glasgow, and thence to the home of Burns, where a great celebration, or memorial gathering, was to be held, to honor the memory of the “rustic bard,” on the banks of his own “Bonnie Doon.”

CHAPTER VIII.

Visit to the Home of Burns.—The Poet’s Cottage.—The Celebration.—Walks and Rides in the Rain.—Edinburgh.—Its Associations.—The Teachings of History.—Home of Drummond.—Abbotsford.—Melrose.—Jedburgh Abbey.—Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Bayard’s visit to Ayr was the first of a long series of like visitations to the homes of celebrated poets, and being then a novel experience was doubly enjoyed. It may be that the similar occupation, and like inspiration, which characterized both himself and Burns, made the spot more attractive. Had they not both followed the plough through the thick sward? Had not both milked the cows; drove the horses to the water; planted the corn; dug up the weeds; cut the hay, and all the while sang and recited original verses? Had he not been ridiculed by his playmates, and sneered at by his neighbors, in common with that great poet of Scotland? To look over the farm on which Burns toiled; to be shown the spot on which it is claimed Burns overturned—

“That wee bit heap o’ leaves and stibble,”

the home of the “mousie,” and to be shown the cottage he was born in, and the scenes which inspired his songs, interesting as they are to the writer of prose, must have been peculiarly satisfactory to him. He does not speak of it, however, with the enthusiasm one would expect, and it is quite probable that he was not yet wholly inured to the inconveniences of a wet climate, and could not think or muse in a crowd as satisfactorily as when dry and alone. When he arrived in the town, the streets were filled by an immense throng, and there could have been little satisfaction in trying to fall into poetical dreams. It is a great satisfaction to those of Bayard’s friends who have loved him, and put their faith in him, to know that he put himself on record in some of his early letters, in no light terms, as having an unutterable disgust for the drunken brawling which went on in the name of Burns that day in Ayr. He felt, with great keenness, the disgrace which every American feels that it is to Scotland, that the old cottage, so sacred for its associations as the birthplace of Burns, should be occupied as a drinking-saloon, and be crowded with intoxicated vagabonds. It seemed like making a dog-kennel of a chapel in St. Paul’s. Anything but genius, intellect, or wit characterizes the crowd that usually frequent Burns’ Cottage on such days; and it is said to have been, in 1844, the resort of a more beastly class than are those wretches who get intoxicated there now, and, naturally, on such a great day as that on which Bayard visited it, every Scotsman who indulged at all became furiously drunk. Besides that inconvenience, the trustees of the monument, on the day when so many thousands came to see it and its treasures, voted to lock it up; and Bayard, with the others, was shut out from its interesting collection of relics and mementoes. Still further, it was so arranged by the marshals of the occasion, that the grand stand, with its literary feast and the ceremonies appurtenant to the occasion, were shut out from the populace to whom the poet sang, and Bayard being only a strange boy, with no more of a title than Robert Burns had, was obliged to content himself with a seat on the ridge of the “brig o’ Doon.” He did see old Alloway kirk, and heard its bell. He saw within its ruined walls the rank weeds, and without, the graves of the poet’s ancestry. He did have a cheerful pedestrian tour; for the home of Burns, with Alloway kirk and the bonnie Doon, are three miles from the city of Ayr in open country. He saw the sister and sons of the poet. He heard the assembled thousands sing, “Ye banks and braes’ o’ bonnie Doon.” He saw a grandson of Tam O’Shanter. He had to walk the three miles, returning through mud and rain, and he had to stand in an open car, exposed to a driving rain-storm, throughout the two hours’ ride by railroad to Glasgow. How different his reception then, as a boy and unknown, from that which he received in his riper age, after his fame was secured, at the home of Germany’s greatest poet.

We follow Bayard in his first tour in Europe with greater detail than we shall do with other journeys, because in this he developed so much of that character which made him famous. History being written, not for the dead, but for the instruction and encouragement of the living, should show clearly how a great life was attained, as a guide for similar genius in the days to come. In a volume of hasty sketches like this, we cannot hope to do the work as thoroughly as we should so much love to do it; but as far as can be done at this early day, we give those events which had the greatest effect upon his life as a writer of prose and poetry.

He must have feasted in Edinburgh. Richest storehouse in Scotland, for all such as follow letters! There was the monument to Scott, suggestive of the most beautiful in art, but so insignificant as a reminder of him, while the walls of Salisbury Crags, and the dome of Arthur’s Seat, frown beyond and above it. There was Holyrood Palace, with its stains of blood, the couch of the beautiful queen, and the collections of historical relics. No place but the Tower of London has received such attention from gifted and famous literary men. Historians, poets, philosophers, educators, preachers, and lawyers have written and discoursed upon it. There was Calton Hill, with its monuments to great men. There was the great University, and there was the old Castle, that sat like a crown on the head of the city. All had been described by the most facile pens. All were full of living interest, and when Bayard tried to describe them, he found himself attempting to compete with the greatest essayists of the English-speaking world. The Grass Market, where Porteous was executed; Cowgate Street, with its aristocratic associations; St. Giles’ Church, with its memories of John Knox and the Heart of Mid-Lothian, were described by him, about which it is a kind of literary sacrilege to speak in other than classic language. It was a school that included every other, and Bayard was an apt and diligent scholar.

A short distance from Edinburgh, the pedestrians saw the birthplace and hermitage of Drummond. It is a delightful, sequestered chateau, called “Hawthornden,” and in it the poet wrote nearly all his elegant sonnets, and it was there that old Ben Jonson, after a walk from London, was entertained by Drummond, and Drummond was in turn entertained by Jonson. Going by the way of Galashiels and Selkirk, the party visited Abbotsford and its environs, where the immortal Scott lived and wrote. In the beautiful mansion which Scott built, and in which he wrote his most popular works, they read his manuscripts; sat at his desk; wandered in his gardens; gazed intently over the wide lawn and the distant Tweed; scrutinized the enormous variety of relics which had been collected by that antiquarian, to whom kings and queens were glad to become tributary. Thence they walked along the hard and smooth highway to old Melrose.

Ruins they would see in the near England, and on the distant continent, which would enclose a dozen abbeys such as this; Gothic arches they would enter which would make those of Melrose seem as a toy; and ivy and carving and chancels would be noticed, so much more rich and beautiful, that these would suffer sadly if put in comparison. But nowhere else in all the wide world would they find a locality made more interesting than this. The associations are almost everything. And to the initiated, the great magician, Scott, still speaks in the groined arches, flowering pillars, old clock, and willow-like windows. Melrose Abbey is a marked illustration of the power of a master-mind to give influence, life, and interest to inanimate things. Bayard felt this truth and mentioned it. He read “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” in the shadow of the arches, and imagined how the ruins glowed when the grave of the wizard opened and the book was revealed. Who knows but it was there, in the presence of those stirring associations, that he first conceived the plan which led him to make classic in poetry and fiction the fields, hills, and Quakers of his native county. Had he lived ten years longer than he did, his loved Kennett might have been as classic in song and story as Abbotsford itself.

From Melrose the young pedestrians walked to Jedburgh, omitting the delightful excursion to Dryburgh, but passing the home of Pringle, who had been the founder of “Blackwood’s Magazine,” and who had been also a poet and wanderer like Bayard. While passing the Cheviot Hills, the party met an excursionist in a carriage, fast asleep, which appeared to amuse Bayard very much. Probably he afterwards saw more amusing scenes than that, wherein travellers did not appreciate their privileges. The writer, as late as the summer of 1878, saw an American who had worked most industriously to lay up the funds to visit Switzerland, ride up the entire ascent of the glorious Alps at St. Gothard, on the top of a coach, fast asleep. Such marvels does the world of humanity contain. Bayard did not sleep when anything of interest called upon him for investigation, nor when the beauties of nature were to be enjoyed. They crossed the border between Scotland and England, over the battle-fields of the Percys, and by streams that were often, in days past, actually swollen with blood. There, “Marmion,” with all its tales historical, and legends mythical, was quoted and lived as only the cultured traveller can live it. There was instruction in every scene, every stranger, and every inn. How well Bayard availed himself of their lessons, is illustrated in all his excellent letters on foreign travel, and in his books compiled from them. At Newcastle he noticed a group of miners begging in the streets, and when he heard how they had struck for higher wages, because they could not longer exist on the pittance allowed them, and how they and their families were turned out upon the streets to starve, his indignation was very great, and in his book he utters a prophecy that soon that murmur from the oppressed people would increase to a roar, and be heard “by the dull ears of power.” From Newcastle he went by boat to London, reaching that city in the early morning near the end of August.

CHAPTER IX.

Visit in London.—Exhibition of Relics.—The Lessons of Travel.—Historical Association.—London to Ostend.—The Cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle.—The Great Cathedral at Cologne.—Voyage up the Rhine.—Longfellow’s “Hyperion.”—Visit to Frankfort.—Kind Friends.—Reaches Heidelberg.—Climbing the Mountains.

London is a world in itself, as has often been written and, to such an impressible mind as that of Bayard, was a place, replete with pleasure and instruction. London instructs by two methods; one by agreeable, and the other by disagreeable examples. Bayard was equally taught by both. There was Westminster Abbey, with its numberless tombs of the talented and noble; and there was the Tower of London, with its dungeons and beheading blocks. There were the palatial residences of the West End, and there the hovels and holes of the Wych Street district. There were the great mercantile houses of Holborn and Regent Street, and there were the gambling dens of Drury Lane. There were the magnificent galleries of art, at the Museum, at the Palaces, at Westminster, and at Kensington; and there were the dirty, slimy exhibitions of marred humanity along the wharves of the Thames. There were the zoölogical wonders of the parks, and there were the dog-shows, and cock-pits of the St. Giles Rookery. There was the palace of the Queen, and there the Old Bailey. There was the office of the “Thunderer” (Daily Times), and there were the attics from whence flowed the vilest trash that man ever printed. There were Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, and the broad squares; and there were the filthy alleys and narrow lanes about London Bridge. There were the Rothschilds, and there the poor Micawbers and deserted Nicholas Nicklebys. The richest, the poorest, the best, the worst; the most cultivated, and the most ignorant; the most powerful monarch, and the most degraded fishmongers. Extremes! Extremes that meet in everything there. They all instruct by teaching the beholder what he ought to be, and what he ought not to be. One sees much in London that ought not to have been; and, strange to relate, many of the relics connected with such things, are exhibited with great pride. If there is any one thing above all others, for which the American should be thankful, it is for the fact that the dungeon, the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew, the guillotine, the gibbet, the headsman’s block, the deadly hates of royalty, the cruelty of kings, and the jealousy of queens, have no place in the history of the Republic of the West. Yet there, somehow, the officials and guides who open to the public the records of the past and show visitors their institutions, give the most prominent places to deeds of horrid cruelty and shameless murders, as if they took pride in such fearful annals. It would seem as if, had our rulers butchered in cold blood their sons and daughters; had they cruelly starved their friends and relatives, we in America would be ashamed of it. It would be regarded as very natural here, if an ancestor was hung and quartered and his head carried about on a pole, to speak of it as seldom as possible. It would appear consistent if, had our national government oppressed the weak, degraded the poor, killed inoffensive captives, and, for selfish ambition, laid waste the cities and fields of an innocent people, we should attempt to bury the remembrance of those deeds so deep as to make a resurrection impossible. But there, in Europe, they appear to revel in the hideous doings of their ancestors, and will show you where human heads or bands were exhibited, and where noble men and women were persecuted to martyrdom, with the air of the circus manager who announces the clown. Who can hear the guide on London Bridge, “Here was posted the bleeding head of Sir William Wallace, the Scotch warrior and patriot, while the quarters of his body were at Stirling, Berwick, Perth, and Newcastle,” and not curse, with the deepest feeling, the people who murdered one of the greatest and best of men?

TOWER OF LONDON.

It is clear that these things made a strong impression upon Bayard, for we find him more frequently and more decidedly praising his own land, as he saw more and more of Europe. He saw, also, many of the advantages which European nations enjoy in art, literature, and commerce, and failed not to suggest them to his readers. But, unlike those shallow tourists, who would ape European manners, and think all European institutions should be at once imported here, his patriotic regard for the institutions and people of his own land, increased with the desire to benefit them. How reverently he speaks of George Washington; how touchingly does he speak with the European peasants who accost him, of the home of the free beyond the great ocean.

A whole week those young men searched the great city for valuable information. They slept and ate in the rudest of taverns, and tramped the city with the workmen and the beggars, but they were gathering the forces for a useful life. Bayard was filled with the sublimity of the mighty human torrent that, like a tide, rolls into London in the morning, dashes about the highways during the day, and surges outward at night. He felt the grandeur of St. Paul’s, the conflicting and exciting associations of Westminster, the marvellous feat of tunnelling under the Thames, the enormous wealth of churches, monuments, halls, and galleries, and carried away with him to the Continent a very complete idea of the institutions and the queer customs of the great metropolis.

From London, the party proceeded to Dover, and from thence to Ostend and Bruges. They travelled in the cheapest manner, walking wherever practicable, and going from Bruges to Ghent in a canal-boat, thence by railroad across the border to Aix-la-Chapelle. Here was another treat. The description which he gave in his letters of his visit to the old Cathedral, where rest the remains of Charlemagne, was one of the most vivid recitals to be found in the annals of travel. For some reason, he so abridged it in his book, as to take away the finest and most original delineations. Every reader of his first narration, who may never have visited Aix-la-Chapelle, can in imagination see the old Cathedral, with its shrines, its antique windows, and the shadows of saints on the floor, and hear the sweet undulations of the organ’s solemn peal. While to the traveller who follows him through those aisles, and under those magnificent arches, his words give life and language to the pillars, altars, and luminous decorations. To the least poetic or sentimental of travellers, it is a solemn place; and if so to them, how deep and impressive must it have been to a soul so full of emotion as that of Bayard! There he wrote his well-known poem, “The Tomb of Charlemagne.”

This grand old pile was succeeded next day by the great Gothic Cathedral, at Cologne, which was not then finished, is not now completed, and will never see the end of the mason’s labors, because the time taken in the construction is so long that the very stone decays, and must be replaced at the base by the time the delicate tracery of the towers is set on those skyward heights. The structure must be constantly in process of reconstruction, from the bottom, upwards. When Bayard looked upon this wonderful building, which since 1248 had been in an uncompleted state, two hundred and fifty years having been spent in active labor, he said it impressed him most deeply, by way of comparison. Two hundred and forty years before America was discovered, the foundations of that church were laid, and here they are working on it still! By such lessons is an American made to know his place in the history of the world. Had the history of these old lands been less barbarous and cruel, we should feel humble indeed. But in view of what the old folks have done, we may be thankful that we are young, and have our record yet to write. But the fact that we are not so old, so great, so artistic, or so cultured as we have flattered ourselves, is wholesome information, and as taught by these old Cathedrals of Europe, is very necessary to the success of our young men. How deeply these things moved Bayard, is seen by the very frequent mention we find in his writings, of aisle, or arch, or dome, or spire.

But one of the most attractive spots to that young voyager, in all his wanderings in Europe, he saw while going up the Rhine, from Cologne to Mayence. He viewed with satisfaction the vineyards and villages along the banks; he was charmed with the crags and crumbling towers of the innumerable old castles which ornament the tops of all the most prominent hills and mountains. The walled cities, the legendary caves and grottos, the most exquisite fables that account for the miraculous construction of cliff, and convent, and crusaders’ halls, all came upon him as he glided by them on the muddy river, as dreams come to the drinker of hashish. But beyond all these in interest to our young wanderer, was the little walled town of Boppart, whose feudal history is nearly lost, but whose romantic connection with Longfellow’s “Hyperion,” has given it a fresh lease of life. Bayard there recalled his life at home, and his days of anxious waiting; for, had not this same “Hyperion,” with entrancing interest, spurred on his hope to one day travel along the Rhine? Had not this same “Hyperion” given the impulse that started his cousin on such a great journey to the university at Heidelberg? And were not those houses in the town of Boppart, and was not that cottage the very Inn of the “Star,” and might not that woman, near the shore, be “Paul Flemming’s” boatwoman? Oh! grand and revered Longfellow! when we note how many a life, like these, has turned upon the reading of your inspired words, one feels as if to have seen your face and heard your voice, and to have been beneath the same roof, was an honor greater than kings could bestow!

But Boppart, Lurlei Berg, Oberwisel, Bingen, and Geisenheim were soon left behind, and Mayence, with its Cathedral six centuries old, its walls and fortresses, welcomed them to its monotonous shades.

A beautiful trait of Bayard’s character comes gracefully into view as we read his grateful acknowledgments of the kindnesses he received. On his first walk in his apprentice days, in Pennsylvania, having determined to see some mountains, although he had to walk two hundred miles to view them, he was kindly served at a well, on the way, by a farmer’s girl, who cheerfully drew the bucket from the well and ran for a glass, that he, a dusty, thirsty stranger, might drink without further fatigue; and in his later years he records the fact in his book, with the sweetest expressions of thankfulness. So when he arrived at Frankfort, and was kindly received and entertained by Mr. Richard S. Willis, the American consul, brother of Bayard’s old friend, Nathaniel P. Willis, he sits down at once, and in his letters to his friends, and in his public correspondence, he speaks of the generosity and thoughtfulness of his old friend, and the hospitable and cultured characteristics of his new friend. They were noble friends, who made for him a home at their fireside in Frankfort, and deserve the thanks of every admirer of Bayard Taylor. His thanks they had throughout a long life, and not only thanks, but grateful deeds.

It was Bayard’s purpose to go to Heidelberg, with his cousin, and give himself to close study, at the University, or with private tutors; but just how he was going to obtain the means to pay his expenses was something of an enigma. It may be that his good fortune in the outset made him too confident and careless in regard to other undertakings. At all events, his stay in Heidelberg was much shorter than he had at first intended that it should be, and his studies were much more broken and superficial than his letters show he thought they would be. He was not constituted for close, hard, metaphysical study, and made but little attempts in that direction, after he arrived at Heidelberg. He loved the grand old Castle better than the whittled benches of the University. He enjoyed the Kaisersthul and the lesser mountains, far more than the monotonous recital of German theories. The river Neckar called him in its murmurs, the clouds beckoned to him as they flew over the Heligen Berg, the wind called for him as it sighed around the vineyards of Ziegelhausen, and all thoughts of private, quiet study fled at the summons. So he climbed the mountains. It was always a passion with him to gain an altitude as high as possible, and look out upon the world. He tells how, when a boy, he ventured out of a chamber window in the old farm-house at Kennett, and seeing a row of slats which the carpenters had used for steps in ascending the roof, he sallied forth, and there astride of the roof, gained his first view of a landscape. He said afterward, that the roof appeared to be so high and the view so extensive, that he imagined he could see Niagara Falls. Whether this inclination to climb up came to him through the stories of his old Swiss nurse, whose bed-time stories were of the mighty Alps and their towering cones, or whether it was an hereditary trait in his nature, none may be able to decide. He was certainly prone to go upwards, and had a tendency, for horizontal motion equally as strong. He would not remain stationary; hence, at Heidelberg, he inspected every nook and crevice of the picturesque old Castle, crouched through its conduits, rapped its ponderous tun, scaled its roofless and crumbling walls, rushed into the recesses of the adjacent thickets, and tested the celebrated beer at the students’ resorts. He joined excursion parties which visited the neighboring mountains, and after he had been there a month, he knew the fields, rocks, trees, valleys, dells, and peaks, as well as a native, and appears to have loved them with a patriotic regard almost equal to the eldest burgher.

CHAPTER X.

Study in Frankfort.—Lack of Money.—Different Effect of Want on Travellers.—Bayard’s Privations.—Again sets out on Foot.—Visit to the Hartz Mountains.—The Brocken.—Scenes in “Faust.”—Locality in Literature.—The Battle-field at Leipsic.—Auerbach’s Cellar.

For the purposes of this work, an outline of Bayard’s travels is all that can be attempted; except where some remarkable incident occurred that had an unusual influence on his subsequent life. Leaving Heidelberg in the latter part of October (1844), Bayard walked through the Odenwald to Frankfort, where he could pursue his study of the German language, and observe the customs and characteristics of the people to better advantage and at a less expense. In attempting to see Europe on such a limited allowance of money, he necessarily met with many inconveniences and privations. His sufferings were at times most intense. He knew what it was to fast for whole days; he felt the pains of blistered bare feet. He was exposed to the severest storms of summer and winter; he was familiar with the homes of beggary and the hard, swarming beds of third-class taverns. He must have suffered beyond his own estimate, for, as he so well says, the pains of travel are soon forgotten and the pleasures vividly remembered. There was a youthful abandon in his almost reckless adventures which startles the reader of his tours. But yet the pains he felt so keenly, the dangers he encountered so frequently, did not seem to abate his enthusiasm for the great works and beautiful scenes which Europe exhibits. To find ourselves in a strange city, where no one speaks our native language; where it is not possible that any person can know us or any of our friends; without money, or food, or work, is one of the most disheartening situations that can be imagined. Yet such an experience came often to Bayard. It would seem as if, on some occasions, he ran into such difficulties needlessly and for very wantonness. Yet, as was sometimes the experience of the writer, and from one of which dangerous situations Mr. Taylor generously rescued him, there somehow opens a way out from such ventures, which is found on the very verge of starvation and despair. But the trait of character, which in Bayard commanded such respect, was something so unusual, that his daring example cannot be safely followed by the multitude. It is far better to have a supply of money for the necessary expenses of travel in Europe or Asia, than to run risks for the sake of the romance which Bayard found in such straits. To many tourists, even the parks of Homburg, the castle of Drachenfels, or the palace of the Vatican, would become insignificant baubles before the stronger demands of the body for food and raiment. But seldom did any fatigue or annoyance or loss, abate his wonderful zeal in his search for the poetical, the strange, the historical, and the beautiful. Some of his most exquisite descriptions of art or nature, were written from notes made when his stomach was empty and his limbs chilled with wet and cold. Such young men are few; and for one with less perseverance, endurance, or genius to attempt such things on such a scale, would be to meet with disheartening failure.

Of his life in Frankfort, during the winter of 1845, he often speaks with great satisfaction. He made excellent progress in the language, and in that understanding of the habits of the people which Mr. Greeley had so pointedly urged upon him as an ambitious aspirant for the favors of the “Tribune.” He comes out of that study a matured thinker. His descriptions assume a more thoughtful tone. His sympathies are more often awakened for the people, and he sees as a man sees, and less juvenile are all his undertakings and communications. He there acquired a love of German poetry, and became acquainted with many of the noted men of Frankfort. He visited the aged Mendelssohn, and tells with charming simplicity how he was received by the composer of “St. Paul” and “Elijah.” Thus introduced to German literature, art, and music, he entered again upon his travels at the opening of spring, with new and increasing appreciativeness.

Again, on foot, he went into the untried way of Europe. His first attraction was for the Hartz Mountains, so intimately connected with Goethe’s “Faust,” with which Bayard was already in love, and which he afterwards translated in a masterly manner. So he went through Friedberg and Giessen, into Hesse-Cassel, making the acquaintance of peasants and merchants on his way, and moralizing upon the curious circumstance that the descendants of the Hessians, who fought so doggedly at Brandywine, should receive so hospitably the descendant of those who filled the “plains of Trenton with the short Hessian graves.” Thence by Münden, Göttingen and Osterode, enduring sickening fatigues and dangerous exposure, he reached the Brocken mountain, where, through thickets, rocks, chasms, snow and cold, he at last rested in a cottage at its summit, amid the associations awakened by the weird tales of witches and the superstitious explanations of that singular illusion,—the “Spectre of the Brocken.” If he had any “wish” on that “Walpurgis night,” which he passed on the highest mountain of the Hartz range, it was probably to be relieved of the tortures which his weak frame endured, and from which the physician had failed to relieve him. It would not be surprising if he recited from “Faust” the words of scene IV.:—

“Through some familiar tone, retrieving

My thoughts from torment, led me on,

And sweet, clear echoes came, deceiving

A faith bequeathed from childhood’s dawn,

Yet now I curse whate’er entices

And snares the soul with visions vain;

With dazzling cheats and dear devices

Confines it in this cave of pain!

Cursed be, at once, the high ambition.

Wherewith the mind itself deludes!

Cursed be the glare of apparition,

That on the finer sense intrudes.”

We cannot forbear to add another quotation from the same Act, so illustrative is it of Bayard’s note-taking life:—

“No need to tell me twice to do it!

I think, how useful ’tis to write;

For what one has in black and white,

One carries home and then goes through it.”

His visit to the Brocken was one of the most fascinating trips of his whole pedestrian tour, notwithstanding his narrow escape from death in the snow, and from destruction by falling into the partially concealed caves that beset his way to the summit. He mentioned long afterward the view he had from the summit-house, through the rifts in the clouds, of the plains and cities of Germany. Thirty cities and several hundred villages lay within sight, and all of them more or less closely interwoven with the literature of Germany. The plains of Brunswick and Magdeburg stretch away for seventy miles, with all the various shadings of green intermingled with the sparkling silver of stream and lake. It is a scene so grand that no pen could portray its sublimity and no tongue accurately convey an idea of its varied beauty. With that romantic persistency which no amount of fatigue overcame, Bayard descended the mountain by that rugged and nerve-shaking path up which Faust was said to have ascended with Mephistopheles (scene XXI. of Taylor’s translation) who says:—

“How sadly rises, incomplete and ruddy,

The moon’s lone disk, with its belated glow,

And lights so dimly, that, as one advances,

At every step one strikes a rock or tree!

Let us, then, use a Jack-o’-Lantern’s glances:

I see one yonder, burning merrily.

Ho, there! my friend! I’ll levy thine attendance:

Why waste so vainly thy resplendence?

Be kind enough to light us up the steep.”

After which Faust, in a musing mood, looks down from the Brocken heights and replies:—

“How strangely glimmers through the hollows

A dreary light, like that of dawn!

Its exhalation tracks and follows

The deepest gorges, faint and wan.

Here steam, there rolling vapor sweepeth;

Here burns the glow through film and haze:

Now like a tender thread it creepeth,

Now like a fountain leaps and plays.

Here winds away, and in a hundred

Divided veins the valley braids:

There in a corner pressed and sundered,

Itself detaches, spreads and fades.

Here gush the sparkles incandescent

Like scattered showers of golden sand;—

But, see! in all their height at present,

The rocky ramparts blazing stand.”

As Bayard leaped and stumbled down the rocky declivity into the narrow gorge that there divides the mountains to give an outlet for the river Bode, the very difficulties bound him closer to Goethe’s writings. He felt again how important a thing it is in literature to connect it by patriotic links with some actual landscape, and how much more vivid and permanent are the lessons an author would teach when the reader visits the mountains, plains, cities, buildings, and people mentioned in books of classic worth. Thus learning and growing the young traveller plodded on from inn to inn and village to village.

Leipsic, which he reached a day or two after leaving the Brocken, was a place of great interest to Bayard, as it is in fact to all travellers. But the interest in any city or country visited by a tourist depends so much upon his previous reading, and the taste and opportunities for reading are so diverse, that it seldom happens that any two persons in the same party enjoy the same scene with equal satisfaction. Bayard had read of Leipsic and Dresden in his boyhood when other boys were catching rabbits or playing ball, and as when he sees the great citadel at Magdeburg which once held Baron Trenck a prisoner, so when at Leipsic he looks over the field where Blucher and Schwartzenberg met Napoleon, he is startled with the vividness of the pictures in his imagination. Hundreds of thousands rushing to combat and scattering in retreat while smoke rolls upward from hundreds of cannon and the streams are choked with piles of bloody dead!

There too was Auerbach’s Cellar, in which Goethe’s Faust and Mephistopheles are so humorously placed. There was the same drinking-saloon, there the descendant of the old bar-keeper, and there the same characteristic crowd of loafers, as when Faust and Mephistopheles drank there, and when amid songs and jokes, the latter drew all kinds of wine from the gimlet holes in the leaf of the old wooden table. Bayard’s estimate of the people appears to have confirmed that of Mephistopheles who says (scene V.):—

“Before all else I bring thee hither

Where boon companions meet together,

To let thee see how smooth life runs away.

Here, for the folk, each day’s a holiday:

With little wit, and ease to suit them,

They whirl in narrow, circling trails,

Like kittens playing with their tails:

And if no headache persecute them,

So long the host may credit give,

They merrily and careless live.”