Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 5

colors and proportions it wore to his eyes.
He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was
not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic or
the public.
He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors at
the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long
have rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them
through one of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all
our lives; but he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was
always attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to
make his scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and
training. I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a
book in his hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author,

and he said he was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a
patriarchal age to me of the early thirties!
I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in the
day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world." Yea, that made it worth while, I
consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As sure as I am of
this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid
him in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was
one of the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of
all our Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature
by his appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no
one more fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so
distinguished to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the
service he had done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently,
as a man could be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last
drop the many cups of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I
believe these farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with
work and excitement, were notably harmful to him, and helped to
hasten his end. Some of us who were near of friendship went down to
see him off when he sailed, as the dismal and futile wont of friends is;
and I recall the kind, great fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad
flowers that heaped the tables, saying good-by to one after another, and
smiling fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of
course, and an odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission,
till the warning bell chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with
what was left of his life.

IV
I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even
on my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly
drew my eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis

was not, was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I
distinguished between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I
suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston,
wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I
think him now, one of the first in our whole American province of the
republic of letters, in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing
state, whether we regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it
lustre. Lowell was then in perfect command of those varied forces
which will long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first among
our literary men, and master in more kinds than any other American.
Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-wide fame, and in the
ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not to know decay while life
endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular darkness which had
so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a lambent star of
poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the
unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to,
whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and still
leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately returned from his
long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last of the incomparable
romances which the world was to have perfect from his hand.