p. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his
_Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel
written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and
his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California,
India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and
the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His
head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for
the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many
volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations,
and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the
magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from
_Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and
home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old
Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat
mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four
days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince
Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a
great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for
learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his
favorite books. From his facility, his openness to external
impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at
once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something
"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's
work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of
glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not
unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_, for
example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_:

"From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry;
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die."

The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets
made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876,
contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great
translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close
reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of Am