s the quality of permanency. His
personality was a picturesque and fascinating one and his life
interesting and romantic.

A poor boy, burning with the itch to write and especially to travel; at
the age of nineteen making his way to England, and from there to
Germany; spending two years in Europe, enduring hardships, living with
the common people; and finally returning home to find that his letters
to the newspapers had been read with interest and had won a considerable
audience--these were the first steps in his struggle for recognition. He
collected his letters into a book called "Views Afoot," which at once
became widely popular, and his reputation was made.

But it was a reputation as a reporter and traveller, and Taylor, much as
he despised it, was never able to get away from it. He became, perforce,
a sort of official traveller for the American people, journeyed in
California, in the Orient, in Russia, Lapland--in most of the
out-of-the-way corners of the world--and his books of travel were
uniformly interesting and successful. They do not attract to-day, not,
as Park Benjamin put it, because Taylor travelled more and saw less than
any other man who ever lived, but because they lack the charm of style,
depth of thought, and keenness of observation which the present
generation has come to expect.

During all this time, Taylor was struggling with pathetic earnestness
for recognition as a novelist and poet, but with poor measure of
success. His novels were crude and amateurish, and have long since
become negligible; but his verse is somewhat more important. His travels
in the East furnished him material for his "Poems of the Orient," which
represent him at his best.

His ambition, however, was to write a great epic; but for this he lacked
both intellectual and emotional equipment, and his attempts in this
field were virtual failures. These failures were to him most tragic; not
only that, but he found himself financially embarrassed, and was forced
to turn to such hack work as the writing of school histories in order to
gain a livelihood. But his friends, of whom he had always a wide circle,
secured him the mission to Germany, and he entered on his duties in high
spirits--only to die suddenly one morning while sitting in his library
at Berlin. A generous, impulsive and warm-hearted man, Bayard Taylor
will be remembered for what he was, rather than for what he did.

Two other poets, whose deaths occurred not many