his heart. He has written fresh and vital verse on outdoor themes, published in a volume called Bird and Bough. Burroughs is also a literary critic of remarkable sanity and penetration: Thoreau, Emerson, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Walt Whitman, are his masters; from them he learned how to write with clearness and vigor and how to keep his eye on the object. In his literary essays, originally contributed to the magazines and later published as Indoor Studies and Literary Values, he talks with great good sense and with artistic discrimination of style, on the relation of literature to life and other matters in the field of appreciative criticism. He is an essayist of open mind and broad sympathies, with a suggestive style which has the flavor of the outdoors. THE POETS Bayard Taylor (1825-1878).—Bayard Taylor, poet, traveler, and novelist, was born at Kennett Square, Chester county, Pennsylvania, of Quaker and German ancestry; attended the local schools, and was at seventeen apprenticed to a printer; indulging his passion for travel, he made long journeys in Europe and the Orient as correspondent of New York papers, and soon after the publication of Views Afoot in 1846 he became a regular contributor to the New York Tribune. Though spending much time in travel at home and abroad, he had an ambition to own land and a fine mansion; accordingly, just after his marriage in 1857 to a German lady he bought the old Taylor homestead and much additional land and built Cedarcroft, a princely home for a man of letters. Here he studied several languages and wrote many of his works. In 1869 he was appointed lecturer on German literature in Cornell University, and in 1878 was sent as United States minister to Germany, but died a few months after his arrival at Berlin. The works of Bayard Taylor, who ranks with Lowell and Holmes in versatility, include several volumes of poems, eleven volumes of travels, and four novels. He preferred to be considered a poet, and in spirit he was essentially poetic. Some of his most notable productions in verse are Poems of the Orient (1854), lyrics of sensuous beauty, of which the "Bedouin Song" is the best known; The Poet's Journal (1862), another collection of short poems; the long poems, Lars: a Pastoral of Norway, The Prophet, The Masque of the Gods, Prince Deukalion, -the last three dramatic pieces; Home Pastorals and Ballads, the Gettysburg Ode, and the Centennial Ode (1876). The "Bedouin Song," especially the concluding refrain in each stanza, is familiar to readers of American verse: From the desert I come to thee, On a stallion shod with fire; And the midnight hears my cry: I love thee! I love but thee! With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold! Look from thy window and see My passion and my pain! I lie on the sands below, And I faint in thy disdain. Let the night-winds touch thy brow With the heat of my burning sigh, And melt thee to hear the vow Of a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold! My steps are nightly driven, By the fever in my breast, To hear from thy lattice breathed The word that shall give me rest. Open the door of thy heart, The love that shall fade no more Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold! The poetic work of Bayard Taylor that seems likely to live the longest is his translation of Goethe's Faust (1870) in the original meters. He knew the German language well, he had a wide and sympathetic acquaintance with German literature, and he succeeded in making a translation which holds its own as the best version in English of Goethe's great poem. In his own verse, particularly in his lyrics, Taylor shows delicate and finished craftsmanship, but there is a lack of simplicity and spontaneity; there are unmistakable echoes of Shelley and Tennyson, without the compelling charm of those masters. Still, in view both of the variety of his verse and the artistic finish of some of it, he will be remembered as a true poet, if not as a great one. Among Bayard Taylor's voluminous prose works the Views Afoot (1846) may safely be called his best. He was an indefatigable traveler, he had an interesting personality, he had imagination, and he had a graphic style. One may take up these books of travel to-day and not be disappointed, so fresh and vital are the touches, so human is the point of view of the tramp-author in his journeyings through many lands. But the novels are distinctly disappointing: Hannah Thurston deals with the various isms of the middle of the nineteenth centuryspiritualism, vegetarianism, teetotalism, and the like,-and is accordingly a kind of satire on reformers; The Story of Kennett centers about the author's old home and is a pleasing picture of familiar people and background, with an element of autobiography. These are agreeable books, but they do not impress the reader so favorably as Taylor's poems and travels. His Life.-Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, of English and Dutch ancestry. His father, a carpenter and farmer, was also named Walter, and the son, to distinguish him from his father, came to be known as Walt. The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was four years old, and in and around Brooklyn, with frequent long stays in the country, he spent much of the first forty years of his life. He attended the public schools of Brooklyn, and at the age of fourteen learned to set type. For many years after this he worked on newspapers in New York and Brooklyn as typesetter, contributor, and editor, being for a year editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. Meanwhile he had become thoroughly acquainted with New York City and its environs; he knew the omnibus drivers on Broadway, with whom he loved to ride; he was fond of the opera and the theater; he delighted in bathing off Coney Island beach and in skating on the Long Island bays; he would race up and down the hard sand, he says, declaiming Homer and Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour. During one or two winters he taught school, and by 1849 he had written a number of pieces in prose and verse. That year he left Brooklyn for a leisurely trip through the Middle States, down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where he worked for a time on the editorial staff of the Daily Crescent; then he gave up his position and slowly plodded his way northward, up the Mississippi, by way of the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, Southern Canada, and down the Hudson to New York. He had made in all a journey of about eight thousand miles and gained valuable experience. He now returned to his old work of editing and printing; he also engaged with his father in his old business of building and selling houses in Brooklyn. He had now decided, however, to devote himself mainly to writing the poetry of Democracy, having experienced a sort of conversion from things material to concerns literary and patriotic. He accordingly composed and printed in 1855 his first edition of representative poems, Leaves of Grass, giving only so much time to his industrial occupations as was necessary for a simple support. In 1862 Whitman's brother was wounded in the first battle of Fredericksburg, and the poet went South to nurse him. Thus began his long service as an army and hospital attendant, which continued until the army hospitals at Washington were closed. These years of ministration in the tents and hospitals of the Union army constitute the most interesting and admirable period in Whitman's life. He was not so much a regular nurse as a visitor and comforter of the sick and wounded, bringing good cheer and doing various little services for the soldiers, though he dressed many wounds and watched by the dying. After the war he was appointed to a clerkship in the Interior Department at Washington; from this he was removed because of objection to certain coarse passages in his Leaves of Grass, but was soon given a clerkship in the office of the Attorney-General. This position he held until 1873, when a stroke of paralysis compelled him to give up regular work. He retired to Camden, New Jersey, where his brother was living, and there as a semi-invalid he spent the rest of his long life, supported partly by the meager income from his books and partly by the gifts of admiring friends. He died March 26, 1892, and was buried in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden. His Personality. In his earlier life Walt Whitman seems to have been a man of boundless vitality, full of interest in things and people around him. His health was good and the mere joy of living filled his whole being. He freely associated with all sorts and conditions of men-laborers, omnibus drivers, street-car conductors, ferry-boat pilots, tramps, farm hands, and the motley city crowds. He loved humanity not simply |