Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor Part 15

[NOTE.--The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Harper & Brothers for permission to use extracts from "Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton," and to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to use extracts from the Poetical Works of Lowell.]

THE STORY OF BAYARD TAYLOR

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAYARD TAYLOR.]

BAYARD TAYLOR

CHAPTER I

HIS BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

Bayard Taylor was born in the country village of Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jan. 11, 1825, "the year when the first locomotive successfully performed its trial trip. I am, therefore," he says, "just as old as the railroad." He was descended from Robert Taylor, a rich Friend, or Quaker, who had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1681, and settled near Brandywine Creek. Bayard's grandfather married a Lutheran of pure German blood, and on that account was expelled from the Society of Friends, which at that time had very strict rules regarding the marriage of its members. Although the family still used the peculiar speech of the Quakers, and clung to the Quaker principles of peace and order, none of them ever returned to the society.

When Bayard was four years old, the family moved to a farm about a mile from the village. There they lived, until, years afterward, the successful traveler and poet bought an estate near by and built a magnificent house upon it, into which he received his father and mother and brothers and sisters, with that open-hearted generosity and hospitality which was so much a part of his nature.

He was the fourth child of his parents; but the three older children had died in infancy, and he remained as the eldest of the family.

Chester County, Pennsylvania, has always been a rich farming region, peopled by solid, well-to-do farmers, many of whom are Quakers. Here the northern elms toss their arms to the southern cypresses, as the poet has it; the two climates seem to meet and mingle, in a sort of calm, neutral zone, and the vegetation of the North is united with the vegetation of the South, to produce a peculiar richness and variety.

In such surroundings the boy grew up, a farmer's lad, and learned that love of nature which was a part of his being till the day he died.

"The child," says he, "that has tumbled into a newly plowed furrow never forgets the smell of the fresh earth.... Almost my first recollection is of a swamp, into which I went barelegged at morning, and out of which I came, when driven by hunger, with long stockings of black mud, and a mask of the same. If the child was missed from the house, the first thing that suggested itself was to climb upon a mound which overlooked the swamp. Somewhere among the tufts of rushes and the bladed leaves of the calamus, a little brown ball was sure to be seen moving, now dipping out of sight, now rising again, like a bit of drift on the rippling green. It was my head. The treasures I there collected were black terrapins with orange spots, baby frogs the size of a chestnut, thrush's eggs, and stems of purple phlox."

He loved his home with a pa.s.sionate intensity; but he also had yearnings for the unknown world beyond the horizon. "I remember," says he, "as distinctly as if it were yesterday the first time this pa.s.sion was gratified. Looking out of the garret window, on a bright May morning, I discovered a row of slats which had been nailed over the s.h.i.+ngles for the convenience of the carpenters in roofing the house, and had not been removed. Here was, at least, a chance to reach the comb of the steep roof, and take my first look abroad into the world!

Not without some trepidation I ventured out, and was soon seated astride of the sharp ridge. Unknown forests, new fields and houses, appeared to my triumphant view. The prospect, though it did not extend more than four miles in any direction, was boundless. Away in the northwest, glimmering through the trees, was a white object, probably the front of a distant barn; but I shouted to the astonished servant girl, who had just discovered me from the garden below, 'I see the Falls of Niagara!'"

He was a sensitive child and had a horror of dirty hands, "and," says he, "my first employments--picking stones and weeding corn--were rather a torture to this superfine taste." In his mother, however, he had a friend who understood and protected him. So his life on the farm was as happy as it well could be, in spite of its roughness. He himself has described it with a zest which no one else could lend it.

"Almost every field had its walnut tree, melons were planted among the corn, and the meadow which lay between never exhausted its store of wonders. Besides, there were eggs to hide at Easter; cherries and strawberries in May; fruit all summer; fis.h.i.+ng parties by torchlight; lobelia and sumac to be gathered, dried and sold for pocket money; and in the fall, chestnuts, persimmons, wild grapes, cider, and the grand butchering after frost came, so that all the pleasures I knew were incidental to a farmer's life. The books I read came from the village library, and the task of helping to 'fodder' on the dark winter evenings was lightened by the antic.i.p.ation of sitting down to 'Gibbon's Rome' or 'Thaddeus of Warsaw' afterwards."

He was fond of reading, and especially fond of poetry, and his wife in her biography says: "In the evening after he had gone to bed, his mother would hear him repeating poem after poem to his brother, who slept in the same room with him."

CHAPTER II

SCHOOL LIFE

Bayard had the advantage of regular attendance at the country schools near his father's home, with two or three years at the local academy; but his father could not afford to send him to college. He enjoyed his school life, and in after years wrote to one of his early Quaker teachers thus:

"I have never forgotten the days I spent in the little log schoolhouse and the chestnut grove behind it, and I have always thought that some of the poetry I then copied from thy ma.n.u.script books has kept an influence over all my life since. There was one verse in particular which has cheered and encouraged me a thousand times when prospects seemed rather gloomy. It ran thus:

'O, why should we seek to antic.i.p.ate sorrow By throwing the flowers of the present away, And gathering the dark-rolling, cloudy to-morrow To darken the generous sun of to-day?'

Thou seest I have good reason to remember those old times, and to be grateful to thee for encouraging instead of checking the first developments of my mind."

You may easily guess from this letter that Bayard's school life was very sedate and Quakerish. Nearly all the people in Kennett Square were Quakers, and though Bayard's father and mother were not, they had all the Quaker habits. Among other things, he was taught the wickedness of all kinds of swearing. His mother "talked so earnestly on this point that his mind became full of it; his observation and imagination were centered upon oaths, until at last he was so fascinated that he became filled with an uncontrollable desire to swear. So he went out into a field, beyond hearing, and there delivered himself of all the oaths he had ever heard or could invent, and in as loud a voice as possible." After this he felt quite satisfied to swear no more.

When Bayard was about twelve years old, his father was elected sheriff of the county and went to live at West Chester for three years. The young lad was sent to Bolmar's Academy at that place; and when the family went back to the farm he was sent to the academy at Unionville, three or four miles from his home. Here, at the age of sixteen, he finished his regular schooling. During the last two years he studied Latin and French, and during the last year Spanish. His Latin and French he continued by private study for three years longer.

He now went back to work on the farm for a season, and, as he says, "first felt the delight and refreshment of labor in the open air. I was then able to take the plow handle, and I still remember the pride I felt when my furrows were p.r.o.nounced even and well turned. Although it was already decided that I should not make farming the business of my life, I thrust into my plans a slender wedge of hope that I might one day own a bit of ground, for the luxury of having, if not the profit of cultivating, it. The aroma of the sweet soil had tinctured my blood; the black mud of the swamp still stuck to my feet."

After a few weeks of farm life he was apprenticed to a printer in West Chester for a term of four years.

CHAPTER III

HIS FIRST POEM

It is the will and the spirit that makes every life seem happy or the reverse. If Bayard Taylor had remained a farmer in Kennett Square all his life, he would not have looked back on his early experiences with so much pleasure as he did. Indeed, we may safely say that he would not have liked his life so well at the time had it not been for his buoyant and hopeful nature, which made him feel that he was destined for higher and better things, for a world beyond the horizon.

Already he was a poet, with all a poet's aspirations and eagerness. A year before he left the academy his first printed poem appeared in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ of Philadelphia. It is not wonderful as poetry. Yet we read it with interest, because it shows so plainly the earnest and ambitious, yet cheerful, nature of the boy. He did not merely sit and hope; he was determined to _win his way_. It is ent.i.tled, "Soliloquy of a Young Poet."

A dream!--a fleeting dream!

Childhood has pa.s.sed, with all its joy and song, And my life's frail bark on youth's impetuous stream Is swiftly borne along.

High hopes spring up within; Hopes of the future--thoughts of glory--fame, Which prompt my mind to toil, and bid me win That dream--a deathless name.

I know it all is vain, That earthly honors ever must decay, That all the laurels bought by toil and pain Must pa.s.s with earth away.

But still my spirit high, Longing for fame won by the immortal mind-- On fancy's pinion fain would scale the sky, And leave dull earth behind.

Yes, I would write my name With the star's burning ray on heaven's broad scroll, That I might still the restless thirst for fame Which fills my soul.

Bayard Taylor was not a great genius, and he did not succeed in winning quite all of that high fame for which he struggled throughout his life. He never expected to have earth's blessings showered upon him without working for them; and the fact that he failed somewhat in his highest ambition--to be a far-famed poet--makes his life seem nearer to our own. We call him a great man because he did well what came to him to do, working hard all his life. In this we can all follow his example.

CHAPTER IV

SELF-EDUCATION AND AMBITION

"The Village Record" (to the proprietor of which Bayard was apprenticed) was printed upon an old-fas.h.i.+oned hand press, and it was the business of the apprentices to set the type, help make up the paper, pull the forms, and send the weekly issues off to the subscribers.

The mechanical work was soon learned, and the young apprentice found considerable time for reading. He now began that work of self-education which he carried on through his whole life. Already, before he left the academy, he had become acquainted with the works of Charles d.i.c.kens, and had secured the great man's autograph. "I went to the Academy," says he, "where I received a letter that had come on Sat.u.r.day. It was from Hartford; I knew instantly it was from d.i.c.kens.