Bayard Taylor, in the ’60’s and ’70’s, was among the best known of our men of letters. Typical American in enterprise and resource, he gave most of his life to foreign lands and letters. Views Afoot (1846), which has sent across the Atlantic hundreds of young Americans like him in large ambition and small purse, was the first of a series extending through his life. For a really Viking spirit of travel urged him over the habitable globe, from Africa to Iceland, from California to Japan. The store of observations first made newspaper correspondence. His profession was journalism. Some of the material was subsequently cast in lectures; most of it appeared finally in books. Thus his trip across the world (1851–1853) to join Perry furnished, first, copy for the New York “Tribune,” then many popular lectures, and finally The Lands of the Saracen (1854) and A Visit to India, China and Japan (1855). His wide knowledge of foreign societies and his intimate acquaintance with Germany brought him naturally into public life as minister to Berlin (1877–1878).

Admirable journalist, Taylor was not content with journalism. In 1863 at Gotha, where he had found a wife in 1857, he was deep in the study of Goethe. From 1868–1870, after intervening travels, he gave himself to the translation of “Faust.” Lecturing then at Cornell as Professor of German Literature, he went back to Germany to pursue Goethe still further at Weimar. So his knowledge of Scandinavia was of the literature as well as of the land.

His great ambition, and doubtless his measure of success, was poetry. From his youthful ventures in Philadelphia almost to the day of his death he published verse; and the recognition of the public appears in the choice of him to read the Harvard Φ Β Κ poem in 1850 and the National Ode at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Since his death this part of his work has been so far slighted that there is some need of recalling his consistently high aim and the technical mastery evinced by performances so widely different as the delicious parodies of The Echo Club and the noble rendering of “Faust.” No criticism of Taylor as a poet should obscure the fact that his “Faust” takes rank with the few great verse translations.

Taylor’s versatility achieved also a lesser, but still a considerable, success in novels and tales. The interest aroused by the lively opening of Who Was She? is sustained with no little art. Perhaps the import would be more poignant if it were less dangerously near to abstract proposition; but it is very human.