A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway. Charles Fenno Hoffman, who occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for his services on the Tribune, as Greeley did not believe in high salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wrote Kubleh and Ariel in the Cloven Pine, and, too, the song that won for him a prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W. Griswold, author of Poets and Poetry of America, Prose Writers of America, and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made one of the party at this time, when his tragedy, Calaynos, was being acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England. Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then enthusiastically putting the finishing touches to St. Leger.
These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's career. Many other places in the city are associated with him, one a house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote among other things the Poems of the Orient. His last city home was at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wrote Deukalion, and from there he started out, after being dined and fêted, on his mission as United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in Berlin.
Chapter XI
Two Famous Meeting-Places
LOOKING backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways.
There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half on the land, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to how it ever came by the flowery half of its name.
Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town—beyond the town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis.
But of all the points of interest none comes fresher to the mind than Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day, with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homes or a business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and respect. They were gifted men with great power of intellect, who spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew with most of them, they gathered there.
It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the tradition runs, soon after he started the Saturday Press in 1858, that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die, and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that the members of the staff of the Saturday Press did more than any one else to give it a name that has lived through the years.