The home at Kennett known as ‘Cedarcroft’ was built in 1859–60. Taylor lavished on it both money and affection; and while for a few years it gave him a deal of happiness, it proved in the end a burden he could ill afford to carry.
Robust and vigorous though he seemed in middle life, Taylor by unremitting activity had sapped his powers. He gave no evidence of declining literary ambition, but at fifty he was worn out by overwork. A notable recognition of his worth came to him in 1878, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Germany. He was not to enjoy the honor for long. In May, 1878, he took up the duties of his office, and on the fifteenth of the following December he died while sitting in his armchair in his library.
II
HIS CHARACTER
Ambition was a ruling motive in Taylor’s life. Yet there has seldom been an ambition which, albeit as consuming as fire, was at the same time so free from selfish and ignoble elements.
Taylor aspired to fame through cultivation of the art of poesy. This was the real object of his life. To gain this object he toiled unceasingly and made innumerable sacrifices. Baffled in the attempt to reach his ideal, he was a little comforted when he could persuade himself that he had not fallen completely short of it. And there was exceeding great reward in the knowledge that if wide recognition as a poet was denied him, his friends, Whittier, Longfellow, Stoddard, Boker, and Aldrich, knew for what he was striving and commended him in no uncertain tones.
Whittier described Taylor as one who loved ‘old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood’s dreams in sight.’ Life was intensely interesting to Taylor. Although the zest of travel disappeared and his large experience of the ways of men had had its customary disillusioning effect, he never really lost his youthful enthusiasm. And it is touching to find in his private correspondence the repeated proofs of how inexhaustible was his fund of hope and of courage, and how quick he was to recover after real or fancied defeat.
Notwithstanding his successes, and he had his share of the good things of life,—contemporary reputation, money of his own earning, and friends,—Bayard Taylor remains, with all his manly qualities, a somewhat pathetic figure in American letters. He led a restless and turbulent mental existence, and died the victim of ambition and overwork.
III
THE ARTIST
Taylor has been pronounced the most skilful of our metrists after Longfellow. One illustration only can be given of his interest in the mechanism of verse, and that is his poetic romance The Picture of St. John. The poem was not published until sixteen years after its first conception. Possibly its growth was a little retarded by the structural peculiarities.
The poem contains three hundred and fifty-five eight-line stanzas (iambic pentameter) grouped into four books. The ‘ottava rima’ was chosen as ‘better adapted for the purposes of a romantic epic than either the Spenserian stanza[57] or the heroic couplet.’ But the question with the poet was,—how to avoid the ‘uniform sweetness’ of a regular stanza while obtaining the ‘proper compactness and strength of rhythm’ which (in his belief) only a stanza could give. His device was to allow himself freedom of rhyme within the stanza, and this ‘not to escape the laws which Poetry imposes,’ but rather to impose a different law in the hope that the form would ‘more readily reflect the varying moods.’ When finally the poem was finished Taylor found that the three hundred and fifty-five stanzas contained ‘more than seventy variations in the order of rhyme.’