The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor

by Russell H. Conwell

The steamer from Lubec was a rough, uncouth, inconvenient craft, and the sea-sick voyage which Mr. Taylor and his friend made to Stockholm was not an auspicious beginning for a tour so long and so dangerous. But he relapsed into his old habit, acquired in Asia, of regarding no delay with surprise or impatience, and refusing to feel certain of anything until he possessed it; and as neither carelessness, neglect, lack of sleep or food was allowed to disturb him, he made the company cheerful under the most distressing circumstances.

LAZARETTO CHRISTIANSAND.

On his arrival in Stockholm he could not speak a word of the language, and had to depend mostly upon his own common-sense in the selection of an outfit. But his quick ear and tractile tongue soon caught up words and phrases, the meaning of which he learned by their effect when spoken, and when he started northward he was able to ask for nearly everything he needed in the native language. Of his ride from town to town, by diligence and by lumbering sleighs, along the shores of the Bothnian Gulf, we cannot give any extended account, and it can easily be found by any reader who did not peruse it at the time of its publication. But it answers our purpose to note how he appeared and what he suffered. It was a terrible ride. Day after day and night after night he pushed on, losing many meals, and often without sleep, in a temperature creeping downward far below zero, and the sun sinking lower and lower on the southern horizon. Frequently overturned in the snow, his beard and hair a mass of solid ice, his eyelids frozen together, his nose frost-bitten, his hands and feet momentarily in danger of freezing, he kept heroically on his course, allowing no rumors of unendurable cold or impassable mountains, of snow ahead to drive him from his purpose. With a wisdom that saved his life, he fell with perfect abandon into the habits of Swedes, Finns, and Lapps, as he in turn found himself in their country and society, eating what they ate, and wearing such skins as they wore, and following their habits, excepting their dirt and their promiscuous arrangements for sleeping. Around the gulf to Tornea, and thence to Muoniovara, he sped northward with a haste which astonished the natives, and a shortness of time which has surprised many travellers who have followed him on that difficult route. He made such acquaintances and such friends on his way northward that they wished him God-speed as he passed on, and welcomed him in a royal manner on his return. On the borders of Lapland he took his first lessons in reindeer-driving, and a most amusing experience he had of it. He could not at first balance himself in the narrow boat which was built for snow navigation, and he was frequently overturned in fathomless piles of snow; and as he did not fully understand how to check the speed of the animal, he flew like the wind over drifts, hollows, and around corners with a most dangerous speed. Many men would have given up the task, after being frozen, kicked, bruised, and pulled half out of joint by the first trial. But such experiences were regarded by him as a joke, and laughing over past mishaps, he tried again and again, until he could guide a deer and balance himself in the narrow pulk as skilfully as the Lapps themselves. He was not a traveller who sought luxury and ease. He wished to sound all the shoals and depths of local experiences. Some of the trials were very hazardous, and make one’s hair rise as he reads of them. Yet Mr. Taylor appears to have put a blind trust in fate and went boldly on. In all these visits and undertakings he forgot not his Muse, and repeated “Afraja” and the “Arctic Lover” when the snow blew too furiously or the cold was too far below zero to engage in original composition.

With the thermometer varying from zero to forty degrees below he traversed the wildest part of Lapland, which lies between the Bothnian Gulf and the Northern Ocean.

At Kautockeino, far beyond the Arctic Circle, he found friends, through the letter of a mutual acquaintance, and recorded with his usual kindness of heart, how good and how generous they were to him. There, too, he saw the day without a sunrise, which he had promised himself to see, and his description of the white earth, the blue sky, the saffron and orange flushes of the morning, and the crimson glow of the evening, all combined in a few moments of time as the sun approached the line of the horizon and sank again without peeping over it, is one of the most charming and graphic paragraphs to be found in literature. There, too, he saw the moon wheel through her entire circuit, without a rising and without a setting. There he made sketches of the dwellings and the people which, after so much practice, he was able to take in a very accurate and artistic manner, and which served afterwards for illustrations in the pages of a magazine. There he met a Lapp by the name of “Lars,” and meeting the name often afterwards, suggested the name for that poem of “Lars,” now as popular in Norway as in the United States. There, in that extreme north, in the house of a native missionary, he found a piano, and was half beside himself with joy when the kind-hearted ministers wife played “Yankee Doodle.” She had heard Ole Bull play it at Christiania, and caught the tune in that way.

His return to Stockholm was more tedious and dangerous than his northward journey, for the weather was colder and the storms more severe. But his reception at the miserable huts along the route, where he had stopped on his journey northward, was always so hearty and friendly that he felt no longer in a strange land. It was a repetition of his experience elsewhere. He was loved at sight, and has not been forgotten to this day by the humble friends he made. Nothing shows the whole-souled manner in which he threw himself into the feelings and habits of the people, better than the expressions which he used in his letters concerning the scenery. He felt so much like a Swede, that he loved the landscapes with the devotion, of a native. Notwithstanding he had used all the superlative terms which our language furnished, in which to describe the scenery of the tropics, yet there he went further and declares with great enthusiasm, that the South had no such beautiful scenery as the ice-bound forests and mountains of Sweden. To him, when he saw them, there were no landscapes to compare with those before him. The transparent crystals, the purity of the snow, the shape of the half-buried trees, the boundless plains of white, and the gleams of acres of diamonds when the frosty spirals greet the morning sun, all possessed a charm beyond the attractions of any other land, so long as he was their associate. He became a Swede, and knew, when his experience was over, just how a Swede lived and how he felt, what he loved and what he enjoyed. Thus he came to a more thorough understanding of the people, and had a better appreciation of their literature, than any other traveller known to the public prints.

On his return to Stockholm, February 14, he set about the work of learning the language and literature of the Swedes. For nearly three months he kept close to his books and his practice in the gymnasium, and although it seems almost impossible, it is said by his associates that he could then read fluently any work to be found in the Norse language.

He left Stockholm on the 6th of May, taking a steamer for Copenhagen, from which place he purposed to take a steamer for Germany. At Copenhagen he met Hans Christian Andersen, the great Danish poet, by whom Mr. Taylor was received most cordially. Thus, one after another, the great men of the world were added to the list of friends found by this son of an humble American farmer. Andersen afterwards sent Mr. Taylor copies of his poems and essays before they were printed, and in many ways showed his regard for the American poet. There Mr. Taylor met Prof. Rafn, the archæologist, and Goldschmidt, the author of the “The Jew,” and editor of a magazine.