Little did Mr. Taylor expect, when he bade those extensive, massive palaces adieu, that he should return to that city, in a few years, as the official representative of a powerful nation. Probably the idea of being again in those galleries of art, was as remote from his calculations as was the idea of being minister of the United States at the court of the German Empire, when he walked reverently along the Unter-den-Linden at Berlin for the first time, trying to get a peep at the distant carriage of the king.
From St. Petersburg, he took the inland route for Prussia, passing through the Baltic provinces, and studying the habits and appearance of the people. His return to Gotha, from Russia, was regarded by himself, and by his friends, as the close of his wanderings, and, with a sigh of relief, he laid down his pen, and declared that he wished for nothing more than to “settle down in a home of his own near the old farm in the States.” A few weeks later, and he was receiving the congratulations of his friends in New York, and had taken his place at the familiar desk in the office of the New York “Tribune.”
Then began another season of closest and severest mental labor. Rest, during his waking hours, seemed impossible, and even the hours which he spent at the Literary Club and at his rooms, were more or less connected with his work. Literature was his work, and literature was his play. He had become enamored of Goethe and Schiller, and already conceived the idea of giving to the world a translation of their best works. He had the “Argument” of the “Poet’s Journal” in his mind, and every visit to the scenes of his first love, in the companionship of the second, served to urge him to complete and publish it.
He had become one of the noted men of America, and the calls, to lecture, to write, to visit, to attend dinners, and write editorials, were incessant and persistent.
The construction of his house took much of his attention, and he ransacked his collections of sketches, and photographs of villas, palaces, and cottages in the Old World, to find such a plan as he could be satisfied to adopt. It was no child’s play with him to construct the building wherein to make his home. He had thought of the matter from boyhood, and that clump of oaks on the highland, about a mile to the westward of Kennett Square, and within a short distance of the old homestead, had ever been his choice. His years of wanderings had sharpened his desire for a permanent home, and, with characteristic care and thoroughness, he investigated his plans and means. He had owned the land for five years, and had gloried in being the owner of American soil, without which one can hardly claim to be an American. He attended to all the details of rooms, closets, stairways, windows, brick, stone, cornices, roof, tower, with caution and deliberation; and when he contracted with the masons, carpenters, and gardeners, he knew just what was needed, and told to each what was expected of them. There was a ceremony attendant on breaking the ground, a procession, and a box of records deposited in the foundation, when the corner-stone was laid, and such a house-warming when it was dedicated October 18 and 19, 1860, as Americans seldom enjoy. There was feasting, singing, original poetry, original plays, and one of the happiest, merriest companies ever gathered under a hospitable roof.
But while the building was being slowly and carefully constructed, with its thick walls of stone and brick, Mr. Taylor, was engaged no less in his editorial tasks. The summer after his return from Europe, he made several excursions in an editorial capacity, one of which took him again to California. The great changes in the city of San Francisco, and in the appearance of the entire State, so far as he visited it, were marvellous, and were as marvellously pictured to the minds of his readers. His time was much occupied in delivering lectures in the various cities of the State; but he used his disciplined eyes and ears to such advantage that he gave in his book the most full and accurate account of California,—its agriculture, its institutions, its lakes, its mountains, its great trees, its mines, its enterprises, and its people,—to be found in any work of the kind now in print. It is astonishing how much he could put into a paragraph, without giving it a crowded appearance!
His time, from the day he returned from California, was mostly engaged in delivering lectures and writing letters. He was not rich, and he was generous. He had a house to build, and to pay for. Furniture must be had, and his accumulated fortune was not large enough for all. Hence he travelled, and he delivered lectures, notwithstanding the disagreeable experiences which he was compelled to endure. He yearned to be at the translation of “Faust”; but necessity drove him to talk of travel and biography. He had a home, for “it is home where the heart is,” and he longed to be in it. But necessity sent him forth with a rude hand, and held him aloof from his own. Oh! that is the saddest experience in human life! To feel called to a certain work; to know that there is one task for which one is peculiarly fitted by nature and by discipline; to see before him still the beckoning forms which have hovered in the glory of every setting sun, since earliest childhood; to feel that one’s productions, which might be valuable, are unfinished, and hardly shaped, before they are forced into the hands of conscienceless critics, is one of the most miserable conditions in life. This condition, which has worn out so many men of genius, and which has, with tyrannical coldness, compelled authors to fence up their own literary highway, or die, was not felt by Mr. Taylor in that degree that it was by some of his cotemporaries,—and by many since his time. But he felt it often enough and keenly enough to sympathize with others, and most forcibly expressed their feelings in his “Picture of Saint John.”
“But soon assailed my home the need of gold,
The miserable wants that plague and fret,