“I have known Mr. Bayard Taylor so long that I hardly know when our acquaintance began. It was at least thirty years ago, during his first year’s residence in New York, after his tour in Europe and the publication of his ‘Views Afoot.’ The occasion of our acquaintance was a magazine which had lately been started here, and which was edited by Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, one of my earliest and best literary friends. I had contributed to this periodical, which was entitled ‘The Union Magazine,’ and on her departure for Europe she recommended me to call upon her young friend, Mr. Taylor, who was to take care of it for her during her absence. She was sure I would like him, for we were Arcades ambo. I called upon him, and liked him, as she had foreseen I would. I found him in the editorial room of the ‘Tribune,’ a dingy, dusty, comfortless den on the same floor with the composing-room, if I remember rightly. He was seated on the hither side of an old ink-stained desk, which was surrounded by a railing, over which newspapers were flung, and was writing rapidly. He looked up when I addressed him and stated my errand—a bright, joyous, handsome man of twenty-five, with a world of animation in his sparkling dark eyes. I have no recollection of what passed between us, except that the poem which was in his hands was accepted, and that we had taken a fancy to each other. I went away feeling happy, for I felt that I had made a friend, and one who could sympathize with me. There were two bonds between us—love of verse, and equality of years. He was the first man of letters who had treated me like one of the craft, and I was grateful to him, as I should have been, for I was weary of the intellectual snobbery I had undergone from others.
“It was not long before we were what Burns calls ‘bosom cronies.’ We used, I remember, to spend our Saturday evenings together, generally at his rooms, which were within a stone’s throw of the ‘Tribune’ office, at a boardinghouse in Warren Street, not far from Broadway. He lived in a sky parlor, which is present before me now, as if I had seen it but an hour ago. I remember just where his table stood, and the little desk upon which he afterward wrote so many books, and upon which he was then writing so many charming poems. I took up the collected edition of his poetical works this afternoon in my library, and turning over the leaves sorrowfully, felt the weight of thirty years roll from me—not lightly, as it would have done a few weeks ago, but with a pain for which I have no words. They were all there, the poems which I remembered so well—‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’ (which I read in MS. before it saw the light of print), ‘The Metempsychosis of the Pine,’ ‘Mon-da-min’ (which was written years before the ‘Song of Hiawatha’), ‘Kubleh,’and, saddest of all, the solemn dirge beginning ‘Moan, ye wild winds! around the pane.” As I read, I saw the eager face, the glowing eyes, the kindly smile of the enthusiastic young poet, whom the world preferred to consider as a traveller merely, and who knew so many things of which I was profoundly ignorant. My nature is not a reverent one, I fear, but I looked up to Bayard Taylor, and admired his beautiful genius. We read and criticised each other’s verse a good deal too lightly and generously, I have since thought, and talked of the poets whom we were studying. It was his fancy that there was something in his genius which was allied to that of Shelley, and I hoped that I might claim some relationship with Keats, enough at least to make me a ‘poor relation.’ We talked long and late; we smoked mild cigars; and, once in a while when our exchequers were replenished, we indulged in the sweet luxury of stewed oysters, over which we had more talk, of present plans and future renown. I was, I believe, Bayard Taylor’s most intimate friend at this time, and the one with whom he most consorted, though he had, of course, a large literary acquaintance among the young writers of the period, whose name was Legion, and whose works are now forgotten. I have spent many happy nights with my dead friend, but none which were so happy as those. I looked forward to them as young men look forward to holidays which they have planned. I look back upon them as old men look back to their past delights, with pity and regret.
“The world, as I have said, considered Bayard Taylor as a traveller, and it was his pleasure, as well as his profit, during the first years of our friendship, to travel largely in California, in Egypt, in Japan, and elsewhere in the Old World. I read his letters of travel as they appeared in the ‘Tribune,’ and I read these letters again which he collected thus in books after his return. I saw that they were good of their kind; I felt that his prose was admirable for its simplicity and correctness; but, with a waywardness which I could not help, I slighted them for his poetry. I thought then, and think still, that his ‘California Ballads’ and ‘Poems of Travel’ are masterly examples of spirited, picturesque writing, and I am sure that his ‘Poems of the Orient’ are superior to anything of the kind in the English language. They have a local color which is absent from ‘Lalla Rookh.’ The ‘Bedouin Song,’ for instance, is instinct with the fiery, passionate life of the East, and is a worthy companion-piece to Shelley’s ‘Lines to an Indian Air.’ The ‘Poems of the Orient’ were dedicated to me, I shall always be happy to remember, in a poetical ‘Epistle from Tmolus.’
“Bayard Taylor had a sunny nature, which delighted in simple pleasures, and he had the happy art of putting trouble away from him. One trouble, however, he could not put away, as those who are familiar with his life and poems are aware. I have spoken of one of his early poems (‘Moan, ye wild winds! around the pane’), which embodied the first great sorrow of his young manhood. It was written after the death of his first wife, whose memory it embalms, and whose tender presence haunted him later in ‘The Mystery’ and ‘The Phantom.’ Among the literary acquaintances of Bayard Taylor and myself, I must not forget to mention the late Fitz James O’Brien, whose promise was greater than his performance, and who, clever as he was in prose, was at his best a graceful poet. Taylor and O’Brien were in the habit of meeting in my rooms at night, about twenty-five years ago, and of fighting triangular poetical duels. We used to sit at the same table, with the names of poetical subjects on slips of paper, and drawing out one at random, see which of us would soonest write a poem upon it. This practice of ours, which is well enough as practice merely, was the origin of Bayard Taylor’s ‘Echo Club.’
“Always a charming companion, Bayard Taylor was delightful in his own home at Cedarcroft. I remember visiting him there when he gave his ‘house-warming,’ and the merriment we had over a play which we wrote together, speech by speech, and scene by scene, and which we performed to the great delectation of his friends and neighbors. Many of the latter had never seen a theatrical performance before, and, I dare say, have never seen one since. Our play was a great success, and ought to have been, for there was not a word in it which had not done duty a thousand times before! We called it ‘Love in a Hotel.’ ‘Miller Redivivus’ would have answered just as well, if not better.
“The recollections of thirty years cannot be recalled at will, and seldom while those who shared them with us are overshadowed by death.” I remember merry days and nights without number, and I remember sorrows which are better forgotten. One of my sorrows was deeply felt by Bayard Taylor, who, fresh from the reading of the second part of ‘Faust,’ saw in my loss a vision of Goethe’s ‘Euphorion.’
“The last time, but one, when I saw my friend alone was three or four nights before his departure for Berlin. It was one night at my own house, at a little gathering to which I had invited our common friends, comrades of ten and twenty years’ standing, poets, artists, and good fellows of both sexes. It was notable on one account, for our great poet Bryant came thither to do honor to his younger brother, Bayard Taylor. I cannot say that it was a happy night, for it was to be followed by an absence which was close at hand,—an absence which was to endure forever. Before two months had passed, the Nestor of our poets was gathered to his fathers in the fullness of his renown. His sons bewailed their father; my good friend Stedman, in a noble poem in the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ and Bayard Taylor in a solemn ‘Epicedium’ in ‘Scribner’s Monthly.’ And now Bayard Taylor is gone!
“‘Insatiate archer, could not one suffice?’ The world of American letters has lost a poet in Bayard Taylor; but we who knew and loved him—have lost a friend.
“R. H. Stoddard.”
“New York, Dec. 19, 1878.”