CASTLE OF CHAPULTEPEC.
His hardships were many, and his fatigue at times almost unbearable; but his love for things new and strange, for the unexplored and unknown, kept him moving perseveringly on through the thickets and ravines of upper Mexico. By great skill and considerable assurance he managed to keep in the good graces of the people he met, and for several days, in the forests and in the villages, he met, with very kind and hospitable treatment.
On one occasion, however, he fell among thieves. Before he arrived at the city of Mexico, and while still in the wilderness of the interior of the Mexican highlands, he was suddenly attacked by three Mexican robbers, to whose marauding purposes he could make no resistance, he having placed such reliance upon the good faith of the natives as to carry his pistol without a cartridge in it. The banditti made him dismount and hand over what little money in coin he happened to have, and after taking such blankets and trinkets as they desired, left him with his hands tied behind him, to get on as best he could. Fortunately they did not want his horse, which he had bought in place of the useless mule, and after extricating himself from his bonds by long struggles, he mounted his horse and rode on to Mexico with his drafts for money all intact. He seems to have placed less reliance on the Mexicans, after that encounter, and took good care to ride out of range of their muskets and to keep himself supplied with ammunition.
His visit to the Mexican capital was an occasion of great interest to him, and brought up freshly and vividly the story which Prescott has so well told of the Aztecs and the heroic age of Cortez. No scene in Europe is said to combine such extremes of sweetness and grandeur, of light and shade, of valley and hill, of plain and cragged highland, of land and water, of art and nature, as the valley of Mexico. There he saw the evidences of prehistoric civilization, and looked with curiosity and awe upon the towering fortress of Chapultepec, which connects the present with the ages past. However, Mr. Taylor could not stop long in that charming vale, and hastened on over the battle-fields of Scott to Vera Cruz. From Vera Cruz he went by steamer to Mobile, from thence overland to Charleston, S. C., and by way of North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, to New York, where, about the middle of March, he resumed his duties as editor of the “Tribune” with the thought that there he might stay the remainder of his life.
CHAPTER XVI.
The Poet’s First Love.—Playmates.—Miss Mary S. Agnew.—His Fidelity.—Poems Inspired by Affection.—Her Failing Health.—Consumption.—His Return to Her.—The Marriage at the Death-bed.—Her Death.—The Poet’s Grief.—His Inner Life.—The Story in his own Rhyme.
We now enter upon the most holy ground ever trod by the biographer,—the sacred recesses of the human heart. In the annals of ordinary life, or even in those of many great men, the record of their early love may not be important to the reader. But to the poet, these more subtle and more tender emotions are events of the greatest importance. Every heart contains more or less of the poetical sentiment, and the love and marriage of any individual is a matter of great moment to him, although it may not be to his biographer. But here we write of a poet. To him, all the strings of human feeling had a clear and unmistakable sound. To him, the undertones of life played an important part in the harmony of his being. All that was pure and sweet in love he saw. All that was beautiful and lovable in life he felt, with a keenness none but the poet can know. Hence to him, we find, as in the history of the grand poets of ancient days, his love was a holy sentiment, to be valued as God’s best gift, and to be worshipped as a part of Him.
In a neighboring farm-house, but a short distance from his father’s farm, lived Mary S. Agnew. She was born and reared in the same community, went to the same school, attended the same church, and was a playmate, classmate, and trusted companion. They sought each other in childhood’s days, and their friendship ripened into love as imperceptibly and surely as the coming and going of the years developed their lives, and pressed them forward into manhood and womanhood. Her dark hair and eyes, her slender form, her lovable disposition, her conscientiousness and purity were presented to him in that strong light, under which all lovers see the merits and virtues of their sweethearts. Added to that was the romance and insight of that other sense which poets are said to possess. He built a shrine to this idol wherever he went, and through all his early years she was, as he said in verse, the representative to him of the goodness of God. On the farm, he made verses in her honor; at the Quaker meeting he was thankful for her; at the parties and social gatherings among the young folks, she was the centre of his thought. Not foolishly or blindly did he exhibit his affection. Not extravagantly or obtrusively did he follow his wooing. But his poetry and his prose give here and there a clew to the deep and fervent love of his youthful days. Some of his very sweetest poetry found its inspiration in that love, and when the volume is published, if ever it is, in which shall appear those sonnets, which have modestly been kept thus far from the public gaze, there will be found gems that the world cannot well spare. How sincere, disinterested, and noble was his affection, was proved by his faithful and unabated love, after he had seen the world and its loveliest ladies, and after the cruel hand of disease had chiselled away the round and rosy cheeks, and left, in place of the sparkling, blushing maiden of his early love, a pallid spectre—a shadow of her former self. In all his wanderings, he never neglected her. In all his most tender writings, her image is more or less clear. In one of his volumes, “The Poet’s Journal,” he gives a history of his love and sorrow; of the awakening, after years of death, in the sweetest and most touching of all his poems.