Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

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All the poetical quotations in this book are from Taylor’s poetical works.

The account of the funeral found in this volume was written subsequent to the other portions of the work, as the obsequies and burial took place after the first edition was printed and sold.

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Mr. Taylor’s Career.—Difficulty and Importance of the Work.—The Romance of his Life.—Variable Experience.—His Success as Novelist, Orator, Traveller, and Poet.

The nearness and magnitude of Bayard Taylor’s life make it one exceedingly difficult to comprehend and classify. His adventures were so many, his struggles so severe, his experience so varied, and his final success so remarkable, that the materials are too abundant, and often serve to clog and confuse the student of his career. An artist who views the mountain from its base, loses many of the finest effects and most charming outlines, because of his very close proximity to them. So, in looking upon the wonderful career of such a versatile and gifted man, at a time so near his death, we are less able to form a comprehensive idea of his life, as a symmetrical whole, than we shall be when the years have carried us farther away from him, and the outlines of his greatness are more distinct. Whether it were better to wait until a part of the life has been forgotten, and until the more harsh and angular features have been lost in the general outline, or whether it were more desirable to describe the life in all its actual details, and in the natural ruggedness which the close view reveals, is, however, a mere matter of taste. To those who love to read of a man in whose work there was no unevenness and in whose experience nothing unbroken is seen, the life of one so long dead that the writer is compelled to fill up the forgotten years with ideal events and motives may furnish the choicest theme. But to those students who love scientific scrutiny, who would estimate the life for what it is really worth as an example, the biography which is written amid all the facts, and by one who comes in actual contact with them, is perhaps esteemed the most valuable, although, as a whole, less symmetrical.