Part 15 (1/2)

[NOTE.--The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Harper & Brothers for permission to use extracts from ”Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton,” and to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to use extracts from the Poetical Works of Lowell.]

THE STORY OF BAYARD TAYLOR

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAYARD TAYLOR.]

BAYARD TAYLOR

CHAPTER I

HIS BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

Bayard Taylor was born in the country village of Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jan. 11, 1825, ”the year when the first locomotive successfully performed its trial trip. I am, therefore,” he says, ”just as old as the railroad.” He was descended from Robert Taylor, a rich Friend, or Quaker, who had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1681, and settled near Brandywine Creek. Bayard's grandfather married a Lutheran of pure German blood, and on that account was expelled from the Society of Friends, which at that time had very strict rules regarding the marriage of its members. Although the family still used the peculiar speech of the Quakers, and clung to the Quaker principles of peace and order, none of them ever returned to the society.

When Bayard was four years old, the family moved to a farm about a mile from the village. There they lived, until, years afterward, the successful traveler and poet bought an estate near by and built a magnificent house upon it, into which he received his father and mother and brothers and sisters, with that open-hearted generosity and hospitality which was so much a part of his nature.

He was the fourth child of his parents; but the three older children had died in infancy, and he remained as the eldest of the family.

Chester County, Pennsylvania, has always been a rich farming region, peopled by solid, well-to-do farmers, many of whom are Quakers. Here the northern elms toss their arms to the southern cypresses, as the poet has it; the two climates seem to meet and mingle, in a sort of calm, neutral zone, and the vegetation of the North is united with the vegetation of the South, to produce a peculiar richness and variety.

In such surroundings the boy grew up, a farmer's lad, and learned that love of nature which was a part of his being till the day he died.

”The child,” says he, ”that has tumbled into a newly plowed furrow never forgets the smell of the fresh earth.... Almost my first recollection is of a swamp, into which I went barelegged at morning, and out of which I came, when driven by hunger, with long stockings of black mud, and a mask of the same. If the child was missed from the house, the first thing that suggested itself was to climb upon a mound which overlooked the swamp. Somewhere among the tufts of rushes and the bladed leaves of the calamus, a little brown ball was sure to be seen moving, now dipping out of sight, now rising again, like a bit of drift on the rippling green. It was my head. The treasures I there collected were black terrapins with orange spots, baby frogs the size of a chestnut, thrush's eggs, and stems of purple phlox.”

He loved his home with a pa.s.sionate intensity; but he also had yearnings for the unknown world beyond the horizon. ”I remember,” says he, ”as distinctly as if it were yesterday the first time this pa.s.sion was gratified. Looking out of the garret window, on a bright May morning, I discovered a row of slats which had been nailed over the s.h.i.+ngles for the convenience of the carpenters in roofing the house, and had not been removed. Here was, at least, a chance to reach the comb of the steep roof, and take my first look abroad into the world!

Not without some trepidation I ventured out, and was soon seated astride of the sharp ridge. Unknown forests, new fields and houses, appeared to my triumphant view. The prospect, though it did not extend more than four miles in any direction, was boundless. Away in the northwest, glimmering through the trees, was a white object, probably the front of a distant barn; but I shouted to the astonished servant girl, who had just discovered me from the garden below, 'I see the Falls of Niagara!'”

He was a sensitive child and had a horror of dirty hands, ”and,” says he, ”my first employments--picking stones and weeding corn--were rather a torture to this superfine taste.” In his mother, however, he had a friend who understood and protected him. So his life on the farm was as happy as it well could be, in spite of its roughness. He himself has described it with a zest which no one else could lend it.

”Almost every field had its walnut tree, melons were planted among the corn, and the meadow which lay between never exhausted its store of wonders. Besides, there were eggs to hide at Easter; cherries and strawberries in May; fruit all summer; fis.h.i.+ng parties by torchlight; lobelia and sumac to be gathered, dried and sold for pocket money; and in the fall, chestnuts, persimmons, wild grapes, cider, and the grand butchering after frost came, so that all the pleasures I knew were incidental to a farmer's life. The books I read came from the village library, and the task of helping to 'fodder' on the dark winter evenings was lightened by the antic.i.p.ation of sitting down to 'Gibbon's Rome' or 'Thaddeus of Warsaw' afterwards.”

He was fond of reading, and especially fond of poetry, and his wife in her biography says: ”In the evening after he had gone to bed, his mother would hear him repeating poem after poem to his brother, who slept in the same room with him.”

CHAPTER II

SCHOOL LIFE

Bayard had the advantage of regular attendance at the country schools near his father's home, with two or three years at the local academy; but his father could not afford to send him to college. He enjoyed his school life, and in after years wrote to one of his early Quaker teachers thus:

”I have never forgotten the days I spent in the little log schoolhouse and the chestnut grove behind it, and I have always thought that some of the poetry I then copied from thy ma.n.u.script books has kept an influence over all my life since. There was one verse in particular which has cheered and encouraged me a thousand times when prospects seemed rather gloomy. It ran thus:

'O, why should we seek to antic.i.p.ate sorrow By throwing the flowers of the present away, And gathering the dark-rolling, cloudy to-morrow To darken the generous sun of to-day?'