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Had I seen through her disguising, could I so have
loved and mourned?

Oh! that loving, and that weeping, would have been to
worship turned.

As a maiden at her window, watches Love's pale planet

rise,

So my Mary's soul was watching, ever watching, at her

eyes;

As that maiden, footsteps hearing, from the darkened
window flying,

So some angel, earthward nearing, lured my Mary into

dying!

Mr. Taylor was called into the lecture field when lectures first began to be popular, and soon became a favorite with the public. It was not any grace of oratory which won him regard, for as an orator he does not excel. His rare power of pleasing, when upon the rostrum, does not lie in address, although he is by no means an unpleasant speaker. The charm is in the thought, not in the style of its utterance. He reads his lectures at a galloping rate, with little regard for elocutionary effect, hardly pauses to take breath, and scarcely gives opportunity for proffered applause. Simile, metaphor, sentiment, roll off his tongue in such quick succession that one has barely time to realize the beauty of each; and audiences go away in a daze of splendid rhetoric, unable to recall half the beauties of thought with which the hour has overflowed,—not vastly instructed, perhaps, but with a very satisfying memory of the hour and the man.

We doubt if there lives another, accustomed to public appearance, who is so keenly sensitive with regard to it as is Benjamin F. Taylor. He is almost morbidly sensitive, indeed, and suffers from his sensitiveness to a degree that would surprise phlegmatic people. His mood is as variable as the mercury in a barometer, and goes up or down in sympathy with the atmosphere of circumstance and occasion. He can never get over what is known among speakers as stage fright, and has been known utterly to refuse giving his lecture, at the last moment, simply because his mood had suddenly sunk, and overapprehension had taken undue hold upon him.

Mr. Taylor is strongly patriotic. When war came, his sympathies were all with "the Boys in Blue." Leaving his quiet literary labor in The Journal office, abandoning the lecture field, he went with the soldiers of the West as their enthusiastic chronicler. In his army correspondence people were given the finest literature of the time. No other letters from the front so perfectly photographed army life, in all its varied features. No other pictures of war's sorrows and successes were so vivid, so intensely real, as were his. He went with the Army of the Cumberland, and saw the battles of Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain. How the glory of loyal endeavor lit up his description of those memorable days! Every sentence was eloquent. In the graphic lines he drew, one could see the whole panorama of battle unfold. The charge, the steady onset, the thundering cannonade,

the roll of musketry, the brave daring, the magnificent victory-all were there. No finer descriptive writing was ever done, than Mr. Taylor did in the camp of that successful army whose courage and accomplishments he eulogized so well.

Back again in ways of peace, he told the story of Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain to delighted audiences, east and west, and finally embodied it in a volume bearing that title, which merits lasting place among the records of war. Its pictures of army life are well worth preserving, while its narrative of victorious battling can not be surpassed.

Mr. Taylor is a perfect artist in words. He picks them out, and uses them, with an exquisite regard for every shade of meaning. Perhaps this characteristic is even more apparent in his prose than in his poetry. His thought is a veritable epicure in the choice of syllables; there seems no effort in it all; the marvelous wealth and fitness of syllabic expression is so natural you but half appreciate it, at the first. His fancy is quick as the lightning, airy and delicate as gossamer; his imagination runs free as the wind flies, and on its rhythmic feet wanders at will over all the fields of thought. Between his luxurious taste for words, his rare appreciation of syllabic meaning, his swift fancy and his lively imagination, he would make poetry of the dictionary itself. In the commonest and most matter-of-fact things he finds poetic hints and forms. Ordinary people would see little poetical in a

comet, yet hear him sing of one, after naming it

THE NEW CRAFT IN THE OFFING.

'T was a beautiful night on a beautiful deep, And the man at the helm had just fallen asleep, And the watch on the deck, with his head on his breast, Was beginning to dream that another's it pressed. When the look-out aloft cried, “A sail! ho! a sail !” And the question and answer went rattling like hail : “A sail! ho! a sail!" "Where away?” “No'th-no'th

west!"

"Make her out?" "No, your honor!"—the din drowned the rest.

There, indeed, is the stranger, the first in these seas,
Yet she drives boldly on, in the teeth of the breeze-
Now her bows to the breakers she steadily turns,
Oh! how brightly the light of her binnacle burns!
Not a signal for Saturn this Rover has given,
No salute for our Venus, the flag-star of heaven ;
Not a rag or a ribbon adorning her spars,

She has saucily sailed by the red planet Mars; She has "doubled," triumphant, the Cape of the Sun, And the sentinel stars, without firing a gun ; Now, a flag at the fore and the mizzen unfurled, She is bearing right gallantly down on the world! "Helm a-port!" "Show a light! she will run us aground !" "Fire a gun!" "Bring her to!" "Sail ahoy!-whither bound?"

Avast there! ye lubbers! Leave the rudder alone;
'T is a craft "in commission"-the Admiral's own;
And she sails with sealed orders, unopened as yet,
Though her anchors she weighed before Lucifer set!

Ah! she sails by a chart no draughtsman could make,

Where each cloud that can trail, and each wave that can

break,

Where each planet is cruising, each star is at rest,
With its anchor "let go" in the blue of the Blest;
Where that sparkling flotilla, the Asteroids, lie,
Where the scarf of red morning is flung on the sky :
Where the breath of the sparrow is staining the air-
On the chart that she bears, you will find them all there!
Let her pass on in peace to the port whence she came,
With her trackings of fire, and her streamers of flame!

This poem appeared soon after the great comet of 1858 blazed forth, and went the rounds. Another, on a common-place theme, is almost as much a waif as "The Long Ago," or "The Beautiful River," for like those it continually goes around in newspaper columns uncredited. It is about

THE OLD-FASHIONED CHOIR.

I have fancied, sometimes, the Bethel - bent beam
That trembled to earth in the patriarch's dream,
Was a ladder of song in that wilderness rest,
From the pillow of stone to the blue of the Blest,
And the angels descending to dwell with us here,
"Old Hundred," and "Corinth," and "China," and "Mear."
All the hearts are not dead, not under the sod,

That those breaths can blow open to Heaven and God!
Ah "Silver Street" leads by a bright, golden road—

O! not to the hymns that in harmony flowed—

But to those sweet human psalms in the old-fashioned

choir,

To the girls that sang alto, the girls that sang air!

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