TAYLOR. BAYARD TAYLOR was born, January 11, 1825, in the village of Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania. The history of his life is full of instruction and incitement for the youthful aspirant. His early education consisted only in such meagre instruction as could be got in a country school. With this he entered a printing-office in West Chester, believing such employment would increase and facilitate his learning. Here his leisure moments were spent in the sober and praiseworthy task of studying Latin and French, and in penning verses, for which he evinced an early aptitude. These poems he collected and published, when but nineteen years old, in a volume entitled Ximena. His object in publishing these youthful effusions was to make reputation enough to secure for himself a position as correspondent to some leading newspaper, while making the tour of Europe. Success, in a measure, attended his effort, and he started on his cherished adventure with the paltry purse of $140, but also with the wealth of high hopes and resolves. With some further aid from home, he made, on foot, the tour of England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. About two years were consumed in this journey, and its total expenses amounted to $500. He has told us how all this was accomplished in Views-a-Foot, published in 1846. In 1848, Taylor became a permanent correspondent of the New York Tribune. About the same time he issued a volume entitled Rhymes of Travel. The succeeding two years were spent in travel in California and Mexico, which afforded the materials for his next volume, El Dorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire. A third volume, A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs, was given to the public in 1851, as a sort of farewell, or, may. be, propitiatory offering, on the occasion of his departure on an extensive tour in the East. On this journey he was absent over two years, during which time he travelled some fifty thousand miles, visiting Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Soudan, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Turkey, Southern Europe, India, China, and Japan. These all became the subjects of his florid and descriptive pen under titles which we name below. In the winter of 1856-7, Taylor penetrated to the extreme northern parts of Europe, and since has described these and later experiences in Northern Travel and Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark, and Lapland, which volumes were issued in 1858. A few years since, our author, an adventurer by nature, made bold to try the perils of a new field of labor, namely, Fiction; and fetched us from its marvellous realms two stories, Hannah Thurston, a Story of American Life, published in 1863, and John Godfrey's Fortunes, related by Himself, published in 1865. "These works are original in their material and treatment; the characters and incidents are drawn from the writer's observation and experience; they exhibit town and country life in America, with the opinions and ideas of the day, and are pervaded by a healthy and natural sentiment."* The same comment may be applied as well to a still later story than the above, entitled The Story of Kennett, published in 1866. And now, just as we are about concluding this sketch, Mr. Taylor steps before us again in strange and unsuspected guise. His air is that of a foreign-bred gentleman, and is profoundly scholarly. In a word, he introduces himself to us as the translator of Goethe's Faust. "Mr. Taylor translates 'Faust' in the original metres, with the rhymes, monosyllabic and dissyllabic, almost invariably as they are in the German, and also with a very remarkable degree of literainess, though not with so great literalness as we could * Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature. have desired. . . . Now and then a precious phrase is lost; but on the whole the translation is so good that if the reader does not recur to the German he will certainly not know from poverty of the English that he has suffered any deprivation. Here, as elsewhere in Mr. Taylor's rendering, those who read the verse aloud will perceive how he has filled himself with the music of Goethe, and how perfectly he echoes it."* "The characteristics of Mr. Taylor's writings are, in his poems, ease of expression, with a careful selection of poetic capabilities, a full, animated style, with a growing attention to art and condensation. The prose is equable and clear, in the flowing style; the narrative of a genial, healthy observer of the many manners of the world which he has seen in the most remarkable portions of its four quarters."+ We append a list of such of Taylor's works as have not already been enumerated: A Journey to Central Africa; The Lands of the Saracen ; or, Pictures of Palestine; Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain; A Visit to India, China, and Japan; Travels in Greece and Russia, with an Excursion to Crete; Cyclopædia of Modern Travel; At Home and Abroad, A Sketch-book of Life; Scenery and Men-First Series; Scenery and Men-Second Series; Byways of Europe; Life, Travels, and Books of Alexander von Humboldt; Colorado; Picture of St. John; The Poet's Journal; Poems of Home and Travel; Poems of the Orient. PROGRESS NORTHWARDS-A STORM. CHAPTER V. (abridged)—Northern Travel. WE arose betimes on Christmas morn, but the grim and delib erate landlady detained us an hour in preparing our coffee. The horses were at last ready; we muffled up carefully and set out. The dawn was just streaking the East, the sky was crystal * Atlantic Monthly, February, 1871. Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature. Includes Rhymes of Travel and the Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs, before mentioned. As it grew lighter, we clear, and not a breath of air stirring. were surprised to find that our postilion was a girl. She had a heavy sheepskin over her knees, a muff for her hands, and a shawl around her head, leaving only the eyes visible. Thus accoutred, she drove on merrily, and, except that the red of her cheeks became scarlet and purple, showed no signs of the weather. The cold, however, played some grotesque pranks with us. My beard, moustache, cap, and fur collar were soon one undivided lump of ice. Our eye-lashes became snow-white and heavy with frost, and it required constant motion to keep them from freezing together. We saw everything through visors barred with ivory. Our eyebrows and hair were as hoary as those of an octogenarian, and our cheeks a mixture of crimson and orange, so that we were scarcely recognizable by each other. Every one we met had snow-white locks, no matter how youthful the face, and whatever was the color of our horses at starting, we always drove milk-white steeds at the close of the post. The irritation of our nostrils occasioned the greatest inconvenience, and as the handkerchiefs froze instantly, it soon became a matter of pain and difficulty to use them. You might as well attempt to blow your nose with a poplar chip. We could not bare our hands a minute without feeling an iron grasp of cold which seemed to squeeze the flesh like a vice, and turn the very blood to ice. In other respects we were warm and jolly, and I have rarely been in higher spirits. The air was exquisitely sweet and pure, and I could open my mouth (as far as its icy grating permitted) and inhale full draughts into the lungs with a delicious sensation of refreshment and exhilaration. This was arctic travel at last. By Odin, it was glorious! The smooth, firm road, crisp and pure as alabaster, over which our sleigh-runners talked with the rippling, musical murmur of summer brooks; the sparkling, breathless firmament; the gorgeous rosy flush of morning, slowly deepening until the orange disc of the sun cut the horizon; the golden blaze of the tops of the bronze firs; the glittering of the glassy birches; the long, dreary sweep of the landscape; the icy nectar of the perfect air; the tingling of the roused blood in every vein, all alert to guard the outposts of life against the besieging cold; it was superb! The natives themselves spoke of the cold as being unusually severe, and we congratulated ourselves all the more on our easy endur ance of it. Had we judged only by our own sensations, we should not have believed the temperature to be nearly so low. The sun rose a little after ten, and I have never seen anything finer than the spectacle which we then saw for the first time, but which was afterwards almost daily repeated—the illumination of the forests and snow-fields in his level orange beams, for even at midday he was not more than eight degrees above the horiThe tops of the trees only were touched, still and solid as iron, and covered with sparkling frost-crystals, their trunks were changed to blazing gold, and their foliage to a fiery orange-brown. The delicate purple sprays of the birch, coated with ice, glittered like wands of topaz and amethyst, and the slopes of virgin snow, stretching towards the sun, shone with the fairest saffron gleams. zon. There is nothing equal to this in the South-nothing so transcendently rich, dazzling, and glorious. Italian dawns and twilights cannot surpass those we saw every day, not, like the former, fading rapidly into the ashen hues of dusk, but lingering for hour after hour with scarce a decrease of splendor. Strange that Nature should repeat these lovely aerial effects in such widely different zones and seasons! I thought to find in the winter landscapes of the far North a sublimity of death and desolation-a wild, dark, dreary monotony of expression-but I had, in reality, the constant enjoyment of the rarest, the tenderest, the most enchanting beauty. The people one meets along the road harmonize with these unexpected impressions. They are clear-eyed and rosy as the morning, straight and strong as the fir-saplings in their forests, and simple, honest, unsophisticated beyond any class of men I have ever seen. They are no milksops either. Under the serenity of those blue eyes and smooth, fair faces, burns the old Berserker rage, not easily kindled, but terrible as the lightning when once loosed. "The cold in climate are cold in blood," sings Byron, but they are only cold through superior self-control and freedom from perverted passions. Better is the assertion of Tennyson: "That bright, and fierce, and fickle is the South, There are tender hearts in the breasts of these northern men and women, albeit they are as undemonstrative as the English-or we Americans, for that matter. It is exhilarating to see such a people-whose digestion is sound, whose nerves are tough as |