We have seen how it was an age of sugared epithet, of adolescent sadness and longing, of sentiment even to sentimentality. Its dreams were centered in the East, in that old world over which there hung the glamour of romance. "I hungrily read," writes Bayard Taylor of this epoch in his life, "all European books of travel, and my imagination clothed foreign countries with a splendid atmosphere of poetry and art.... Italy! and Greece! the wild enthusiasm with which I should tread those lands, and view the shrines 'where young Romance and Love like sister pilgrims turn'; the glorious emotions of my soul, and the inspiration I should draw from them, which I now partly feel. How my heart leaps at the sound of: Woods that wave on Delphi's steep, Isles that gem the Ægean deep. The isles of Greece! hallowed by Homer and Milton and Byron! My words are cold and tame compared with my burning thoughts."[69] The increasing tide of translations that marked the thirties and the forties, the new editions of English and continental poets--Shelley, Keats, Heine; the early books of the Victorians--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the young Tennyson--came across the sea to these sensitive souls like visitants from another planet. "I had the misfortune," Taylor writes in 1848, "to be intoxicated yesterday--with Tennyson's new poem, 'The Princess.'... For the future, for a long time at least, I dare not read Tennyson. His poetry would be the death of mine. His intense perception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it from me."[70] Poetry was a thing to be spoken of with awed lips like love or the deeper longings of the soul. It was an ethereal thing apart from the prose of life; it was beauty, melody, divinest art--a thing broken into harshly by the daily round, a thing to be stolen away to in golden hours, as Stoddard and Taylor stole away on Saturday nights to read their poets and their own poems, and to lose themselves in a more glorious world. "My favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and we pretended to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to earth in our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent imitation of his diction; my comrade's worship of his master took the form of an ode to Shelley.... It is followed in the volume before me by an airy lyric on 'Sicilian Wine,' which was written out of his head, as the children say, for he had no Sicilian wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage."[71]