way of life, and, more especially, financial worry told upon his constitution. He was destined never to finish his projected “Life of Goethe.” He had barely entered upon his duties as Minister to Germany when the collapse came. His last words were, “I must be away.” “Taylor,” says Albert H. Smyth, “wrote with such rapidity that he could complete a duodecimo volume in a fortnight.... In a night and a day, he read Victor Hugo’s voluminous ‘La Légende des Siècles,’ and wrote for _The Tribune_ a review of it which fills eighteen pages of his ‘Essays and Literary Notes,’ and contains five considerable poems that are translations in the metre of the original.” His powers of memory are said to have been prodigious. He could repeat not only from his favourite authors but from the futile compositions of poetasters whose manuscripts he had read as an editor and rejected. He was in the habit of carrying his own poetry in his head until the process of correction was ended. Accordingly, the perfection of his “copy,” which was written in the neatest hand imaginable, has led various critics into the error of thinking that he did not revise. His poetry was much more carefully worked out than his prose, upon which he had no thought of building a reputation. He would spend hours on the chiselling of a single couplet. His style resounds with echoes of word and phrase from Byron and Shelley, indeed from the whole circle of his reading in both English and German. Nor is it deficient in individuality. Taylor has a pronounced cadence of his own. Nevertheless his poetry wants some quality or other that would make it lasting. Although in 1896 there was a cult of younger men that studied and imitated him, his immense vogue as a prose writer had already waned; and his eclipse as a poet is now almost complete. In the history of American literature there is nothing stranger than this eclipse. Taylor’s learning was wide and substantial. He shrank from no drudgery of preparation. At the age of fifty he was willing to begin the study of Greek. And it was not merely that he was in touch with his time on all sides, and able by brilliant arts to snare the popular fancy. When he wrote, he knew what he was talking about. His “Poems of the Orient” (1854), containing the Shelley-like “Bedouin Song,” show deep sympathy with the customs and passions of the East. “Ross Browne’s Syrian dragoman, when he listened to the reading of ‘Hassan to his Mare,’ ‘sprang up with tears in his eyes, and protested that the Arabs talked just that way to their horses.’” Taylor had the suffrages of educated critics too. “The Picture of St. John” (1866) Longfellow reckoned “a great poem”; while Lowell said that, except “The Golden Legend,” no American poem could match it in finish and sustained power. “The Masque of the Gods” (1872), an endeavour to combine the ideals of Christianity and Hellenism, also pleased Longfellow. “Lars, a Pastoral Poem” (1873), is a curious tale,