_Poems of the Orient_ is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are less prominent. The flavor of _Poems of the Orient_ may be known by such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’ (an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’ _The Poet’s Journal_, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings, is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life. _The Picture of St. John_, an Italian romance, seems made for a popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist after months of conflict with the Power that Denies--these are elements in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts. _Lars_, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth, I do confess I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills, Where winter sits, and sees the summer burn In valleys deeper than yon cloud is high: * * * * * I love the frank, brave habit of the folk, The hearts unspoiled, though fed from ruder times And filled with angry blood. _Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_ contains his fine studies of Westchester County life, ‘The Quaker Widow,’ ‘John Reed,’ and ‘The Old Pennsylvania Farmer,’ together with such happily conceived poems as ‘The Sunshine of the Gods,’ ‘Notus Ignoto,’ ‘Iris,’ ‘Implora Pace,’ and ‘Canopus,’ with its richly colored lines.