Admirable journalist, Taylor was not content with journalism. In 1863 at Gotha, where he had found a wife in 1857, he was deep in the study of Goethe. From 1868–1870, after intervening travels, he gave himself to the translation of “Faust.” Lecturing then at Cornell as Professor of German Literature, he went back to Germany to pursue Goethe still further at Weimar. So his knowledge of Scandinavia was of the literature as well as of the land. His great ambition, and doubtless his measure of success, was poetry. From his youthful ventures in Philadelphia almost to the day of his death he published verse; and the recognition of the public appears in the choice of him to read the Harvard Φ Β Κ poem in 1850 and the National Ode at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Since his death this part of his work has been so far slighted that there is some need of recalling his consistently high aim and the technical mastery evinced by performances so widely different as the delicious parodies of _The Echo Club_ and the noble rendering of “Faust.” No criticism of Taylor as a poet should obscure the fact that his “Faust” takes rank with the few great verse translations. Taylor’s versatility achieved also a lesser, but still a considerable, success in novels and tales. The interest aroused by the lively opening of _Who Was She?_ is sustained with no little art. Perhaps the import would be more poignant if it were less dangerously near to abstract proposition; but it is very human. WHO WAS SHE? [_From the “Atlantic Monthly” September, 1874_] Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your eyes squarely, I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one,--well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile--or, what is worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards--when the external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn’t a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid sensitiveness of my moral nerves.