The senior editor of the _Mirror_, George P. Morris, was once a very popular song-writer, and his _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, still survives. Other residents of New York city who have written single famous pieces were Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General Theological Seminary, whose _Visit from St. Nicholas_--"'Twas the Night Before Christmas," etc.--is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his time, but now remembered only as the author of the song _Sparkling and Bright_, and the patriotic ballad of _Monterey_; Robert H. Messinger, a native of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a familiar figure in fashionable society, who wrote _Give Me the Old_, a fine ode with a choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer and occasional writer, whose capital satire of _Nothing to Wear_ was published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for the _Mirror_ and who are still living and working in the maturity of their powers, it is not within the limits and design of this sketch to speak. But one of their contemporaries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be reckoned among the "literati of New York." A farmer lad from Chester County, who had learned the printer's trade and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with credentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of _Graham's_, and obtaining encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town in Germany and getting employment now and then at his trade to help pay the expenses of the trip. The story of these _Wanderjahre_ he told in his _Views Afoot_, 1846. This was the first of eleven books of travel written during the course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and his journeyings carried him to the remotest regions--to California, India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "by-ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were in New York, where he did literary work for the _Tribune_. He was a rapid and incessant worker, throwing off many volumes of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the magazines. His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged from _Rhymes of Travel_, 1848, and _Poems of the Orient_, 1854, to idyls and home ballads of Pennsylvania life, like the _Quaker Widow_ and the _Old Pennsylvania Farmer_; and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat mystical poems, like the _Masque of the Gods_, 1872--written in four days--and dramatic experiments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a