The novels of the traveler, of which he wrote only four, the scenes being laid in Pennsylvania and New York, possess the same eloquent profusion manifest in his verse, and give the reader the impression of having been written with the ease and dash which characterize his stories of travel. In fact, his busy life was too much hurried to allow the spending of much time on anything. His literary life occupied only thirty-four years and in that time he wrote thirty-seven volumes. He entered almost every department of literature and always displayed high literary ability. Besides his volumes of travel and the four novels referred to he was a constant newspaper correspondent, and then came the greatest labor of all, poetry. This he regarded as his realm, and it was his hope of fame. Voluminous as were the works of travel and fiction and herculean the efforts necessary to do the prose writing he turned off, it was, after all, but the antechamber to his real labors. It was to poetry that he devoted most thought and most time. In 1877 Bayard Taylor was appointed minister to Berlin by President Hayes, and died December 19th, 1878, while serving his country in that capacity. * * * * * THE BISON-TRACK. STRIKE the tent! the sun has risen; not a cloud has ribb’d the dawn, And the frosted prairie brightens to the westward, far and wan; Prime afresh the trusty rifle――sharpen well the hunting-spear―― For the frozen sod is trembling, and a noise of hoofs I hear! Fiercely stamp the tether’d horses, as they snuff the morning’s fire, And their flashing heads are tossing, with a neigh of keen desire; Strike the tent――the saddles wait us! let the bridle-reins be slack, For the prairie’s distant thunder has betray’d the bison’s track! See! a dusky line approaches; hark! the onward-surging roar, Like the din of wintry breakers on a sounding wall of shore! Dust and sand behind them whirling, snort the foremost of the van, And the stubborn horns are striking, through the crowded caravan. Now the storm is down upon us――let the madden’d horses go! We shall ride the living whirlwind, though a hundred leagues it blow! Though the surgy manes should thicken, and the red eyes’ angry glare Lighten round us as we gallop through the sand and rushing air! Myriad hoofs will scar the prairie, in our wild, resistless race, And a sound, like mighty waters, thunder down the desert space: Yet the rein may not be tighten’d, nor the rider’s eye look back―― Death to him whose speed should slacken on the madden’d bison’s track!