During this memorable stay in New York I met Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of his first call, I rushed to my desk and wrote to my sister: “He has a port like Jove. “‘Nature might stand up And say to all the world: “‘This is a MAN!’”’” For once my ideal did not transcend the reality. Would that I could say it of all my dream-heroes and heroines! At his second call, Mr. Taylor was accompanied by Richard Henry Stoddard. At his first, he brought Charles Frederick Briggs, journalist and author, whose best-known book, _Harry Franco_, I had read and liked. I met him but once. Mr. Taylor honored me with his friendship until his lamented death. My recollections of him are all pleasant. We met seldom, but our relations were cordial; the renewal of personal association was ever that of friends who liked and understood each other. I reckoned it a favor that honored me, that his widow accepted me as her husband’s old acquaintance, and that his memory has drawn us together in bonds of affectionate regard. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then (in 1855) a mere stripling, yet already famous as the author of _Babie Bell_ and _Elsinore_, poems that would have immortalized him had he not written another line. I came to know him well during my Northern sojourn. His charming personality won hearts as inevitably as his genius commanded admiration. Halleck’s hackneyed eulogy of his early friend might be applied, and without dissent, to the best-belovéd of our later poets. To know him was to love him. The magnetism of the rarely-sweet smile, the frank sincerity of his greeting, the direct appeal of the clear eyes to the brother-heart which, he took for granted, beat responsive to his, were irresistible, even to the casual acquaintance. His letters were simply bewitching—as when I wrote to him after each of us had grown children, asking if he would give my youngest daughter the autograph she coveted from his hand. He began by begging me to ask him, the next time I wrote, for something that he _could_ do, not for what was impossible for him to grant. He had laid it down as a rule, not to be broken under any temptation, whatsoever, that he would never give his autograph. “If I could make an exception in the present case, you know how gladly I would do it, only to prove that I am unalterably your friend, “THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.” He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the born poet clothed him, as with a garment.