There must be many things in the events of common life which find no voice in poetry, as every life has its prose side. At all events, there were some duties connected with agricultural work which young Bayard never enjoyed. He never was ambitious to follow the plough, or do the miscellaneous odd jobs which perplex and weary a farmer’s boy. Yet, like Burns, he worked cheerfully, and wrung more or less poetry out of every occupation. He was a spare, wiry, nervous boy, quick at work, study, or play, and consequently had many leisure moments, when other boys were drudging along with ceaseless toil. His schoolmates, and the only school-teacher now living (1879) who taught him in his boyhood, all agree that he was a mischievous boy. He loved practical jokes, and, in fact, jokes of every kind. But he was ceaselessly framing verses. When his lesson was mastered, which was always in an incredibly short space of time after he took up his book, he plunged recklessly into poetry. Verses about the teacher, about snowbanks, about buttercups, about pigs, about courting, funerals, church services, schoolmates, and countless other themes filled his desk, pockets, and hat. Often he wrote love letters, couched in the most delicate phraseology, and signing the name of some classmate to them, would send them to astonished ploughboys and blushing maidens. One old gentleman in West Chester, Penn., always claimed that a set of Bayard’s burlesque verses, sent out in that way, induced him to court and marry a girl with whom he had no acquaintance, until the explanation of his tender epistle was demanded by her father. What volumes of poetry he must have written, which never saw the type, and how much more of that which he was in the habit of repeating to himself was left unwritten! The life he led, from his earliest school days, until he was fifteen years of age, was that of every farmer’s boy in America, who is compelled to work hard through the spring, summer, and autumn, and attend the district school in the winter. The only remarkable difference between Bayard and many other boys, was found in his strong desire to read, and his genius for poetry. He gathered the greater part of his youthful education from books, which he read at home, and by himself.