The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard TaylorConwell, Russell H.
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The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Conwell, Russell H.
Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878
“Here, under flowers which have grown on German soil, rests the
perishable encasing wherein for fifty-three years was enshrined
the richly-endowed spirit which bore the name of Bayard Taylor.
Coming races will name thee who never looked into thy kindly
countenance, never grasped thy honest hand, never heard a word
from thy mouth. And yet no, the breath of the lips fadeth away,
but thy words, thy words of song, will endure. In exhortation
to thy surviving dear ones, from the impulse of my heart as
thine oldest friend in the Old World, as thou were wont to call
me, and as representing German literature, I bid thee now a
parting farewell. What thou hast become and art to remain in
the empire of mind history will determine. To-day our hearts
do quake with grief and sorrow, and yet they are exalted. Thou
wert born in the fatherland of Benjamin Franklin, and like him,
to thine honor, raised thyself from a state of manual labor to
be an apostle of the spirit of purity and freedom, and to be a
representative of thy people among an alien nation. No, not in
a land of strangers, for thou wert at home among us; thou hast
died in the land of Goethe, to whose high spirit thou didst
always with devotion turn; thou hast raised him up a monument
before thine own people, and wouldst erect him yet another in
presence of all men; but that design has disappeared with thee.
But thou thyself hast been, and art still, one of them whose
coming he announced—a disciple of the universal literature, in
the free and boundless air of which the everlasting element
in man, scorning the limits of nationality, mounts on bold,
adventurous flights and ever on new poetic fancies sunwards
soars. In thy very latest work thou didst show thou livedst
in that religion which embraces in it all creeds, and in the
name of no one separates one from another. Nature gifted thee
with grace and strength, with a soul clear and full of chaste
enjoyment, with melody and the tuneful voice to search and
proclaim the workings of nature in the eternal and unexhausted
region of being, as well as to sing the earthly and ever-new
joys of married and filial love, of friendship, truth, and
patriotism, and the ever higher ascending revelations of the
history of man. Born in the New World, travelled in the Old,
and oh, so soon torn from the tree of life, thou hast taught
thy country the history of the German people, so that they know
each other as brothers, and of this let us remain mindful.
In tuneful words didst thou for thy people utter the jubilee
acclaim of their anniversary. When it returns, and the husks
of our souls do lie like this one here, then will the lips of
millions yet unborn pronounce the name of Bayard Taylor. May
thy memory be blessed.”
In one of his poems Mr. Taylor wrote, in 1862,—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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