“It was not long before we were what Burns calls ‘bosom cronies.’ We used, I remember, to spend our Saturday evenings together, generally at his rooms, which were within a stone’s throw of the ‘Tribune’ office, at a boardinghouse in Warren Street, not far from Broadway. He lived in a sky parlor, which is present before me now, as if I had seen it but an hour ago. I remember just where his table stood, and the little desk upon which he afterward wrote so many books, and upon which he was then writing so many charming poems. I took up the collected edition of his poetical works this afternoon in my library, and turning over the leaves sorrowfully, felt the weight of thirty years roll from me—not lightly, as it would have done a few weeks ago, but with a pain for which I have no words. They were all there, the poems which I remembered so well—‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’ (which I read in MS. before it saw the light of print), ‘The Metempsychosis of the Pine,’ ‘Mon-da-min’ (which was written years before the ‘Song of Hiawatha’), ‘Kubleh,’and, saddest of all, the solemn dirge beginning ‘Moan, ye wild winds! around the pane.” As I read, I saw the eager face, the glowing eyes, the kindly smile of the enthusiastic young poet, whom the world preferred to consider as a traveller merely, and who knew so many things of which I was profoundly ignorant. My nature is not a reverent one, I fear, but I looked up to Bayard Taylor, and admired his beautiful genius. We read and criticised each other’s verse a good deal too lightly and generously, I have since thought, and talked of the poets whom we were studying. It was his fancy that there was something in his genius which was allied to that of Shelley, and I hoped that I might claim some relationship with Keats, enough at least to make me a ‘poor relation.’ We talked long and late; we smoked mild cigars; and, once in a while when our exchequers were replenished, we indulged in the sweet luxury of stewed oysters, over which we had more talk, of present plans and future renown. I was, I believe, Bayard Taylor’s most intimate friend at this time, and the one with whom he most consorted, though he had, of course, a large literary acquaintance among the young writers of the period, whose name was Legion, and whose works are now forgotten. I have spent many happy nights with my dead friend, but none which were so happy as those. I looked forward to them as young men look forward to holidays which they have planned. I look back upon them as old men look back to their past delights, with pity and regret.