“The world, as I have said, considered Bayard Taylor as a traveller, and it was his pleasure, as well as his profit, during the first years of our friendship, to travel largely in California, in Egypt, in Japan, and elsewhere in the Old World. I read his letters of travel as they appeared in the ‘Tribune,’ and I read these letters again which he collected thus in books after his return. I saw that they were good of their kind; I felt that his prose was admirable for its simplicity and correctness; but, with a waywardness which I could not help, I slighted them for his poetry. I thought then, and think still, that his ‘California Ballads’ and ‘Poems of Travel’ are masterly examples of spirited, picturesque writing, and I am sure that his ‘Poems of the Orient’ are superior to anything of the kind in the English language. They have a local color which is absent from ‘Lalla Rookh.’ The ‘Bedouin Song,’ for instance, is instinct with the fiery, passionate life of the East, and is a worthy companion-piece to Shelley’s ‘Lines to an Indian Air.’ The ‘Poems of the Orient’ were dedicated to me, I shall always be happy to remember, in a poetical ‘Epistle from Tmolus.’ “Bayard Taylor had a sunny nature, which delighted in simple pleasures, and he had the happy art of putting trouble away from him. One trouble, however, he could not put away, as those who are familiar with his life and poems are aware. I have spoken of one of his early poems (‘Moan, ye wild winds! around the pane’), which embodied the first great sorrow of his young manhood. It was written after the death of his first wife, whose memory it embalms, and whose tender presence haunted him later in ‘The Mystery’ and ‘The Phantom.’ Among the literary acquaintances of Bayard Taylor and myself, I must not forget to mention the late Fitz James O’Brien, whose promise was greater than his performance, and who, clever as he was in prose, was at his best a graceful poet. Taylor and O’Brien were in the habit of meeting in my rooms at night, about twenty-five years ago, and of fighting triangular poetical duels. We used to sit at the same table, with the names of poetical subjects on slips of paper, and drawing out one at random, see which of us would soonest write a poem upon it. This practice of ours, which is well enough as practice merely, was the origin of Bayard Taylor’s ‘Echo Club.’