In many a mountain fastness, By many a river’s foam, And through the gorgeous cities, ’Twas loneliness to roam; For the sweetest music in my heart Was the olden songs of home.” When in Florence, in 1846, he wrote a poem entitled “In Italy,” wherein were the following expressive lines:— “Rich is the soil with Fancy’s gold; The stirring memories of old Rise thronging in my haunted vision, And wake my spirit’s young ambition. But as the radiant sunsets close Above Val d’Arno’s bowers of rose, My soul forgets the olden glory, And deems our love a dearer story. Thy words, in Memory’s ear, outchime The music of the Tuscan rhyme; Thou standest here—the gentle-hearted— Amid the shades of bards departed. I see before thee fade away Their garlands of immortal bay, And turn from Petrarch’s passion-glances To my own dearer heart-romances.” “A single thought of thee effaced The fair Italian dream I chased; For the true clime of song and sun Lies in the heart which mine hath won.” When he reached London in 1846, after his long pilgrimage, and when so reduced in funds and friends, he yet had the time and mind to write of her these graceful rhymes:— “I’ve wandered through the golden lands Where art and beauty blended shine— Where features limned by painters’ hands Beam from the canvas made divine, And many a god in marble stands, With soul in every breathing line; And forms the world has treasured long Within me touched the world of song.” “Yet brighter than those radiant dreams Which won renown that never dies— Where more than mortal beauty beams In sybil’s lips, and angel’s eyes— One image, like the moonlight, seems Between them and my heart to rise, And in its brighter, dearer ray, The stars of Genius fade away.” It is an interesting study and one not altogether unprofitable, to follow, through an author’s works the marks of his peculiar likes, joys, and sorrows. For in science, philosophy, history or poetry, the feelings of the student will unguardedly creep into his manuscripts as if between the lines, and often a little word, or a thoughtlessly inserted sentence or comment, will reveal whole chapters of a life which has been carefully, scrupulously hidden. So in Bayard Taylor’s poetry, written on sea and on land, at home and abroad, in poverty and in affluence, there is a certain vein of originality, and certain references to his own life, which, when placed together, give the clew to his inner life, and reveal a charming domestic scene, which cannot be described in prose. One of his characters in “The Poet’s Journal,” says:— “Dear Friend, one volume of your life I read Beneath these vines: you placed it in my hand And made it mine,—but how the tale has sped Since then, I know not, or can understand From this fair ending only. Let me see The intervening chapters, dark and bright, In order, as you lived them.”