Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (California Legacy) (California Legacy Book)
(Bayard Taylor was among the thousands of young men who sp...)
Bayard Taylor was among the thousands of young men who spilled into California in the tumultuous year 1849. Dispatched by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, Taylor was to report on the madness, exuberance, and upheaval of the California gold rush. Traveling throughout the state, Taylor witnessed the explosive growth of San Francisco and the instantaneous creation of Sierra townships. He traversed the nearly deserted lands of the Spanish missions and attended the constitutional convention that set the boundaries and forged the laws for the new state.
Now newly introduced by James D. Houston, with annotations by Robert Senkewicz, this cornerstone of California literature is once again available to a wide audience. Roger Kahn (Boys of Summer), himself once a journalist with the New York Herald Tribune, provides an afterword.
A Visit to India, China, and Japan: In the Year 1853
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(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
(This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat.
Background
Taylor was born on January 11, 1825, in Kennett Square in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His earliest American ancestor, Robert Taylor, had come from England with William Penn and had settled near Brandywine Creek. There the Taylors had remained purely English and strictly Quaker until John Taylor, grandfather of Bayard, married Ann Bucher, of a Swiss Mennonite family, and was expelled from meeting. John Taylor's son Joseph married Rebecca Bauer Way, of English and German stock. The Swiss and German strains, however, did not disturb the Quaker discipline of the household in which Bayard Taylor was brought up. The village of Kennett Square and the Taylor homestead, a mile away, were quiet, orderly, and - for him - dull.
At fourteen he was told by a lecturing phrenologist, Thomas Dunn English, that he would be a traveler and a poet.
Education
He wrote to John Sartain asking to be apprenticed as engraver. He was apprenticed instead to the printer of the West Chester Village Record at seventeen.
Career
Having attracted the attention of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, editor of Graham's Magazine and anthologist of the American ephemerides, Taylor was encouraged to publish his first volume of verse, Ximena (1844), and was enabled to get free of his apprenticeship. With money advanced by the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Gazette of Philadelphia for letters which he was to send back from his travels, he walked to Washington for a passport. In New York he was generously received by Nathaniel Parker Willis, and he made a conditional agreement with Horace Greeley for letters on Germany to the Tribune.
He sailed for Liverpool in July 1844 with his cousin Franklin Taylor and his friend Barclay Pennock. Only nineteen, Bayard Taylor had already shown the energy, eagerness, and charm which were to clear every path before him and make him his age's young hero among travelers. With one or both of his companions he spent two years in Europe.
After a turn in Scotland, he visited London, hurried to the Rhine and Heidelberg, and then settled down for six months in Frankfurt. By Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, he went on foot to Vienna, and later journeyed in the same way to Italy, where he stayed longest in Florence. He shipped to Marseilles, tramped to Paris, returned to London. Once more back in New York, he published his Views Afoot (1846), which had an introduction by Willis and which ran to six editions within the year and to twenty in nine years.
Taylor had traveled like a penniless, well-behaved undergraduate, excitedly alive to all he saw. He wrote ingenuously and engagingly. Editors and publishers hastened to work the vein he had revealed in himself. After a year in Phoenixville, Pa. , where he bought, ran, and soon sold the Gazette (re-named the Pioneer), he left to try his luck in New York in December 1847. First the contributor of a weekly article to the Literary World, after January 1848 he was manager of the miscellaneous and literary department of the New York Tribune.
He made friends with writers in both New York and Boston, and moved in mildly Bohemian circles, a poet in private, a journalist in public. The California gold rush took him, on a commission for the Tribune, to the Pacific. He sailed June 1849 by way of Panama, spent five months in California, enjoyed the high spirits and variety of the gold regions without minding the hardships or violence, crossed Mexico from Mazatl n to Vera Cruz, and was in New York again by March 1850. His Eldorado (1850) doubled his fame as a traveler. As poet he was that year invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, and he won a prize offered by P. T. Barnum for the best lyric to be sung by Jenny Lind on her appearance at Castle Garden.
He traveled in Egypt, Abyssinia, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, India, China for more than two years. At Shanghai he joined Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's squadron and spent the summer of 1853 as master's mate, writing an account of the Japanese expedition which by the rules of the service he was never allowed to publish.
Returning to New York around the Cape of Good Hope, he told about his travels in A Journey to Central Africa (1854), The Lands of the Saracen (1855), and A Visit to India, China, and Japan, in the Year 1853 (1855), and gave countless lectures to lyceum audiences. He never outlived these journeys. For the home-keeping Americans of that generation he remained a Marco Polo, masterfully familiar with incredible lands.
In Whittier's "The Tent on the Beach" Taylor appears as the Traveler. He himself, if not tired of travel, at least desired increasingly to be known as a man of letters. Habit, facility, and need of funds sent him again to Europe during 1856-58 and made him write Northern Travel (1858), Travels in Greece and Russia (1859), and At Home and Abroad (1860).
But having married for the second time, Taylor gradually withdrew to a farm which he had bought near his native village and on which he built a house called Cedarcroft. It was a delusive retirement. When he established himself, with his wife and daughter, there in May 1860 he was still only thirty-five, full of vivacious impulses and cosmopolitan tastes. The neighborhood which he had come to remember as pastoral turned out to be as dull as ever. It bored him with its primness and disapproved of him, especially for his robust use and praise of alcohol. His chief country friends were the family of Horace Howard Furness, the elder, at Wallingford twenty miles away. In spite of Taylor's pleasure in Cedarcroft it was a burden for him to maintain it and its open-handed hospitality. To the end of his life he was strained with anxiety and hackwork.
During the Civil War he served for a time as correspondent of the Tribune at Washington. In May 1862 he went to Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) as secretary of legation under Simon Cameron, the new minister to Russia. Left in charge in September, Taylor had a hand in keeping Russia friendly to the Union, but he was not, as he hoped, chosen to succeed his chief.
Once again at Cedarcroft in September 1863 he published a novel he had completed in Russia, Hannah Thurston (1863), and followed it with two others, John Godfrey's Fortunes (1864) and The Story of Kennett (1866). His novels were vigorously crowded with things he had experienced or observed in America, but they were without distinction. So were the poems with which, earlier and later, he filled more than a dozen volumes, among them: Rhymes of Travel, Ballads and Poems (1849), A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs (1852), Poems of the Orient (1855), The Poet's Journal (1862), The Picture of St. John (1866), The Masque of the Gods (1872), Lars: A Pastoral of Norway (1873), The Prophet (1874), Home Pastorals, Ballads and Lyrics (1875), The Echo Club and Other Literary Diversions (1876), Prince Deukalion (1878).
Between 1863 and 1870 he gave himself up, with intervals of travel and necessary odd jobs, to his translation, in the original meters, of Faust (2 vols. , 1870 - 71). He knew all of the first and most of the second part so well that he could often translate without consulting the text. This translation was to be the English Faust. Instantly applauded, it has ever since been looked upon as the best version, and has been extravagantly praised. But its fidelity and sonorousness should not be allowed to hide the fact that Taylor rendered Faust in the second-rate English poetry which was all he knew how to write.
His last years were full of honors. He held the position of non-resident professor of German literature at Cornell from 1870 to 1877 and gave occasional lectures at the university. He was chosen to write the Gettysburg Ode in 1869 and the Centennial Ode in 1876. His renown in Germany was immense. He planned to crown his life with a great biography of Goethe. Sent as minister to Germany in April 1878, he saw himself at last free to live and write as he desired. But he had worn himself out doing what he thought he did not want to do, and he died in December of the same year. His body, brought home, lay in state in the New York city hall and was buried in the Hicksite Cemetery in Longwood, Pa. There was hardly a poet in America who did not celebrate Taylor's death in generous verse.
Quotations:
"I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die. "
"By wisdom wealth is won; but riches purchased wisdom yet for none. "
"The most annoying of all blockheads is a well-read fool. "
"Love is better than Fame. "
"Love's humility is love's true pride. "
Connections
Long in love with Mary Agnew of Kennett Square, Taylor was married to her on October 24, 1850, that they might be together during the few months she had still to live. She died in December.
He married Marie Hansen, daughter of the Danish astronomer Peter Andreas Hansen, at Gotha in October 27, 1857.