Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/58

40 Later Poets upon a roof-top of Damascus, to show us how much of a Syrian he was. We saw it in the down-drooping eyelids which made his profile like Tennyson's; in his acquiline nose, with the expressive tremor of the nostrils as he spoke; in his thinly tufted chin, his close-curling hair, his love of spices, music, coffee, colours, and perfumes. The author of Poems of the Orient (1854) was indeed a fitting leader and high priest of the cult of the East that was one characteristic of the New York school. After his first voyage to Europe, Taylor determined, in 1847, to try to make a living as a writer in New York; "this mighty New York," as he calls it with his appetite for large experience, "here is the metropolis of a continent ! " It was the New York of Bryant, Halleck, and Willis to which he had come ; it was under Willis's wing that he came to know the literary life of the city. When Greeley, the next year, invited him to a post on the Tribune, Taylor formed a connection that was to give him a sense of security for many years. In the newspaper rooms he now wrote for fifteen hours a day. He also contrived to see a good deal of R. H. Stoddard, Boker, Read, William Winter, and later Aldrich, who were to be his closest friends. He knew the Bohemians well enough not to be one of them; though he could scarcely avoid having some traits in common with them, since Bohemianism in one form or another has been a characteristic of New York literary life from the days of the Knickerbocker school. When the war came he sold a share of his Tribune stock so that his brother might enlist in the army; this he regarded as his "bit." The next year he was in Wash- ington as war correspondent for the Tribune, but his activity in that capacity was cut short by a chance, too good to be sacrificed, to see Russia and Central Asia as Secretary of the Legation in Russia. His Gettysburg Ode, despite the fact that his brother died on that field, is distinguished neither in its poetry nor in its grasp of the significance of the war. ' Mean- while he had built, in his old Pennsylvania haunts, a manorial house named Cedarcroft, at a cost of $17,000, then a good deal of money, — a roomy dwelling with, typically, a tower that commanded an extended view of the gentle Pennsylvania countryside. Cedarcroft became a haven of refuge from his ' See also Book III, Chap. ii.