Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/59

Taylor 41 arduous travels, where he might write undisturbed, and con- verse at ease with Boker and Stedman and the rest, and smoke his narghile, and shock the good people of Kennett through his Continental Gemuthlichkeit in the use of liquor ; it became also, unfortunately, as Stoddard says, ' ' a Napoleonic business for a poet," who, in committing himself to earning a large income, sometimes $18,000 a year, by writing prose, appreciably in- jured his poetry. And poetry was his passion, his religion, as he says with proud humility in Porphyrogenitus. In 1874 he told Howells that he was trying desperately to bury his old reputation as a traveller and writer of travel books ' ' several thousand fathoms deep " and to create a new one. His prose he wrote with fatal facility, performing prodigies of speed, but his poetry he com- posed with the most painstaking care, spending hours over a couplet, if necessary, tiU it satisfied him. Like Aldrich, he de- spised American dialect verse. He venerated the great traditions of poesy, and never threw off the influence of his best-loved masters, Tennyson and Shelley. The "Immortal Brother" of his Ode to Shelley has left traces in most of his poetical work. But, after all, it is Goethe, rather than Shelley, who is the index to Taylor's mind. He was so devoted to Goethe, and to German literature generally, that Whitelaw Reid found it necessary to say that "those who did not know him, have some- times described him as more German than American." Some acquaintance with the German language he picked up at home ; far more he gathered in his hibernation in Germany in the first year of his wanderings abroad ; in time he spoke it like a native, and composed poems in it, including a Jubel-lied (Berlin, 1870) celebrating German unity. He enjoyed life in Germany much as an earlier and greater Pennsylvanian cosmopolite, Franklin, enjoyed life in London and Paris, but his loyalty to America was never in question. He came to know the great men of Ger- many, including Bismarck, who, commenting on a novel by Taylor, remarked that the villain was allowed to escape too easily. In 1869 he was made non-resident professor of German literature at Cornell, where he gave courses of lectures. In 1870 he completed his admirable translation of Faust in the original metres, which he had projected twenty years before, and over which he had laboured with something of the devotion