Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/60

42 Later Poets of Carlyle. This translation will doubtless come to be regarded as Bayard Taylor's foremost achievement. It was largely in- strumental in obtaining for him the appointment, in 1878, as Minister to Germany, whither he sailed thoroughly worn out with congratulations and flowers and champagne. Excessively hard work had taken its revenges, and he was never to enjoy the great future that the new life in Germany held out to him — he was never, for one thing, to carry out his fond plan of writing the biography of Goethe, a task for which he was well fitted. He died soon after reaching Germany. His death is the symbol of his life. His whole career, his poetical achievement most of all, was an approximation to high distinction that was frustrated through both outer and inner forces. He was cast in a large, a Goethean mould; he aspired highly and in many directions, seeking self-realization, but he lacked — outwardly — freedom from worldly troubles and — in- wardly — Goethe's ideal of Entsagung. His buoyant enthusi- asm, his capacity for hard work, tended to deploy in the void because of his lack of concentration and true harmony. He sought what he liked to call "cosmical experience," but in his eagerness he lost himself. The consequences are plainly visible in his poetry. It is the poetry of a man who has "aspired" rather than "attained." It is, to begin with, dangerously versatile. Aside from his varied experiments in prose, Taylor wrote lyrics, pastorals, idylls, odes, dramatic lyrics, lyrical dramas, translations, poems in German, poems in every mood and every metre, poems con- sciously or unconsciously imitative of a host of poets (he had a remarkable but ill-controlled verbal memory), poems on themes Oriental, Greek, Norse, American from coast to coast, poems classical, sentimental, romantic, realistic, poems of love, of nature, of art. In most of this work he was acceptable to his age ; in very little is he acceptable to a later time. His poetry, again, is diffuse, as the poetry of a fifteen-hour-a-day journalist is likely to be. Despite a certain buoyant resonance, a reso- nance, however, rarely full enough ; despite a frequent delicacy of perception and expression; despite a sense of melody that seldom fails; despite a simplicity of method and phrasing that betokens sincerity; — despite all these merits and others, his poetry attracts mildly because it is diffuse, and it is diffuse,