Page 108 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

"It was too tempting; so I climbed upon the tender and rested my weary
legs, while the pines and drifted sands flew by us an hour or more-- and I

had crossed New Jersey!"

This little description may be taken as a type of the way in which he
traveled and the way in which he described his travels-- a way that almost
immediately made him famous, and caused the public to call for volume

after volume from his pen.

CHAPTER VI

TWO YEARS IN EUROPE FOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS

A journey to Europe was not the common thing in those days that it has

since become, and no American had then thought of tramping over historic
scenes with little or no money. So this journey, projected and carried out by

Bayard Taylor, was really an original and daring undertaking. It was all the
more remarkable from the fact that the people of the community where he
had been born and brought up had scarcely ever gone farther from their

homesteads than Philadelphia.

In New York he visited all the editors with an introduction from Nathaniel
P. Willis; but none of them gave him any encouragement, except Horace
Greeley, the famous editor of the Tribune. Here is Bayard Taylor's own

description of the interview: "When I first called upon this gentleman,
whose friendship it is now my pride to claim, he addressed me with that

honest bluntness which is habitual to him: 'I am sick of descriptive letters,
and will have no more of them. But I should like some sketches of German
life and society, after you have been there and know something about it. If

the letters are good, you shall be paid for them, but don't write until you
know something.' This I faithfully promised, and kept my promise so well

that I am afraid the eighteen letters which I afterward sent from Germany,
and which were published in the Tribune, were dull in proportion as they
were wise."