The life, travels, and literary career of Bayard Taylor . hen read at a patriotic gather-ing of the yeomen, in a valley of the BerkshireHills, in Western Massachusetts. The lines were notso polished, nor the words so choice as many otherverses which Mr. Taylor had written; but they seemto come again as they were then recited, and awakenmemories of mountain glens, and mountain boys;of camps and battles, of fields of cotton made fieldsof carnage; of loved faces looking skyward, cold andstill; of a nation saved, redeemed, renewed. Thethree closing verses we have never forgotten. If they should fi
The life, travels, and literary career of Bayard Taylor . hen read at a patriotic gather-ing of the yeomen, in a valley of the BerkshireHills, in Western Massachusetts. The lines were notso polished, nor the words so choice as many otherverses which Mr. Taylor had written; but they seemto come again as they were then recited, and awakenmemories of mountain glens, and mountain boys;of camps and battles, of fields of cotton made fieldsof carnage; of loved faces looking skyward, cold andstill; of a nation saved, redeemed, renewed. Thethree closing verses we have never forgotten. If they should fire on Pickens, let the Colonel in commandPut me upon the rampart, with the flagstaff in my hand :No odds how hot the cannon-smoke, or how the shells may fly ;I 11 hold the Stars and Strix)es aloft, and hold them till I die! Im ready, General, so you let a post to me be given, Where Washington can see me, as he looks from highest heaven, And say to Putnam at his side, or, may be, General Wayne ; There stands old Billy Johnson, that fought at Lundys Lane!. iiB^^ VISIT TO GERMANY. 285 And when the fight is hottest, before the traitors fly, When shell and hall are screeching and bursting in the sky, If any t-hot should hit me, and lay me on my face, My soul vould go to Washingtons, and not to Arnolds place! In Jime, the necessity of rest, and the desire toobtiiin it in such a way as to get pleasure and advan-tage from his release, influenced him to take a trip tohis wifes old home, and to spend a month at the countryresidence of a friend which was situated on slopes ofthe Thuringian Forest, not far from Weimar and was a lovely spot, and a pretty cottage, and abouthim were numberless reminders of Schiller and Goethe,with whose names he was so creditably to connect hisown. Whether he gained the rest he needed or not,is a question still undecided. Certainly he did notgain as much as he would, had he left GoethesFaust, and his own new volume of poems behindhim, and chafed much
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Keywords: ., bookauthorconwellr, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, bookyear1879
