RD TAYLOR

[Illustration: BAYARD TAYLOR.]

BAYARD TAYLOR

CHAPTER I

HIS BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

Bayard Taylor was born in the country village of Kennett Square,
Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jan. 11, 1825, "the year when the first
locomotive successfully performed its trial trip. I am, therefore," he
says, "just as old as the railroad." He was descended from Robert
Taylor, a rich Friend, or Quaker, who had come to Pennsylvania with
William Penn in 1681, and settled near Brandywine Creek. Bayard's
grandfather married a Lutheran of pure German blood, and on that
account was expelled from the Society of Friends, which at that time
had very strict rules regarding the marriage of its members. Although
the family still used the peculiar speech of the Quakers, and clung to
the Quaker principles of peace and order, none of them ever returned
to the society.

When Bayard was four years old, the family moved to a farm about a
mile from the village. There they lived, until, years afterward, the
successful traveler and poet bought an estate near by and built a
magnificent house upon it, into which he received his father and
mother and brothers and sisters, with that open-hearted generosity and
hospitality which was so much a part of his nature.

He was the fourth child of his parents; but the three older children
had died in infancy, and he remained as the eldest of the family.

Chester County, Pennsylvania, has always been a rich farming region,
peopled by solid, well-to-do farmers, many of whom are Quakers. Here
the northern elms toss their arms to the southern cypresses, as the
poet has it; the two climates seem to meet and mingle, in a sort of
calm, neutral zone, and the vegetation of the North is united with the
vegetation of the South, to produce a peculiar richness and variety.

In such surroundings the boy grew up, a farmer's lad, and learned that
love of nature which was a part of his being till the day he died.
"The child," says he, "that has tumbled into a newly plowed furrow
never forgets the smell of the fresh earth.... Almost my first
recollection is of a swamp, into which I went barelegged at morning,
and out of which I came, when driven by hunger, with long stockings of
black mud, and a mask of the same. If the child was missed from the
house, the first thing that suggested itself was to climb upon a mound
which overlooked the swamp. Somewhere among the tufts of rushes and
the bladed leaves of the