ay in which he read poetry may be gathered from the following
extract from a letter to one of his comrades:

"By the way, what do you think of Bryant as a poet, and especially of
'Thanatopsis? For my part, my admiration knows no bounds. There is an
all-pervading love of nature, a calm and quiet but still deep sense of
everything beautiful. And then the high and lofty feeling which
mingles with the whole! It seems to me when I read his poetry that our
hearts are united, and that I can feel every throb of his answered
back by mine. This is what makes a poet immortal. There are but few
who make me feel so thrillingly their glowing thoughts as Bryant,
Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell (all Americans, you know), and these
I _love_. It is strange, the sway a master mind has over those who
have felt his power."

Another poet of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer was Tennyson. He
had read a criticism by Poe. "I still remember," he wrote afterward,
"the eagerness with which as a boy of seventeen, after reading his
paper, I sought for the volume; and I remember also the strange sense
of mental dazzle and bewilderment I experienced on the first perusal
of it. I can only compare it to the first sight of a sunlit landscape
through a prism; every object has a rainbow outline. One is fascinated
to look again and again, though the eyes ache."

He contributed several poems to the _Saturday Evening Post_, and then
wrote to Rufus W. Griswold, who, besides being connected with the
_Post_, was the editor of _Graham's Magazine_, the leading literary
periodical at that time. Those of us who know the life of Poe remember
Griswold as the man who pretended to be his friend, but who after
Poe's death wrote his life, filling it with all the scandalous
falsehoods he could hear of or invent. To Bayard Taylor, however, he
seems to have been a helpful friend.

"I have met with strange things since I wrote last," writes Taylor to
a school friend in March, 1843. "Last November I wrote to Mr.
Griswold, sending a poem to be inserted in the _Post_. However, I said
that it was my highest ambition to appear in _Grahams Magazine_. Some
time ago I got an answer. He said he had read my lines 'To the
Brandywine,' which appeared in the _Post_, with much pleasure, and
would have put them in the magazine if he had seen them in time. He
said the poem I sent him would appear in April in the magazine, and
requested me to contribute often and to call on him when I