sharing the hardships of the gold diggers,
without taking part in their labors."

On his return he gathered his letters into a volume entitled
"Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire: comprising a voyage to
California, via Panama; Life in San Francisco and Monterey; Pictures
of the Gold Region, and Experiences of Mexican Travel."

He now began to feel the strength and confidence of success; his brain
was seething with new ideas, and he felt as if he could do that which
would realize the destiny of which he had dreamed. But sorrow was
already at his door. His hopes were for the time broken and thrown
back by the death of Mary Agnew.

In the summer of 1851 he found himself worn out and depressed. His
health was shattered and his mind was overpowered. But a change and
rest were at hand. The editors of the _Tribune_ suggested his going to
Egypt and the Holy Land. In the autumn he set out, and spent the
winter in ascending the Nile to Khartoum. He even went up the White
Nile to the country of the Shillooks, a region then scarcely known to
white men.

Bayard Taylor fancied that he had two natures, one a southern nature
and one a northern nature. Of course the northern nature was his
regular and ordinary one. In one of his later journeys, when he had
entered Spain from France and was sitting down to a breakfast of red
mullet and oranges fresh from the trees, "straightway," he says, "I
took off my northern nature as a garment, folded it and packed it
neatly away in my knapsack, and took out in its stead the light,
beribboned and bespangled southern nature, which I had not worn for
eight or nine years."

He donned this southern nature for the first time on his trip to
California by way of Panama. Horace Greeley especially commended his
letter from Panama. But it was during his journey in Egypt that he
became most saturated with the south, and composed his "Poems of the
Orient"--perhaps the best he ever wrote. He had not been in Alexandria
a day and a half before he wrote to his mother that he had never known
such a delicious climate. "The very air is a luxury to breathe," he
said. "I am going to don the red cap and sash," he wrote from Cairo,
"and sport a saber at my side. To-day I had my hair all cut within a
quarter of an inch of the skin, and when I look in the glass I see a
strange individual. Think of me as having no hair, a long beard, and a
copper-colored face." So much like a native did he become that when h