periments like the _Prophet_, 1874, and _Prince
Deukalion_, 1878. He was a man of buoyant and eager nature, with a
great appetite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for
learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the hue of his
favorite books. From {540} his facility, his openness to external
impressions of scenery and costume and his habit of turning these at
once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something
"newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's
work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry, too, though full
of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson
not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited _Bedouin Song_,
for example, has an echo of Shelley's _Lines to an Indian Air_:

"From the desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand
And the midnight hears my cry;
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die."

The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner of other poets
made him an admirable parodist and translator. His _Echo Club_, 1876,
contains some of the best travesties in the tongue, and his great
translation of Goethe's _Faust_, 1870-71--with its wonderfully close
reproduction of the original meters--is one of the glories of American
literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among
our poets of the second generation--the generation succeeding that of
Longfellow and Lowell--although the lack in him of original genius
self-determined to a {541} peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward
fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward
impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our
literary thought than some other writers less generously endowed.

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were profuse,
eloquent and faulty. _John Godfrey's Fortune_, 1864, gave a picture of
bohemian life in New York. _Hannah Thurston_, 1863, and the _Story of
Kennett_, 1866, introduced many incidents and persons from the old
Quaker life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his
boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, a
satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is a nobly conceived
character, though drawn with some exaggeration. The _Story of
Kennett_, which is large