And Bayard Taylor was the accepted friend of nearly all the distinguished men of letters of his time.  He knew Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes in Boston, and even in his early years, when he first went to New York to work, he was able to pay them such flying visits as he describes in the following to Mary Agnew:  “Reached Boston Sunday morning, galloped out to Cambridge, and spent the evening with Lowell; went on Monday to the pine woods of Abingdon to report Webster’s speech, and dispatched it to the Tribune; got up early on Tuesday and galloped to Brookline to see Colonel Perkins; then off in the cars to Amesbury, and rambled over the Merrimac hills with Whittier; then Wednesday morning to Lynn, where I stopped a while at Helen Irving’s; back in the afternoon to Cambridge, where I smoked a cigar with Lowell, and then stayed all night at Longfellow’s.”

In New York his enjoyment of his friends, whom he met often and familiarly, was of the keenest.  Says Mr. R. H. Stoddard, “I recall many nights which Bayard Taylor spent in our rooms....  Great was our merriment; for if we did not always sink the shop, we kept it solely for our own amusement.  Fitz-James O’Brien was a frequent guest, and an eager partaker of our merriment, which sometimes resolved itself into the writing of burlesque poems.  We sat around a table, and whenever the whim seized us, we each wrote down themes on little pieces of paper, and putting them into a hat or box we drew out one at random, and then scribbled away for dear life.  We put no restriction upon ourselves:  we could be grave or gay, or idiotic even; but we must be rapid, for half the fun was in noting who first sang out, ‘Finished!’”

The reader will remember Taylor’s joy when a boy at receiving the autograph of Dickens.  The time was coming when he should be on terms almost of intimacy with all the leading poets and writers of London.  “I spent two days with Tennyson in June,” he writes to a literary friend in 1857, “and you take my word for it, he is a noble fellow, every inch of him.  He is as tall as I am, with a head which Read capitally calls that of a dilapidated Jove, long black hair, splendid dark eyes, and a full mustache and beard.  The portraits don’t look a bit like him; they are handsomer, perhaps, but haven’t half the splendid character of his face.  We smoked many a pipe together, and talked of poetry, religion, politics, and geology....  Our intercourse was most cordial and unrestrained, and he asked me, at parting, to be sure and visit him every time I came to England.”

A similar tale might be told of his relations with Thackeray and a score of others.