About this time, also, Taylor began to write a series of novels, in the hope of bettering his fortunes thereby.  The books brought him some reputation, but to-day “Hannah Thurston” and “John Godfrey’s Fortunes” are seldom read.

A more important undertaking was his translation of “Faust,” which was accepted abroad as a monument of his scholarship, and remains to-day one of the best translations into English of the great Goethe’s most famous work.

Other books of travel were written and published, and various fresh volumes of poems.  During this period of his life he produced most of his longer descriptive and philosophic poems, such as “The Picture of St. John,” “Lars,” and “Prince Deukalion”; but his songs and ballads have proved more popular than these, though he threw into them all his energy and ambition.

On July 4, 1876, he delivered his stately National Ode at the Philadelphia Centennial, and the same year he returned to his desk at the Tribune office.  But failing health compelled him to give up this drudgery, and in the following year he was nominated United States minister to Berlin.  A grand banquet at which Bryant presided was given him in New York, on April 4, the eve of his departure; but before the year was finished he died in Berlin—­December 19, 1878.