At Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Bayard Taylor took me to the grave of his wife, and said “Here is the spot where I determined to live anew.  From this grave the real experiences of my life began.”  There he was completing his home called “Cedar Croft.”  But he died while U.S.  Minister to Germany.  The Young Men’s Congress of Boston, when arranging for a great memorial service in Tremont Temple, asked me to call on Dr. Oliver Wendel Holmes to ask him to write a poem on Bayard Taylor’s death.  When I asked Mr. Holmes to write this poem, to be read in the Tremont Temple, he was sitting on the rocking chair.  He rocked back and kicked up his feet, and began to laugh.  “I write a poem on Bayard Taylor—­ah, no—­but I tell you, if you will get Mr. Longfellow to write a poem on Bayard Taylor’s death, I will read it.”  These things only show the eccentricities of Mr. Holmes.  So I went to Mr. Longfellow and told him what Dr. Holmes had said, and here is the poem he wrote: 

  “Dead he lay among his books! 
  The peace of God was in his looks. 
  As the statues in the gloom
  Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
  So those volumes from their shelve. 
  Watched him, silent as themselves. 
  Ah, his hand will never more
  Turn their storied pages o’er. 
  Never more his lips repeat
  Songs of theirs, however sweet. 
  Let the lifeless body rest! 
  He is gone who was its guest. 
  Gone as travellers haste to leave
  An inn, nor tarry until eve.

  “Traveller! in what realms afar,
  In what planet, in what star,
  In what gardens of delight
  Rest thy weary feet to-night? 
  Poet, thou whose latest verse
  Was a garland on thy hearse,
  Thou hast sung with organ tone
  In Deukalion’s life thine own. 
  On the ruins of the Past
  Blooms the perfect flower, at last
  Friend, but yesterday the bells
  Rang for thee their loud farewells;
  And to-day they toll for thee,
  Lying dead beyond the sea;
  Lying dead among thy books;
  The peace of God in all thy looks.”

That great traveller, like Mr. Longfellow, used to tell me of his first wife.  He always said that her sweet spirit occupied that room and stood by him.  I often told him that he was wrong and argued with him, but he said, “I know she is here.”  I often thought of the great inspiration she had been to him in his marvelous poems and books.  Poor Bayard Taylor, “In what gardens of delight, rest thy weary feet to-night?” Mr. Longfellow once said that Mary “stood between him and his manuscript,” and he could not get away from the impression that she was with him all the time.  How sad was her early death and how he suffered the martyrdom of the faithful!  Longfellow’s home life was always beautiful But his later years were disturbed greatly by souvenir and curiosity seekers.

Horace Greeley died of a broken heart because he was not elected President of the United States, and never was happy in the last years of his life.  His idea of true happiness was to go to some quiet retreat and publish some little paper.  He once declared at a dinner in Brooklyn that he envied the owner of a weekly paper in Indiana whose paper was so weakly that the subscribers did not miss it if it failed to appear.