Taylor’s collection of “Poems at Home and Abroad,” dedicated to Boker in 1855, suggests that the two must have continually talked over the possibilities of gathering their best effusions in book form.  Did not Taylor write, as early as June 30, 1850, “You must come out in the Fall with a volume of poems.  Stoddard will, and so, I think, will I. You can get a capital volume, with your ‘Song’, ‘Sir John’, ‘Goblet’, and other things....  The publishing showmen would of course parade our wonderful qualities, and the snarling critics in the crowd would show their teeth; but we would be as unmoved as the wax statues of Parkman and Webster, except that there might now and then be a sly wink at each other, when nobody was looking.”  The two friends had been separated for some time, while Taylor wandered over the face of the globe, writing from Cairo, in the shadow of the pyramids, and exclaiming, in Constantinople (July 18, 1852), “There is a touch of the East in your nature, George.”

In 1856, Boker prepared his two volumes of “Plays and Poems” for the press.  He had won considerable reputation as a sonneteer, and this was further increased by the tradition that Daniel Webster had quoted him at a state dinner in Washington.  As yet he was merely a literary poet, and a literary dramatist whose name is usually linked with that Philadelphia group discussed in Vol.  II of this collection.[A]

Writing of the Philadelphia of 1868, Leland says: 

[It was] “the Philadelphia when ‘Emily Schaumbeg’ was the belle and Penington’s ‘store’ was the haunt of the booklover, when snow fell with old fashioned violence, and Third Street was convulsed by old-fashioned panics, when everybody went mad over Offenbach, when one started for New York from the Walnut Street Ferry, when George Boker was writing his dramas and George Childs was beginning to play the public Maecenas.”  Oftentimes the sturdy figure of Walt Whitman could be seen walking on Broad Street, while Horace Greely, buried in newspapers, travelled aboard a boat between New York and Philadelphia.

It was the Civil War that not only turned Boker’s pen to the Union Cause, but changed him politically from a Democrat to a staunch Republican.  In fact, his name is closely interwoven with the rehabilitation of the Republican party in Philadelphia.  He often confessed that his conscience hurt him many times when he realized he cast his first vote for Buchanan.  “After that,” he is quoted as having said, “the sword was drawn; it struck me that politics had vanished entirely from the scene—­that it was now merely a question of patriotism or disloyalty.”  His “Poems of the War,” issued in 1864, contained such examples of his martial and occasional ability as the “Dirge for a Soldier,” “On the Death of Philip Kearney” and “The Black Regiment,” besides “On Board the Cumberland” and the “Battle of Lookout Mountain.”