Mr. Taylor’s muse has of late become very still-faced, decorous and mindful of the art-proprieties.  Cautious is she, and there is perhaps nothing in this pastoral that will cause the grammarian to wince, or make the censorious rhetorician writhe in his judgment-seat with the sense that she is committing herself.  Not such were the early attributes of the great itinerant’s poetry.  When he used to unsling his minstrel harp in the wilds of California or on the sunrise mountains of the Orient, there were plenty of false notes, plenty of youthful vivacities that overbore the strings and were heard as a sudden crack, and, withal, a good deal of young frank fire.  Now there is much finish and the least possible suspicion of ennui.  But the life-history of Lars is worth reading.  It is a calm procession of pictures, without pretence, except the slight pretence of classical correctness.  The first part, which reflects Norwegian manners in a way reminding us more or less of the exquisite stories of Bjornsen, tells how two swains of Ulvik, Lars the hunter and Per the fisher, quarrel for love of Brita, and at a public wrestling decide the question by a combat, fighting with knives, in Norse fashion, while hooked to each other at the belt.  They strip, a la Heenan and Sayers.  Mr. Taylor, who does not often come behind the occasion when he can get a human figure to describe statue-wise or under a studio light, is perhaps a trifle too Phidian in bringing out the good looks of his fish-eating gladiators: 

                       The low daylight clad
  Their forms with awful fairness, beauty now
  Of life, so warm and ripe and glorious, yet
  So near the beauty terrible of Death.

Lars, the victor, has all the ill-luck.  His foe falls lifeless, his sweetheart calls him a murderer, and he flies from the law.  Another scene quickly shows him crossing the broad ocean, as so many Norwegians and Swedes had crossed before him, and seeking the protection of Swedish forts on Delaware banks.  Long, sad days pass on the ocean,

                      Till shining fisher-sails
  Came, stars of land that rose before the land;

and soon he leaps to shore in New Sweden, only to find that the civilization he seeks has set like a sinking planet into the abiding enlightenment of another race and creed.  Governor Printz’s fortress on Tinicum isle is a ruin of yellow bricks:  the wanderer strays up the broad stream

To where, upon her hill, fair Wilmington
Looks to the river over marshy weeds. 
He saw the low brick church with stunted tower,
The portal-arches, ivied now and old,
And passed the gate:  lo! there the ancient stones
Bore Norland names and dear familiar words! 
It seemed the dead a comfort spake.

The governor is a myth, the Swedes are dead, the Scandinavian tongues have been changed to English, and an English exactly conformed to King James’s translation of the Scriptures.  The first girl he speaks to checks him for addressing her with a civility: