“DEAR FRIEND:—I am not able to attend the memorial meeting in Tremont Temple on the 10th instant, but my heart responds to any testimonial appreciative of the intellectual achievements and the noble and manly life of Bayard Taylor. More than thirty years have intervened between my first meeting him in the fresh bloom of his youth and hope and honorable ambition, and my last parting with him under the elms of Boston Common after our visit to Richard H. Dana, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of that honored father of American poetry, still living to lament the death of his younger disciple and friend. How much he has accomplished in these years! The most industrious of men, slowly, patiently, under many disadvantages, he built up his splendid reputation. Traveller, editor, novelist, translator, diplomatist, and through all and above all poet, what he was he owed wholly to himself. His native honesty was satisfied with no half tasks. He finished as he went, and always said and did his best.
“It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature. His picturesque books of travel, his Oriental lyrics, his Pennsylvanian idyls, his Centennial ode, the pastoral beauty and Christian sweetness of ‘Lars,’ and the high arguments and rhythmic marvel of ‘Deukalion,’ are sureties of the permanence of his reputation. But at this moment my thoughts dwell rather upon the man than author. The calamity of his death, felt in both hemispheres, is to me and to all who intimately knew and loved him, a heavy personal loss. Under the shadow of this bereavement, in the inner circle of mourning, we sorrow most of all that we shall see his face no more, and long for ‘the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.’
“DEAR SIR:—I very much regret that I shall not be able to accept the invitation of the Young Men’s Congress for Friday evening of next week. At the same time I wish in heartiest sympathy to unite with them in honoring the memory of Bayard Taylor, whom I not only valued as a man of the highest intellectual qualities, but in whose loss I have to lament a dear friend. I beg you to convey to the committee of arrangements my deep sense of honor done me.