His Marriage.—German Relatives.—Intention of visiting
Siberia.—Goes to Greece instead.—Dalmatia.—Spolato.—Arrival
at Athens.—His first View of the Propylæa.—The
Parthenon.—Excursion to Crete.—Earthquake at
Corinth.—Mycenæ.—Sparta.—The Ruins of Olympia.—Visit to
Thermopylæ.—Aulis.—Return to Athens.—His Acquirements.
Mr. Taylor was married in October following his return from Norway and
Sweden, to Marie Hansen, whose father had already gained a world-wide
reputation as an astronomer through his works on Physical Astronomy, and
was then winning renown for his “Tables de la Lune,” for which he was
given a prize by the English Government, as a public benefactor. He was
a man of remarkable mathematical genius, universally respected, and the
founder of the Erfurt Observatory near Gotha. It was a family of scholars
which received Mr. Taylor as a son and brother, and a fortunate alliance
for the world of letters. It would be interesting to our readers, no
doubt, to know all about the ceremony, the guests, the letters, and the
relatives. But that which at some future day may be elevated to the
plane of history, would be mere gossip now; and could only serve, for
the present, to bring more vividly before his loved ones living, the
greatness and reality of their loss.
Not even such an event as his marriage was allowed to interfere with his
work. His travels in the North had been in a great measure described in
detail from day to day, as he stopped for food and rest, and when he left
Stockholm for Germany, a large pile of manuscript had accumulated, which
needed correction and arrangement before being sent to his publishers
in New York. To this he applied himself closely, and a month after
his marriage, was in London making the closing arrangements for the
appearance of his book on “Northern Travel,” published by G. P. Putnam &
Sons, and containing a condensed account of his winter and summer in the
Norse countries.
Immediately after despatching the manuscript for the book, together
with several letters for the press, he made his preparations for a
winter’s sojourn in Greece. He had purposed to take a trip from St.
Petersburg across the continent of Asia, through Siberia to Kamtschatka,
and returning through Persia and by the shores of the Black Sea. But
it appears that neither Mr. Greeley, nor Mr. Putnam, nor his German
relatives approved of the undertaking, which, together with some
unsatisfactory financial details, caused him to abandon the snows of
Siberia for the sunshine of Attica.
This arrangement must have been a far more pleasant one for him, as Mrs.
Taylor and other friends could accompany him to Athens, and as that land
was so connected with the richest themes for poets and scholars. Many
of Byron’s poems had been favorites with Mr. Taylor from his boyhood,
and especially familiar were those passages relating to Greece; for the
reading-books in use by American scholars, in his school-days, contained,
very wisely, several selections from Byron’s patriotic poems relating to
Greece. To this was added an appreciation of “Childe Harold,” gained by
visiting the Italian scenery where Byron lived during those years of his
voluntary exile.
The party left Gotha in the early part of December, 1857, and going down
the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Gulf, visited the ancient town of
Spolato, where the ruins of the Emperor Diocletian’s palaces are still
imposing and beautiful. Without losing the steamer, which put in at all
the small ports along the route, they skirted the southern shores of the
Gulf of Corinth; and, after crossing the Isthmus near Ancient Corinth,
sailed direct for Piræus.
To a man of Mr. Taylor’s mental capacity and disposition, the country
afforded the means for the highest enjoyment. Men may be as unsentimental
as a beast, and as regardless of ancient greatness as a savage, and yet
their lives will be influenced more or less by a sojourn in old Greece.
Later philosophers declare, and attempt to prove it on scientific
principles, that the typography of the country, added to the influences
of the climate, produced the great minds of ancient Greece. If so,
which may be wholly or partially true, then the same hills and the same
valleys, combined with the same climate, must influence the mental
characteristics of those who live there now. If, however, as is too
frequently the fact to make a clear case of the philosophers’ claims,
men do reside under the Acropolis and in the Academian groves wholly
unaffected by the scenery, certain it is that to a poet whose whole
ambition and only joy was found in a determination to follow the lead of
Homer, Simonides, and Tyrtæus, it was an ecstasy of mental satisfaction
to feel the influence of the surrounding associations. Even Mr. Taylor
feared that his name as a poet would lead people to consider his
descriptions to be somewhat colored by the imagination, and labored hard
to avoid the imputation. He, with great candor and truth, claimed that
men are as great as they were in the days of Demosthenes and Aristides,
although the community to which they belonged has moved farther west. He
did not believe that all the great and noble and good belonged to the
past. He recognized the great fact that dead men have better reputations
than living ones, and that the longer a man lies in his grave the greater
seem his virtues, and the less the number and magnitude of his faults,
_i. e._ if he is not forgotten altogether. So, Mr. Taylor inserted such
thoughts in his letters and conversation, for the sake of seasoning his
enthusiasm, which he feared was too active. But it was as useless for
him as it was for Byron, and as it has been for other American poets
who visited those ancient groves, to keep above or outside the subtle
and powerful influences which Greece puts forth. Oh! land of heroes,
patriots, poets, philosophers, orators, and musicians! Oh, land of
republics and birthplace of fleets! How like a visit to the homes of
Solon, Plato, Socrates, and Polycrates it is to walk thy fields, and how
like a flight to the homes of the gods, to dream through thy moonlit
nights!
Mr. Taylor made the most of his winter in Greece, and visited every
place of ancient renown which was accessible to travellers. He scarcely
waited for the dawn of his first day in Athens before he hastened to
the Acropolis, and admired its marvels and historical suggestions. At
the Propylæa, which crowns the mountain with beauty and majesty, where
all the destructive inventions of two thousand years have failed to
annihilate the monument which Phidias and Calicrates erected to their
genius, Mr. Taylor was overwhelmed with emotions, and gazed with wonder
at the chaste sculpture which adorns the most graceful structure ever
made of marble, and in silent awe contemplated the pillars, cornices,
tablets, pavements, and broken ornaments with which he was surrounded.
Where was the Coliseum he had praised so much when a boy? Where were
the cathedrals, palaces, and castles he had regarded as so sublime?
Everything he had seen sank into insignificance beside the ponderous yet
exquisitely beautiful pile before him. He was so affected, that when
he spoke he whispered, as if in the presence of Jupiter, and his eyes
grew moist as he tried to compass the grandeur of the lofty Parthenon
and Propylæa. This language will seem extravagant to the reader who
has not felt such sensations. The writer, who makes no pretensions of
being a poet either in letters or by nature, has been so filled with
the unspeakable grandeur of some of the scenes from the heights of the
Alps, Himalayas, and Rocky Mountains, as to find himself, to his own
surprise, shedding copious streams of tears. It is a sensation unknown
to common experience, and our language has no adequate terms with which
to describe it. Such a feeling, beyond a doubt, was that which reigned
in his sensitive nature when he stood in the porch of the Parthenon.
To him, those marvels of art produced the impression which nothing but
the mightiest mountain-peaks could awaken in others. It must have been
grand to possess such a nature; and it is grand to follow him through his
letters and books. There was the crowning point of all his travel. It had
been reserved until near the end of his wanderings, and a fitting climax
it was. The poet and traveller amid the ruins of Athens! He spent many
happy hours amid the crumbling evidences of Athenian greatness. Temples
uncounted lay half-buried in the broken soil. Those of Demeter, Hercules,
Apollo, Aphrodite, Hephæstus, Theseus, Dioscuri, could be traced in the
earth, or confronted the antiquarian with majestic porches; while the
Odeon, Gymnasium, Museum, Aglaurium, Lyceum, Prytanæum, Erechtheum,
Propylæa, and Parthenon, can easily be reconstructed in the imagination
of any student of Greek history with the aid of their wonderful ruins.
And when those colossal edifices stand forth in their beauty, it is but
a step to the sublimest dreams, wherein Socrates, Anaxagoras, Pericles,
Eschylus, Sophocles, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and their noble cotemporaries,
walked through the colonnades, along the payed streets, and among the
verdant, classic groves which bordered on the Ilissus. The walls of
Athens, extending from Hymettus to the distant sea, the city crowded
with the wealth of the commercial world, and the fields as verdant and
fruitful as now.
Mr. Taylor often remarked that he should never have been a successful
traveller had he not been a poet; and it might be added that persons,
in whom the power to recall the past through the debris of the present
is wholly lacking, had better not travel at all. There are hills in
Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire, far more picturesque than the Acropolis,
and on them might be erected a tolerably accurate copy of the Propylæa,
Erechtheum, and Parthenon as they now stand, and the curious might
visit them to observe the beauty of the architecture and remark the
foolishness of those who constructed them. Unconnected with any history,
and the originals unheard of, they would be nothing but mere monuments to
folly, with all their symmetry. Take away from Athens the records of its
grand humanity; the stories of its achievements; the tales concerning
the wonders of its genius; the renown of its arms; the memories of its
misfortunes; and all the life, the spirit, that shines through its
fragments, as the soul beams through the eye of a loved face, would be
extinguished, and no great good could come from seeing them.
We mention these things, not to excuse Mr. Taylor for his strong
assertions concerning the effect these ruins had upon him, but to give
to the student a clearer insight into the nature and life of the poet,
Bayard Taylor. From Athens, after visiting the king and queen, Mr. Taylor
made excursions into the interior, and to the Island of Crete, visiting,
in his various tours, Candia, Rhithymnos, Corinth, Leuetra, Mycenæ,
Arcadia, Sparta, Parnassus, Platea, Thermopylæ, and various other fields,
mountains, and ruins connected with ancient Greece. At Crete he was
most graciously welcomed by the Turkish governor, and was treated with
the most generous hospitality by the people and officials, throughout a
somewhat lengthy journey about the island. It was there that he met the
American consul who was going to start the commerce of Crete by bringing
in a cargo of rum to exchange for the products of the island, and who
was so startled by Mr. Taylor’s frankly avowed hope, that the ship would
be wrecked before the curse of drunkenness was added to the other Cretan
vices. Mr. Taylor gave a somewhat different version of the affair,
not changing however its exposition of his sentiments on the subject
of drunkenness. But it is to be supposed, that the consul, who was so
severely rebuked, would have the best reason for remembering it, and, as
his version throws no discredit on Mr. Taylor, and varies in no important
particular from that given by Mr. Taylor, we give the consul the benefit
of the story.
At Corinth he had a startling experience in an earthquake, feeling the
earth rise and fall with that sickening movement, creating a nausea like
the sea-sickness of a whole voyage concentrated into a few minutes, and
saw the stone walls of the house crumbling and splitting about him. He
arrived after the greatest shock had passed, or he would have seen whole
streets of buildings thrown down, for the village was half in ruins
when he reached the place. Near Corinth he saw the plain whereon were
celebrated the Isthmian games and repeated sections of Schiller’s poem,
“The Gods of Greece.”
At Argolis he saw the gateway of Mycenæ, guarded by the celebrated stone
lions, and tried to connect Agamemnon and Orestes with the landscapes.
At Sparta he trod the sward above the buried palaces, and having no
poets’ names to rhyme with Lycurgus and Leonidas, he hurried on to scenes
less suggestive of mere physical endurance and bloody encounters.
In Mania, within the boundaries of ancient Sparta, he was delighted to
find the descendants of the ancient Greeks, whose blood was not diluted
by that of Turks, Slavs, Italians, and Egyptians. He found there what no
other part of Greece visited by him could boast, the Greek face and form
such as Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus portrayed in their immortal
sculptures. At Olympia he saw the home of Xenophon, and the foundations
of that temple of Olympus from whence the Greek chronology was taken,
near which were celebrated the great Olympian Games, around which were
once those sacred groves so often mentioned in Greek poetry and tragedy,
and where the most artistic work of Phidias stood,—the ivory statue of
Jupiter.
At Thebes he recalled the deeds of Pindar, Epaminondas, and the heroes of
the Trojan War.
At Delphi he looked over the forests that clothe the lofty Parnassus,
gazed into the rocky cleft from which the priestesses received their
communications, and saw the sites of temples used for gardens, and blocks
from the sacred shrines used for cellar walls.
At Thermopylæ he marked the spot where the heroes fought and the narrow
gorge where they fell, with feelings of respect and pride. He said that
the story of such deeds should never be allowed to die.
At “Aulis” he saw where Jason launched his ships to sail in search of
the Golden Fleece, and repeated a part of the Argonautic story in modern
Greek.
On all these journeys Mr. Taylor displayed the same fearless, adventurous
spirit, and was frequently in danger. By fortunate accidents he was
prevented from falling into the hands of brigands, and returned to
Athens, after his prolonged journeys, in good health, and with the
accounts of his journeys nearly complete in his pocket.
When he left Athens in the spring for Constantinople, he had become
acquainted with all parts of ancient Greece, and was able to give to his
readers a fund of valuable information concerning the country and its
products, the people and their industries. He had kept up that triple
life which characterized all his later travels in Europe and Asia, and
saw everything modern in the way of manners, races, products, commerce,
government, and everything that remained of the ancient days in the shape
of monuments, temples, or ruins, together with those undefinable yet real
suggestions which come to the poet, and to him alone.