Taylor, Bayard. Prose Writings of Bayard Taylor (10 volume set) Caxton Edition : At Home and Abroad, Second Series. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861-1864. Revised Edition. [11733]
Ten volumes in matching publisher's bindings, green textured cloth with blind borders and gilt wreath to fronts, gilt titles and volume numbers to spines, 8 x 5 3/4 inches, all joints good, bindings tight. About 500 pages in each volume. Each with bright marbled end papers, extra steel-engraved title page and frontispiece. Very good. Hardcover.
The set consists of these volumes:
At Home and Abroad (1861)
Views A-Foot; or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff (1862)
At Home and Abroad: A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery and Men (1862)
Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire... (1864)
A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile (1864)
The Lands of the Saracen: or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain (1864)
A Visit to India, China, and Japan, in the year 1853 (1864)
Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures in Sweden, Denmark, and Lapland (1864)
Travels in Greece and Russia, with an Excursion to Crete (1863)
Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life (18636)
Bayard Taylor (1825-1878). One of the most enterprising of travelers and liveliest of raconteurs, Taylor was born near Kennet Square, Chester county, Pennsylvania. He became an apprentice in a printing office in Westchester, Pa., in 1842; traveled for two years in Europe at an expense of only five hundred dollars 1844-46. On his return home he published and edited a paper in Phoenixville, Pa., for one year and subsequently wrote for the Literary World, and also the New York Tribune, of which he became a co-proprietor and co-editor in 1849. He visited California in 1849, and returned by the way of Mexico in 1850. He left Philadelphia, August 28, 1851, and returned to New York, December 20, 1853, after accomplishing more than fifty thousand miles of travel in Asia, Africa, and Europe. He started on a fourth tour, July, 1856, and returned to New York, October, 1858. In 1862 Bayard became Secretary to the American Legation at the Court of St. Petersburg, and in 1863 performed the duties of Charge-d’Affaires. His life continued to consist of alternate travel, lecturing, and newspaper work in the office of the New York Tribune until he was appointed U.S. minister to Germany, less than a year before his death in 1878. He had been long collecting materials for a Life of Goethe, but the composition of the work was never begun. He wrote much, including works of metrical verse and books of travel. He is noted for a fine translation from German to English of Goethe’s “Faust” in which he preserved the thought, meter, and rhyming scheme of the original. – From Allibone.
