With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took
an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James
Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I
had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for
my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could
not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think
he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.
There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the
Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and
overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of
the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of
spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening
when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the
most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we
all went into the library, something tragical happened.
Pages:
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38