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!