Bayard Taylor’s gifts were not such as would contribute toward the success of a country newspaper—so delicate, refined, poetical, and classical, we wonder that he should ever have undertaken so uncongenial a work. The best things which he could write would be dull as lead to the majority of his readers. The more literary merit his editorials and poems contained, the less likely were they to receive the praise of his subscribers. Yet his disposition to work was so inherent in every nerve, that he had not been at home one week from his tour of Europe before he was searching for a place for editorial work or correspondence. Mr. Frederick Foster, who was an old acquaintance and who also had been in the office of the West Chester “Village Record,” suggested the establishment of a weekly newspaper. As they looked for an opening for such an enterprise, they hit upon the town of Phoenixville, Pa., as the most advantageous locality. Phoenixville was then a prosperous village, containing about two thousand inhabitants, twenty-seven miles from Philadelphia and thirty-one miles from Reading. There were rolling-mills, furnaces, and a variety of manufactories in the town, and the people constituted an enterprising and unusually vigorous community. There Mr. Taylor and Mr. Foster began the publication of the “Pioneer,” and with high hopes and an alarming confidence, waited neither for capital nor subscribers.

Mr. Taylor has often related to his friends some most amusing anecdotes connected with his life as a country editor. One subscriber wanted a glossary, another wished to see the local gossip about John Henry Smith’s surprise party, instead of the dull columns of literary reviews. One suggested that two editors would kill any paper, while another ventured to assert that he himself would edit the paper for them at three hundred dollars a year and “find shears.”

It was a difficult task. To edit the New York “Herald” would have been far easier and better suited to Mr. Taylor’s genius. The people, of Phoenixville, however, began to appreciate their privileges after the lack of support compelled the young journalists to close their office and suspend the publication of the paper; and financial aid to re-establish the “Pioneer” was generously offered. But one year in such an unappreciated labor was enough for Mr. Taylor, and he left Phoenixville, according to his own account, considerably wiser and poorer than he was when he entered it. If any of our readers has attempted to start a literary paper in the country, and passed through the perplexities of financial management and rude discouragements, he will need no words to prompt his most hearty sympathy with the work, and the suspension of Mr. Taylor’s undertaking. To make successful a publication of that character in a scattered and small community, requires a greater diversity of talent, greater manual labor, and a closer study of all-various human nature, than it does to conduct the largest establishments in the limitless field of a great city. Mr. Taylor’s experience simply added another illustration of the universal rule. His best articles were unappreciated or believed to be borrowed, and everything hindered the pursuit of that conscientious literary aspiration which feels keenly the failings and improprieties of superficial work.

It was in this year that Mr. Taylor prepared, and Mr. Putnam published, his surprisingly attractive volume, entitled “Views Afoot.” With such Quaker-like simplicity was it written, and such a noble spirit of poetry pervaded the descriptions of scenery, men, and art, that it leaped into popular favor on the prestige of its advance sheets. Its success was a forcible example of the winning power of simple truth. Its interest will never abate, because he did not assume the pompous airs of an infallible critic, but rather chose to pretend to nothing but describe what he saw as it appeared to him.

The success of that book introduced him at once into the literary circles of New York, where, with the friendship of Mr. Willis, Mr. Parke Godwin, Mr. Horace Greeley, Mr. William Cullen Bryant, and many others, well known as men of the highest culture, he received a most cordial welcome. He was at once secured by the management of the “Literary World,” a periodical issued weekly in New York, and which, from 1847 to 1853, held the highest place in literary criticism and classical composition gained by any American magazine or paper of that period.

When he sought employment on the New York “Tribune,” in 1848, a place was readily found for him, and he began, by the contribution of small articles, his long and honorable career as one of the editors of that influential journal.

In the spring of 1849, Mr. Greeley suggested to Mr. Taylor the importance of having some trustworthy information from the gold regions of California, about which there was then so much excitement. The people read, with the greatest avidity, every scrap of news or gossip from the gold-fields, and thousands were on their way by steam and by overland mule-trains to seek their fortunes in that Eldorado. At no period of our nation’s history, not excepting the agitation at the beginning of great wars, have the people of this country exhibited such uncontrollable excitement as they displayed at that time.

The rich sold their property to the first bidder, and took the first conveyance; while the poor started on foot, with nothing to preserve them from the starvation which followed in the desert. For a time it appeared as if New England and the Middle States would be left without sufficient male population to carry on the routine of official duty.

In the height of that feverish exodus Mr. Taylor decided to fall in with the tide, and drifting with the current, tell the readers of the “Tribune” what he saw and heard. Hence, in June, he took passage on a crowded steamer for Panama, and after a dreadful experience in crossing the Isthmus, steamed up the Pacific Coast and entered the Golden Gate.