SOURCE: “Bret Harte on Bayard Taylor: An Unpublished Tribute,” in The Markham Review, Vol. 3, No. 6, May, 1973, pp. 101-104.

In the following essay, Luedtke and Morrow offer a commentary on Bret Harte's obituary of Taylor, and examine the relationship between the two authors.

When Bayard Taylor died in Berlin on December 28, 1878, the one man who most fittingly could write his obituary for the German nation had just settled in the Ruhr town of Crefeld: his countryman, Francis Bret Harte. For Taylor, the German ambassadorship to which he had just been appointed culminated an affair with the heart of Germany which reached back beyond his acclaimed translation of Goethe's Faust in 1871-72 to the first appearance of his many travel books and poems in Germany in 1851.¹ Karl Bleibtreu's translation of eighty of Taylor's Gedichte in 1879, although inferior to earlier translations by Karl Knortz, Friedrich Spielhagen, and Adolf Strodtmann, was one...