You can get a capital volume, with your 'Song', 'Sir John', 'Goblet',
and other things.... The publishing showmen would of course parade our
wonderful qualities, and the snarling critics in the crowd would show
their teeth; but we would be as unmoved as the wax statues of Parkman
and Webster, except that there might now and then be a sly wink
at each other, when nobody was looking." The two friends had been
separated for some time, while Taylor wandered over the face of
the globe, writing from Cairo, in the shadow of the pyramids, and
exclaiming, in Constantinople (July 18, 1852), "There is a touch of
the East in your nature, George."

In 1856, Boker prepared his two volumes of "Plays and Poems" for the
press. He had won considerable reputation as a sonneteer, and this was
further increased by the tradition that Daniel Webster had quoted him
at a state dinner in Washington. As yet he was merely a literary
poet, and a literary dramatist whose name is usually linked with that
Philadelphia group discussed in Vol. II of this collection.[A]

Writing of the Philadelphia of 1868, Leland says:

[It was] "the Philadelphia when 'Emily Schaumbeg' was the belle and
Penington's 'store' was the haunt of the booklover, when snow fell
with old fashioned violence, and Third Street was convulsed by
old-fashioned panics, when everybody went mad over Offenbach, when one
started for New York from the Walnut Street Ferry, when George Boker
was writing his dramas and George Childs was beginning to play the
public Maecenas." Oftentimes the sturdy figure of Walt Whitman could
be seen walking on Broad Street, while Horace Greely, buried in
newspapers, travelled aboard a boat between New York and Philadelphia.