they watch each other's development, so intently did they await each
other's literary output, and write poetry to each other, and meet
at Boker's, now and again, for golden talks on Sundays. Poetry was
a passion with them, and even when two--Boker and Taylor--were sent
abroad on diplomatic missions, they could never have been said to
desert the Muse--their literary activity was merely arrested. One of
the four--Stoddard--often felt, in the presence of Boker, a certain
reticence due to lack of educational advantages; but in the face of
Boker's graciousness--a quality which comes with culture in its truest
sense,--he soon found himself writing Boker on matters of style, on
qualities of English diction, and on the status of American letters--a
stock topic of conversation those days.

Boker was a Philadelphian, born there on October 6, 1823,--the son
of Charles S. Boker, a wealthy banker, whose financial expertness
weathered the Girard National Bank through the panic years of 1838-40,
and whose honour, impugned after his death, in 1857, was defended
many years later by his son in "The Book of the Dead," reflective of
Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and marked by a triteness of phrase
which was always Boker's chief limitation, both as a poet and as a
dramatist.

He was brought up in an atmosphere of ease and refinement, receiving
his preparatory education in private schools, and entering Princeton
in 1840. On the testimony of Leland, who, being related to Boker, was
thrown with him in their early years, and who avows that he always
showed a love for the theatre, we learn that the young college student
bore that same distinction of manner which had marked him as a child,
and was to cling to him as a diplomat. Together as boys, these
two would read their "Percy's Reliques," "Don Quixote," Byron and