“On Saturday evening I went to a genuine soirée at the great Dr. Hosack’s. This man is the most luxurious liver in the city, and his house is a perfect palace. You could not lay your hand on the wall for costly paintings, and the furniture exceeds everything I have seen. I met all the literary characters of the day there, and Halleck, the poet, among them. With him I became quite acquainted, and he is a most glorious fellow. More of him when we meet.… You know on New Year’s day in New York all the gentlemen call on all their acquaintances. I began at twelve o’clock at the Battery, and went up to St. John’s Park, merely running in and right out again till four, the dinner hour. I called on everybody. William Woolsey went with me, and, by appointing a rendezvous in every street, we kept along together. At four I went to Mr. George Richards’s to dine. He is no relative of Robert’s, and lives in the best style in a large house on St. John’s Park. We sat down to dinner between five and six, and sat several hours with a very large party. I got a seat next to the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed it much. They live in the French style, and the last course was sugar-plums!”
In another letter he says:—
“I was much flattered in vacation by the attentions of literary men and women; the latter more particularly, who seemed to consider it quite the thing to find a poet who was not a bear, and who could stoop so much from the excelsa of his profession as to dress fashionably and pay compliments like a lawyer. I heard of a very blue young lady who said, ‘La, how I should love to see Mr. Willis! I am sure I should fall in love with a man who writes such sweet poetry.’ She is both belle and bluestocking, they say.”
One of the families in which Willis was an habitué was the household of Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that “in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W——, Two Years of Age”—one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s “Parnassus”—were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune, who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters, Julia and Pastora—matre pulchra filiæ pulchriores—were great belles among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.”
The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:—
“My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy of the hopes which are experienced in revivals. I understand your anxiety for me, and I understand the feelings which prompted mother’s most tender and affectionate addition to your letter. If I perish it will not be because I do not know my duty, for there are few who have been better instructed. But my feelings are most peculiar and most trying. I am under one ceaseless and enduring conviction of sin; one wearing anxiety about my soul, without making any visible progress. I know what you will write about it. I could anticipate every word you can say upon the point. But so it is, and I have done with all discussion of it.”
At the completion of the senior examinations Willis delivered the valedictory poem to his class, “with a simplicity and feeling which thrilled the audience,” says one who was present. Portions of this were printed in his “Sketches” and in subsequent editions of his poems. It is one of the hardest things in the world to write a good occasional poem, and Willis’s Class Day address does not differ much from other performances of the kind. It is in blank verse, laboriously didactic, and expresses the usual conventional sentiments and noble moral reflections proper to the occasion. It is by no means as good as another occasional poem of his, “The Death of Arnold,” written upon the burial of the class champion, and first printed in the “Connecticut Journal.”
Willis spent the senior vacation—a halcyon period of six weeks that formerly intervened between Class Day and Commencement—in a trip through New York State and Canada; taking what is now known as the grand tour, and gathering impressions which he ultimately worked into the texture of his vivid sketches of “Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence.” He traveled by the Erie Canal, then newly opened through an almost unbroken wilderness, dotted here and there with stripling cities, Utica, Palmyra, Rochester,—the last only a few years old.
“The burnt stumps of the first settlers are all over the town: you find them close by the doors and in the yards of the people, and you may look between elegant blocks of stone and brick buildings and see the natural forest within five minutes’ walk. It is complete mushroom. We saw Colonel Rochester, who first settled it. He and his wife were sitting at their front door, enjoying the evening under trees which twelve years ago were the depth of the wilderness.”