There was a perpetual novelty in these contrasts. He saw the country, as it were, in the making. The canal-boat went only four miles an hour, and the voyager could get out, when so minded, to stretch his legs and pick the wild flowers along the tow-path. Odd experiences relieved the monotony of this quiet sail along the amber Mohawk, “bonniest stream that ever dimpled.” One Sunday, at the request of old General Wadsworth of Geneseo, who happened to be aboard and took a great fancy to Willis, the latter preached a sermon to the passengers assembled in the cabin, and passed among them, in consequence, as a young minister who “had geten him yet no benefice.” And here is a little idyl perhaps worth recording:—
“On Sunday morning I saw a girl on a hillside in the wildest part of the Mohawk Valley, milking. So I leaped ashore, to the great amusement of the passengers, and ran up to give her a lecture. She was quite pretty, and blushed when I asked her if she knew it was wicked to milk on Sunday. She had a pretty little clean foot, probably washed by the wet grass, and held up the milking-pail for me to drink with considerable grace. I should have begged a kiss if the boat had not been in sight. I have just been called up to look at Palmyra. It is curious to sail through the centre of a town, and see people in the windows above you and on the steps of the houses, crowding to see the strange faces on board. They look so much at home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”
At Utica he found a host of friends, was received with Western hospitality, and had twenty or thirty invitations to dinners and parties. A Utica belle whom he had known in New Haven made up a picnic in his behoof to Trenton Falls, the scenery of which he described so admirably in “Edith Linsey.” It was his hap to visit Trenton on the very day when a Miss Suydam, a young lady from New York, fell over the falls and was killed. From Auburn he drove out on a visit to another fair acquaintance, Miss Adele Livingston, whose country house on Skaneateles Lake he found to be a “little palace of cultivation and refinement” dropped down unexpectedly in the wilderness. This was “Fleming Farm” in “Edith Linsey,” though it would probably be a mistake to identify the heroine of that tale with Willis’s hostess. With her he took a horseback ride round the head of the lake, and then he returned to his canal. At Niagara he encountered a pleasant party of Boston and Salem people, and was asked to attach himself to their train on the way up Ontario and down the St. Lawrence. Among them was a “Miss E. M——” (Emily Marshall?), a famous beauty, who figures in Willis’s “Niagara” sketch in a romantic and perilous adventure behind the fall. “I am sorry I may not mention her name,” he says, “for in more chivalrous times she would have been a character of history. Everybody who has been in America, however, will know whom I am describing.” At Montreal he fell in with Chester Harding, the artist, with whom he afterwards became intimate at Boston, and who painted an excellent portrait of Willis, now owned by Mr. Charles A. Dana. In September he went back to New Haven to take his degree and say good-by, and then college life was over and the world before him.
Willis always looked back with tenderness to his college days. Years after, in his “Slingsby” papers, contributed to an English magazine, he made New Haven and the university the scene or background of some of his best stories and sketches of American life, such as “Edith Linsey,” “F. Smith,” “Scenes of Fear,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “The Cherokee’s Threat.” These, however, are not college stories in the common meaning of the term. The heroes of these amusing and often incredible adventures are undergraduates, but they have the easy savoir faire of men of the world, and the incidents of the narrative are mainly enacted outside the college fence, and consist for the most part of love-making, driving stanhope, and touring about the country in an independent manner. The academic life of the time offered but a meagre field to the romancer, nor indeed is the case much altered since. There have been loud calls, at present subsiding, for an “American Tom Brown.” A few patriotic Harvard graduates have responded, but their success has been such that the alumni of other colleges have congratulated themselves that no one has been moved to perform the same office for their own Almæ Matres. It may be doubted whether the four years of a college course are a broad enough base to support a full-length novel. A man is not born in college, and he seldom dies or marries there. The struggle which decides his final success or failure is fought on other fields. As to the life itself, though engrossing enough to those who lead it, as stuff for fiction it is scant,—a life of pleasant monotony, varied by contests for honors and prizes which seem paltry to the man, and made exciting by that most fatuous of pursuits, college “politics.” Nevertheless, it has unique features of its own, peculiar developments of sentiment and humor which appeal to the imagination. To these, the man who has lived it and found it sweet will often attempt to give shape, as he looks back upon it in less happy years, even though he may understand well enough that such fragmentary experiences want the unity and importance required in a continuous fiction. As experiments of this nature, Willis’s college stories should be regarded. It must be confessed that he idealized a good deal. His geese were always swans, and he practiced an airy exaggeration provoking to the statistician or the literal minded. He speaks, for example, in an off-hand way of “the thousand students of the university,” though the number never reached half a thousand at any time when he was a student. But in the incidental glimpses of the life which he described, in the atmosphere which he flung around it, he was true to the spirit of that life,—the gay, irresponsible existence of half-idle, half-earnest youth, whose friendships are warm and unquestioning, to whom the world is new, the future full of promise, and every girl a Venus. There is a glamour over it all—“the golden exhalations of the dawn”—and romance is the proper medium in which to present it.
“Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater, however,” wrote Willis in “Edith Linsey,” “and gayly as I describe it, it is to me a picture of memory, glazed and put away; if I see it ever again it will be but to walk through its embowered streets by a midnight moon. It is vain and heartbreaking to go back after absence to any spot of earth, of which the interest was the human love whose home and cradle it had been. There is nothing on earth so mournful and unavailing, as to return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others as we were when we thus knew them.”
On leaving college, Willis signalized his entrance upon a literary career of forty years by collecting and publishing a score of his juvenile poems, in a thin volume entitled “Sketches,” and dedicated to his father. It contained, among other things, four of the scriptural pieces which had done more than anything else to give him reputation. This vein he continued to cultivate, and added others in later volumes till they reached the number of eighteen. Even in his last years he wrote one more scriptural poem for the “New York Ledger,” at the persuasion of the enterprising Mr. Bonner, reinforced by the proffer of a hundred dollars. As there is little difference in value between the earliest and latest of these, it may be well to speak of them here collectively. It is not hard to explain the vogue which they obtained, or the reason why many people at this day, who know nothing else of Willis, have read his Scripture poems. One still encounters, here and there, a good old country lady who reads little poetry, but who can quote from “Absalom” or “Jephthah’s Daughter” and thinks them quite the best product of the American Parnassus. They made good Sunday reading. They appealed to an intensely biblical and not very literary constituency; to a public familiar with the Old and New Testaments alike, and familiarized also with the life and scenery of the East through Bible commentaries and the lectures of missionaries who had traveled in Palestine. They were pleased to meet again the most striking episodes and affecting situations in the sacred narratives, set forth in easy verse, embroidered prettily, and with the sentiments and reflections proper to the subject all duly marshaled before them. It lent concreteness to the story to learn that in the room of Jairus’s daughter,
“The spice lamps in the alabaster urns
Burned dimly and the white and fragrant smoke
Curled indolently on the chamber walls;”
or that the Shunamite’s little son, on his way to the field, passed