All that can be said of these traveler’s letters is that they are fairly good reporting. They hardly attain the rank of literature, and were as a whole not worth putting between covers. But Willis sold well and, therefore, found his account in continued book-making, bringing out, usually, simultaneous editions in London and New York. It is instructive to compare his letters from Cape Cod—a journey on which Mr. Grinnell was again his companion—with Thoreau’s book on the same piece of geography. Both men had quick eyes, and had taught themselves the art of observation. But Willis’s letters were the notes of an “amateur casual,” or “here-and-thereian,” on a flying trip over a sand-spit inhabited by queer people, who was always on the lookout for points which would interest the lady readers of a metropolitan journal. Thoreau, on the contrary, was like a palmer on a solemn pilgrimage to one of nature’s peculiar shrines, with loins girt up and staff in hand, tramping along the heavy sands, with the eternal thunder of “The Reverend Poluphloisboio Thalasses” in his ear; in serious and vigilant mood, watching every least token of the ways of the sea, but careless of men and reading publics.
Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon, it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton Falls—which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith Linsey”—occurs a startling anticipation of the most admired figure in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”—
“As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight, the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall, drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam, spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to make famous—a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind—there is your similitude: Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a cataract.”
Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from “Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meet often and familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new, and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a part of “Pencillings by the Way.”
CHAPTER VIII.
1853-1867.
IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS.
Mr. and Mrs. Willis, with their children, had passed the summer of 1850 at Cornwall, in the highlands of the Hudson, boarding at the farmhouse of a Mrs. Sutherland. They grew so attached to the beautiful neighborhood that they resolved to make it their home some day, and with this in view, in the fall of the same year, they had bought the fifty acres of land which afterwards became widely known as Idlewild. This little domain lay upon a shelf or terrace on the western bank of the Hudson, lifted some two hundred feet above the level of the river, at the point where its waters received the slender tribute of Moodna Creek. Behind the site chosen for the house was a wild ravine, shaded by hemlocks, at the bottom of which a brook, swollen to sizable rapids and cascades by the spring freshets, but a mere trickle in midsummer, ran down to join the creek. The location seemed destined by nature for a gentleman’s country seat, from its variety of surface, its contrasting prospects, and its noble timber. The outlook in front was upon a wide bend of the river and the opposite heights and distant mountain perspectives of the eastern shore. Behind the house was a private landscape of glen and forest, sunk away quite out of sight of the sails and steamers that passed continually up and down the watery highway before the front door. To the south, a mile away, was the imposing shape of Storm King, a mountain which owes its baptism to Willis, having previously figured in geography as Butter Hill. Four miles below this were West Point and the gate of the highlands, and on the other bank General Morris’s summer home of Undercliff. Four miles above Idlewild was the considerable town of Newburg, for a market; and only a mile from his door, the post office village of Moodna.
Willis’s trip to the tropics had been of small benefit to his health, and, on his return in the summer of 1852, he joined his family at their boarding place at Cornwall. His doctor warned him that a return to New York would be at the risk of his life. He had grown tired, himself, of the city and of gay society, and longed for the repose of the hills. Levavit oculos ad arces. In the hope that rural quiet and the drier air of the highlands might restore his health, he decided that autumn to begin building at once, and to take up his permanent abode in the country. During the winter and spring he remained with his family at the Sutherlands’, and busied himself in superintending the erection of his house, laying out roads and paths, cutting vistas through his trees, building stone walls, constructing a dam for his brook, and reporting progress in gossipy letters to the “Home Journal.” In the spring of 1853 the New York house was sold, and on the 26th of July Idlewild received its tenants.
Willis had a happy knack at inventing names, and if everything that he wrote should become obsolete, he will still have left his sign manual on the American landscape and the English tongue. “Idlewild” was an apt and beautiful name, and like Sunnyside, the place became and remains one of the historic points of the scenery of the Hudson. The story that Willis tells of the origin of the word is this: The old farmer and fisherman who owned the land—uncle of the “Ward boys,” of aquatic fame—was showing him over the property, and Willis, inquiring the price of this particular piece, was answered that it had little value, being “an idle wild of which nothing could ever be made.” I fancy that this little anecdote is in part a myth, invented after the fact to give the name a history and a justification. Willis was particular, not to say fussy, in such matters, and the title finally chosen was obtained by a process of elimination from a list that I have seen, of several hundred “pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms,” such as Everwild, Mieux-ici, Lodore, Loudwater, Idle-brook, Wanderwild, Up-the-brook, Shadywild, Loiterwild, Demijour-brook, etc.