“As you walk in the long porticoes of the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops, and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon, without lifting their wings as if you saw them from the bottom of a well.”
“As far down towards Lake Ontario as the eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing out in rings of foam, with an appearance of vexation and rage that I have seen in no other cataract of the world.”
“He who has soiled his bright honor with the tools of ambition—he who has leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion—he who has loved, hoped, and trusted in the greater arena of life and manhood—must look back on days like these, as the broken-winged eagle to the sky—as the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.”
“The chain of the Green Mountains, after a gallop of some hundred miles from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long Island Sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine trees, three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career by the sea.”
“Next to their own loves ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring the loves of others; and while the violets and already-drooping wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected by those slender fingers, the sun might have swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those seven and twenty Misses would have watched their lovely school-fellow the same.”
An autumn forest—“It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold, purple and crimson—had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and color over the wilderness.”
“The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops, and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop's finger.”
“Just above, there is a sudden turn in the glen, which sends the water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, re-appearing like the angel that has pursued him, glides swiftly, but with divine serenity, on his way.”
We believe that the high powers of Mr. Willis are properly estimated by the judicious among his countrymen. His foibles, his faults, and his deficiencies—let us not forget to say, his merits—are quite as well known to himself as to us. His intellect, if not of the loftiest order, very closely approaches it—and he has stepped upon the threshhold of nearly every species of literary excellence.