we alluded at the opening of our gossip, is giving an almost fabulous price to the river lands as romantic ground. Especially is this the case in respect to the neighborhood of Idlewild. Mr. Irving relates a story of the worthy hostess of Glenross, who was wonderfully attentive to Sir Walter Scott when he visited that place. The secret of the matter was, as it came out, that she "had been told he was the gentleman who wrote a bonnie book about Loch Katrine, and she hoped he would write a little about Glenross also, for she understood that the book had done the inn at Loch Katrine a muckle deal of good!" And so have Mr. Willis's "Idlewild Letters" and residence done all the region round "a muckle deal of good." If the reader has followed us thus far with pleasure in our explorations of the beauties of Idlewild, we need not hesitate to ask his company in a hasty review of the life and literary labors of the magician of the place. Mr. Willis comes of good, sturdy English stock, though a long way off. As early as 1658 one of his ancestors was admitted freeman of Massachusetts. As to his inclination toward literature, that came by inheritance through two generations at least. His grandfather was one of the proprietors of the Independent Chronicle, a provincial political journal in Boston during the period of the Revolution. Afterward he migrated to Virginia, where he published the Potomac Guardian, and, later still, he conducted the Scioto Gazette, the first paper established in Ohio. He was at one time State printer in Ohio, and among the incidents of his life, which was a long and active one, it is recorded of him in the biographies that he was an apprentice in the printing-office of Franklin, and a guest at the immortal Boston Tea-Party. PASSAGE IN THE GLEN. VOL. XVI.-No. 92.-L THE CZAR. Our poet's father, who is still living in useful and revered old age, in his native city of Boston, has been all his years a journalist, and with some noteworthy and most interesting incidents. In 1803 he established the Eastern Argus in Portland. Returning from Maine in 1816, he commenced the publication of the Boston Recorder, the first religious newspaper in the world; and and for the last twenty years he has edited, and still edits, the Youth's Companion, the earliest child's paper ever published. We have seen the monthly issues of this little journal eagerly welcomed by the children at Idlewild. Mr. Willis was called upon, in 1844, to grieve for the death of his mother, whom he has taught us to revere in his verse. She is every where remembered as a woman of very marked intellectual endowments, and not less distinguished for her truthful piety and the earnest, active benevolence of her character. She was held in the highest regard by the best and wisest men of her circle and time, many of whom-among them the Rev. Doctors Payson and Storrs-were her admiring and habitual correspondents. Our poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis, was born in Portland, Maine, on the 20th of January, 1807. His school life began under the tutorship of the Rev. Dr. M'Farland, of Concord, New Hampshire. Afterward he was successively a pupil of the Latin School of Boston, the Phillips's Academy of Andover, and of Yale College. He graduated in 1827 (at the age of twenty), with high honors and brilliant hopes. His first appearance in the literary world was as a poet, in which character he was winning a bright fame before he was known as a prose writer. While in college he published various religious pieces, under the signature of Roy, and he bore off the chief prize offered by Lockwood the publisher, for the best poem which PATH IN THE GLEN. cumstances, his own commending accomplishments. being set off with the diplomatic button of attaché, which had been given to him by Mr. Rives, the American embassador at Versailles. In his wanderings in many lands he gathered up great stores of sparkling warp for the after weavings of his fancy. Last of all, his vagabondizings led him to London, where he pitched his tent for a time in such peace as his literary labors and the social pleasures of that restless metropolis would permit. At this period he contributed to the New Monthly Magazine the tales and sketches of "Philip Slingsby," soon after republished under the title of "Inklings of Adventure." The most interesting result of this residence in England was his marriage, in 1835, to Mary Leighton Stace, the daughter of a distinguished officer who had won high honors at Waterloo, and was then Commissary-General, in command of the Arsenal, Woolwich. The portraits should be contributed to his gift-book, "The which remain of our author's English wife, and Album." After leaving college he became editor of the Legendary and the Token, a series of sketches and tales, published by Mr. S. G. Goodrich, known later as "Peter Parley." In the following year, 1828, he established the American Monthly Magazine. He conducted this enterprise for two years and a half, when it was merged in the New York Mirror, and the interesting literary fraternity of the respective editors, N. P. Willis and George P. Morris, began. No sooner was this partnership formed than he set sail for a tour in Europe, of which the Mirror readers had piquant and palatable reports in "Pencilings by the Way." Ancient as was the theme of his journeyings even at that day, he saw men and things with such new and observant eyes, and recorded his impressions in a style so graphic, fresh, and genial, that he might have gone, or others might go, to the ends of the earth with no more pleasure to the public. This first residence abroad was a long and eventful one. It led our traveler through all the capitals of Europe, even to the City of the Sultan, and yet beyond, to the poetic altars of the Orient, and every where under agreeable cir the remembrances of all who knew her, describe her as a woman of great personal beauty and of unwonted grace, gentleness, and sweetness of character. She died in New York, leaving one child, Imogen, the eldest daughter of the family. In 1837, Mr. Willis returned to his native land, and soon after established himself in that little retreat in Central New York, near the village of Owego, and the romantic waters of the Susquehanna, now lovingly known to the world as "Glenmary." The portrait of this happy home and of the landscape around is drawn with graphic and affectionate minuteness and truth in his "Letters from Under a Bridge." Rugged and mountain-bound as the Susquehanna is in some portions of its long course, here, by Glenmary, its mood is sunny and serene as a Sabbath morning, not wanting, though, in animation and change. The cultivated hill-slopes look out curiously upon wide reaches of fruitful valley and winding river, and upon the capricious outlines of far-off mountain heights; while the little cottage below, vailed by clustering leaves and flowers, is within reach of the scent of summer meadows and the cadence of flowing waters. "There are," as Mr. Willis himself says, "more romantic, wilder places than this in the world, but none on earth more | rapidly, and as sorrows come in battalions, his habitably beautiful. In these broad valleys, afflictions were doubled by the death of his wife. where the grain-fields, and the meadows, and He went abroad for respite and relief, and sufthe sunny farms, are walled in by glorious fered, in England, from an attack of brain fever, mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet, by and afterward from long and painful illness at their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a the baths of Germany. Here he fell in, at perpetual refreshment and an hourly-changing Berlin, with his old Mirror confrère, Theodore feast to the eye; in these valleys a man's house-Fay, the American Secretary of Legation. Mr. hold gods yearn for an altar. Here are Wheaton, our embassador, offered him attracmountains that to look on but once 'becomes tions which determined him to remain and laa feeling;' a river at whose grandeur to mar- bor on the Continent; but going to England to vel; and a hundred streamlets to lace about the place his daughter at school, he was too sick to heart. Here are fertile fields nodding with return to Germany, and soon after took her grain, a thousand cattle grazing on the hills.' back to America. Here is assembled together in one wondrous The Mirror, meanwhile, had passed into othcentre a specimen of every most loved linea-er hands, and General Morris had launched a ment of nature. Here would I have a home! new literary bark, under the flag of the NaGive me a cottage by one of these shining tional Press, where he sat alone at the helm. streamlets-upon one of these terraces that His old shipmate coming alongside, on his seem steps to Olympus; and let me ramble return from foreign seas, was cordially pressed over these mountain sides, while my flowers to "put in his oar"-the lonely colors, after are growing and my head silvering in tranquil floating a year, were lowered, and the bright happiness." banner of the Home Journal was nailed to the mast, where it still waves over the rich freightage of thought and fancy its weekly voyages convey to every appreciative home in the land. In 1845 Mr. Willis was married to Cornelia, We are glad to transcribe this passage (as we would many others of like spirit, if our opportunity allowed), not only as bearing directly upon our especial theme-the home-feeling of our author-but as a leaf from that chief literary labor of his Glenmary life, and perhaps of all his life, in the department of descriptive art-the ever-green "Letters from Under a Bridge." As the course of true love never did run smooth, so this, our poet's first affection, was doomed to early blight, and the clouds of reverse and change gathered and fell upon his contented roof. The sudden loss of his income by the death of his father-in-law, and by the failure of his booksellers, compelled him to return to more laborious and more lucrative life in the city; and after five years' happy retirement, his exiled Lares and Penates were again sent wandering to and fro on the earth. Once more in New York, he engaged for a while with Dr. Porter in the publication of the Corsair, a weekly critical journal; and in its service soon went again to England, where he enlisted, among other contributors, the novelist Thackeray, not then come into his present fame. While in London, he published a collection of stories, poems, and letters, under the title of "Loiterings of Travel," and another volume called "Two Ways of Dying for a Husband," which contained his plays of "Bianca Visconti" and "Tortesa the Usurer." These dramas still maintain their place on the stage. At this time Mr. Willis also prepared the text for Virtue's beautiful volumes upon the scenery of the United States and Canada. When he returned home he found the Corsair "among the missing," and engaged with General Morris in the publication of the New Mirror, first as a weekly, and afterward as a daily journal. Unhappily, severe labors soon made the first breach on a constitution which had hitherto seemed invulnerable. His health failed in an elegant volume, illustrated by Leutze. only daughter of the Hon. Joseph Grinnell, of | tavo, was issued; and his poems were reproduced Massachusetts, and, by-and-by, he made that more intimate acquaintance with the beauties of the Hudson Highlands, which ultimately resulted in the establishment of his family altar at Idlewild. In the mean while a complete edition of his works, in a closely-printed and ponderous oc THE DRIP ROCK. More recently, a uniform collection, in a dozen handsome and convenient volumes, of some five hundred pages each, has come from the press. This edition includes, we believe, all the prose issues, of which we have already spoken, sometimes, though, under different classification and titles, and collections of magazine and newspaper contributions not before made. One volume of the series contains the "Pencilings by the Way," excepting certain portions which, with other material of the same nature form the "Famous Persons and Places." "Further Record of Travel," and "Observations on Europe," are preserved in the "Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American Frigate." In the "Fun Jottings, or Laughs I have taken a Pen to," we have the sketches of the "Ghost Ball at Saratoga," "Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice," "The Spirit Love of Ione S-," and other favorite tales. The two volumes of "People I have Met; or, Pictures of Society and People of Mark: drawn under a thin Veil of Fiction," and "Life Here and There; or, Sketches of Society and Adventure at farapart Times and Places," was also composed of the author's sparkling magazine novelettes; among them the "Lady Ravelgold," "Edith Lindsay," "Leaves from the Heart-Book of Earnest Clay," "Miss Jones's Son," and "Born to Love Pigs and Chickens." "The Rag-Bag" and "Hurrygraphs" are volumes of briefer and slighter material, collected from editorial letters, leaders, and items. "Rural Letters" contains the "Germany Papers and Poems," "Invalid Rambles in Germany," "Letters from WateringPlaces," and other matter. The "Health-Trip to the Tropics" is a republication of the editorial letters from the Bermudas, the West Indies, and the Southern and Western American States, written during the author's invalid rambles in the winter of 1851-2. In a later volume is collected the long series of letters to the Home Journal, suggested by the natural scenery and the daily experience of Highland life on the Hudson, under the title of "Out-Doors at Idlewild; or, the Shaping of a Home on the banks of the Hudson." The catalogue concludes, at present, with the reprint, from the Home Journal, of "Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life else untold"-Mr. Willis's most ambitious venture into the regions of romance, and his only attempt at the full-grown novel. It abounds in that dainty analysis of certain subtle traits of character and social manner, in which Mr. Willis is always so singularly successful. This list might, no doubt, be easily swelled from the stores of wandering waifs not yet called home; and the unfailing activity and fertility of the author's fancy promise a long future extension. If it were proper, some rare volumes might be filled by his liberal and characteristic private correspondence. This edition does not include the poems, the most eagerly sought for of all Mr. Willis's labors, and of which the unflagging sale contributes a liberal item to his yearly income. Various editions may be had-for the pocket, the library, or the drawing-room table. One can not go amiss in choosing among these volumes, whether it be for the gentle occupation of an idle hour, for suggestions to laggard fancy, or for sympathy and companionship in more earnest moods. In the editorial chair Mr. Willis has been uniformly and eminently successful, always displaying a delicacy and nicety of appreciation and judgment, a subtle tact and taste, a ha Mr. Willis's chief literary occupation now, as for some years past, is in the service of the Home Journal, which, through the genius and the un-bitual and hearty kindness for his brother autiring and affectionate industry of its editor, has won exalted esteem as a family and parlor newspaper. It is scarcely known how much and how ponderous is his share of this weekly toil. thors, and a comprehension intuitive of the wants of all classes of readers rarely possessed; though he can not well be spoken of as a journalist, except at the same time as an author, so closely |