Nathaniel Parker Willis. Henry A. Beers

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.