This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823. His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman, simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home, thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor, who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards if you wish, but it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the entry,”—a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way five or six dollars, and had a scrape upon it, and the conclusion of the matter was their getting so intoxicated as to be unable to reach home.” The freshmen have likewise had their windows broken, and Willis’s chum has been smoked out, during the former’s absence from his room, by cigars inserted in the keyhole. A somewhat distant and impersonal form of the persecution this will seem to modern freshmen. But Sophomore Kneeland, from Georgia, having been collared by Tutor Stoddard, red-handed, in the act of breaking windows, and having knocked down the tutor and run, has been publicly expelled, the president reading out his mittimus in chapel to the whole college. Willis has joined the Linonian Society—“Calhoun, the candidate for the presidency, was once a member of it” (an ancient “campaign” argument); also a freshman debating club, the officers of which “are almost all professors of religion,” and in which he has been chosen, in his absence, “critic on composition and speaking.” He has drunk tea at Miss Dunning’s. He has called upon Mrs. Daggett and Mrs. T. Dwight, finding the former of these two ladies to be “a very pious woman, and a woman of uncommon understanding,” and the latter “a woman of noble mind, though plain in person.” He has taken a walk to the Cave of the Regicides on West Rock—time out of mind the goal of the freshman’s first pilgrimage. He has been appointed one of the committee to solicit subscriptions in his own class for the Greeks, and is also one of the managers of the Bible Society, and active at the Friday evening prayer-meetings, there being just at present considerable “engagedness” among “professors” in the several classes. Meanwhile Tutor Twining has been hissed and scraped at while conducting services in chapel. The government “are growing more and more rigorous. Almost every member of the freshman class is called up and questioned. Many are dismissed, and an examination is made of everything, from the stealing of a sugar-bowl out of the hall to the prostration of a tutor. Tutor Woolsey was smoked the other evening by two fellows who were too drunk to make their escape, and were caught without any difficulty. They did it at twelve o’clock at night, wrapped in sheets, and are both dismissed.” The disturbances between the sophomores and freshmen culminated for Willis in a short suspension in the winter of 1823–24 for honorably refusing to disclose the names of sophomores by whom he had been smoked and squirted, or the names of persons in whose rooms he had seen a squirt—an instrument of torture whose possession involved expulsion. The letter in which he announced his suspension is very long and filled with heroic sentiments.
“All my friends have been to see me, and justify me in my conduct. There are two professors of religion in the sophomore class who have done exactly so, and will be treated accordingly. And though it is a matter of policy with the government to pursue this course, it is said, and justly, that they despise an informer. My meeting with this squirt was entirely unavoidable, not originating (as perhaps you may suppose) from being in company where I ought not to be.”
Willis suffered frequently from homesickness and low spirits during the winter of his freshman year. He had the poetic temperament, and was subject to his moods, easily elated and easily depressed. His chum was away somewhere teaching, and Willis, in his loneliness, had recourse to his pen.
“I find but few among the students,” he wrote to his father, “whom I should choose as companions. Most of them are profane and dissipated, and their highest ambition seems to be to show off as a high fellow, and one who can overreach the government and laugh at its officers. The pious students in my class are mostly men, without any refinement either of manners or feeling—fresh from the country—whose piety renders them respectable, and who without it would be but boors. But there are a few students who have both piety and refinement, and some who, though not professors of religion, respect it, and who are moral in their outward conduct, whatever be the state of their hearts. These I can generally associate with, but when they are all out of the way, and I am in need of something to brighten my feelings, I can find in the flow of fancy a forgetfulness of the darker side. I have written a great deal in this way since my college life commenced, and my writing will always depend on the thermometer of my feelings.”
As the youthful scribe gained readier power of expression his home correspondence became fuller and more effusive. He wrote with much minuteness a narrative of an evening spent at a country parsonage in West Haven, of a walk to the light-house, a visit to the cave of the hermit of East Rock, and of a trip by steamboat to New York. He dwelt at length upon all the impressions which the varying seasons and his daily experiences made upon his mind. There is, of course, no literary art in most of these juvenile confidences. The language is apt to be sophomorical, and the letters, as a whole, will seldom repay quotation, but an extract may be given here and there as a specimen of his epistolary style. The following is from a letter of July 11, 1824, to his sister Julia, with whom he was always particularly unreserved:—
“I wish you were here to walk with me these beautiful moonlight evenings. I have seldom gone to bed and left the mild Queen of the Night riding in the heavens, for it seems a waste of noble feelings. When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past, and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in sleep without reluctance. I really think we had better lay it down as a rule never to go to sleep while the moon is shining. In fact, Julia, I suspect (for I find no one who sympathizes with me in this feeling) that I am something of a lunatic—affected by the rays of that beautiful planet with a kind of happiness which is the result of a heated imagination, and which is not felt by the generality of the common-sense people of the world. Last Friday evening, you know, was beautiful. I attended a meeting of the professors of religion, statedly held on that evening in the theological chamber, and when it was out went alone to walk. I strolled along upon the shore of the bay towards the light-house a mile or more, and never did I meet with so delightful a scene. There was no wind stirring, or not enough to make a ripple on the wave, and the hardly perceptible swell of the tide cast its waters upon the pebbles without a sound. You know the appearance of a bay when the light is shed obliquely upon it—looking like one immense sheet of liquid silver, and if you have ever seen a boat pass across it at such a moment, and seen that beautiful phenomena of the phosphorus dripping like fire from the oars and gilding the foam before the prow, you can have some idea of the scene I then witnessed. Now and then a sloop stole languidly across the bay, hardly appearing to move, and presenting an alternate light and shade as the moon struck upon the flapping sail or the helmsman tacked to take advantage of the hardly perceptible breeze which swept him slowly from the land. I declare it did seem like enchantment. The clock struck one, but I felt no disposition to go home, and, as the air was pure and balmy, the thought struck me that it would be a pleasant hour to bathe. Accordingly I undressed, and swam along the shore slowly for about half a mile in the cool, refreshing waters, with