His home, near Hyde Park, where he passed in retirement the final years of a busy life, is described in another chapter. In the effervescent period of Cockloft Hall and Salmagundi, his familiar nickname was Billy Taylor, from a song that he was fond of singing upon festive occasions. Closely connected with Irving, in that circle of writers that we are wont to group under the general title of Knickerbocker, were, among others, Fitz- Greene Halleck, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Jose])h Rodman Drake, Nathaniel Parker Willis, General George P. Morris, Frederick Swartwout Cozzens, the brothers Duyckinck, and Gulian Crommelin Verplanck. These were all associated either by residence or by virtue of some particular work with the Hudson River. Charles Fenno Hoffman was one of the most distinguished of the coterie. He shared with Morris the leadership among American lyric writers, and filled a large place in the earlier anthologies. Of such as he it was that Walter Savage Landor wrote: "We often hear that such and such things ' are not worth an old song.' Alas, how few things are! " No song in our language is more perfect, after its kind, than Hoffman's famous Sparkling and Bright, that for twenty years w^as literally on every one 's lips :

254 The Hudson River . . . in liquid light Does the wine our goblets gleam in, With hue as red as the rosy bed Which a bee would choose to dream in.

He sang of the Hudson in an exalted strain, in verse that may sound formal and, perhaps, a little pedantic to our modern ears ; but the fashions change in fifty or sixty years, and it is certain that he celebrated her beauties as only a lover could. At West Point, during his early life, Hoffman wrote a poem called Moonlight on the Hudson, from which a brief c|uotation may be admitted here :