WilHs, that versatile worker, idler, flaneur, poet, city dandy, and country gentleman, who made no deep impression by his literarv labours, but is nevertheless vividly remembered when many a man of greater power is forgotten. General James Grant Wilson wTote, in 1886, in a reminiscent vein, of a visit to the scene of the poet's retirement at Cornwall, where he was trying to recuperate the strength of which he had been, from his youth up, somewhat of a spendthrift:

Literary Associations of the Hudson 261

It was on a sunny summer's mornini^ in the month of September [wrote Wilson] that we landed from a steamer at the wharf known as Cornwall's Landing. We then wended our wav to a picturesque, many-gabled, gothic structure, nestled among luxurious evergreens, admirably situated in the plateau north of the Highlands, and within sound, under favourable conditions of the weather, of the evening gun at West Point. A tall and elegant figure, with rosy cheeks and a luxuriance of clustering hair, which upwards of sixty winters had failed to whiten, enters with the easy grace of a man of the world, and we see before us our friend the master of the mansion. We sally forth to see his loved domain, and to look at the extensive and varied views commanded by his coign of vantage. Around us we see the Storm King and other wooded mountains, towering to a height of nearly two thousand feet: the whole river, -- here expanded into a broad bay, on whose bosom the white-sailed sloops and schooners are idly floating with the flood tide: and on the opposite shore vallevs and hillsides, sprinkled with country-seats ; from aniong which our companion points out the ancestral home of the veneral)le Gulian C. Verplanck, and the summer residences of other mutual New York friends.