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. Seated on the grey rocks, Mr. Willis described his first visit to the site on which his beautiful home stands: "It was one of the roughest pieces of uncultivated land that I ever looked at; Ijut it had capabilities. I saw trees, knolls, rocks, and this ravine, musical with water-falls, and looking to the south a noble, wild prospect, as Sam Johnson would have said. I passed over the rough and rocky fifty acres with the owner, who looked his astonishment as well as expressed it, that a New Yorker should have any use for his unimproved property. He said, 'What on earth can you do with it" it is only an idle wild.' I did not tell him, but I bought it and you see what I have done with it, and that I was indebted to my Dutch predecessor for a very pretty and appropriate name."

Irving, Halleck, and numerous other friends of Wil- Hs visited him at Idlewild, and on one occasion, when

262 The Hudson River