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

he had been there with Mr. and Mrs. Moses H. Grinnell, his neighbours at Sunnyside, Washington Irving expressed the opinion that the poet's cough was hkely to prolong his hfe by making him more careful of his health. "I do not think his lungs are affected," was the cheerful diagnosis. The reference made by General Wilson to the distant view^ from Idlewild of Gulian C. Verplanck's home suggests the strong contrast between these Highland neighbours. Bryant says of Verplanck:

As a young man he took no part in the Cockloft and other froUcs of his friends Irving, Paulding, and Kemble; but on the contrary, he was held up by the elder men of the period as an example of steady, studious, and spotless youth.

Mr. Verplanck was born in Wall Street, New York, in 1786. His grandmother was a daughter of Daniel Crommelin of Amsterdam, and by her the boy, motherless from infancy, was reared. He graduated at Columbia College when only fifteen years of age, and studied law with Edward Livingston, being finally admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one years, by Chief- Justice (afterwards Chancellor) Kent. Mr. Verplanck was one of those earnest men, of many activities and tireless energy, who undertake seemingly incongruous tasks without hesitation and perform them wdth credit.