My cottage at Idlewild [wrote Willis] is a pretty type of the two lives they live who are wise -- the life in full view, which the world thinks all, and the life out of sight, of which the world knows nothing. You see its front porch from the thronged thoroughfares of the Hudson, but the grove Ijehind it overhangs a deep down glen, tracked but by my own tangled paths, and the wild torrent which by turns they avoid and follow.

That description, which might have been written yesterday, has been applicable for nearly fifty years. Other hands trim the lawns and repair the drives; other eyes enjoy the beauty of the successive years of growth and development, but the place is still "Willis's Idlewild," as though its earlier tenant -- held in mortmain still his old estate.

39^ The Hudson River

The drives are probably better kept and the lawns better groomed than they were in the early fifties, and the shade trees are taller and more dense ; but one step aside over the edge of the wooded declivity instantly translates the pilgrim into a "land of faery," where the hand of man has not interfered except with the consummate art that conceals art. From the commencement of the descent the sound of the stream far below comes up through the rustling foliage. The tops of the trees that grow along the bottom of the glen are below the level of the eye, and the crowding companies of birch and hemlock, chestnut and maple, swarm the hillside.