He would make these humorous sketches to entertain his friends at any time, seizing on a half-sheet of paper, or whatever might be at hand; but he did not long continue to caricature Emerson. His first volume of poetry, published in 1844, was dedicated to Emerson, and in Dwight's "Translations from Goethe and Schiller," there are a number of short pieces by Cranch, almost perfect in their rendering from German to English. Among these the celebrated ballad of "The Fisher" is translated so beautifully as to be slightly, if at all, inferior to the original. The stanza, "The water in dreamy motion kept, As he sat in a dreamy mood, A wave hove up, and a damsel stept All dripping from the flood," may have appealed strongly to Cranch at this time; for we find that in October, 1841, he was married at Fishkill-on-the-Hudson to a young lady of an old Knickerbocker family, Miss Elizabeth De Windt. If she did not come to him out of the Hudson, there can be no doubt that he courted her by the banks of the most beautiful river in North America. Cranch had given up the clerical profession six months before this, and had adopted that of a landscape painter, for which he would seem to have studied with some artist in New York City,--unknown to fame, and long since forgotten. He continued to sketch and paint, and write prose and verse on the Hudson until 1846, when he embarked with his wife on a sailing packet for Marseilles. He had the good fortune to find a fellow- passenger in George William Curtis, and during the voyage of seven weeks, a lifelong friendship grew up between these two highly gifted men. The volume of poems which he published in 1844 is now exceedingly rare; yet many of the pieces belong to a high order of excellence. In ease and grace of versification they resemble Longfellow, but in thought they are more like Emerson or Goethe. Consider this opening from "The Riddle": "Ye bards, ye prophets, ye sages, Read to me, if ye can, That which hath been the riddle of ages, Read me the riddle of _Man_. Then came the bard with his lyre, And the sage with his pen and scroll, And the prophet with his eye of fire, To unriddle a human soul. But the soul stood up in its might; Its stature they could not scan; And it rayed out a dazzling mystic light, And shamed their wisest plan. Yet sweetly the bard did sing, And learnedly talked the sage, And the seer flashed by with his lightning wing, Soaring beyond his age."