“There was a bride, and she was beautiful And fond, affectionate; her soul did love. ’Twas not the transient feeling of an hour, That loves and hates, and loves and hates again,-- Oh, no; it was a purer, kindlier feeling,-- A something rooted, grafted on the soul, That cannot help but live and bud and blossom.” He also began to wreak thought upon expression in that common vent to the _cacoethes scribendi_, of young writers,--keeping a diary, “a red morocco volume, of very ornate slenderness and thinness, in which I recorded my raptures at spring mornings and blue sashes, my unappreciated sensibilities, my mysterious emotions by moonlight, and the charms of the incognita whom I ran against at the corner. This precious record shared in the final and glorious conflagration of Latin themes, grammars, graduses, and old shirts, on leaving academy for college.” “The Lunatic’s Skate” opens with some reminiscences of school life at Andover:-- “In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from him), and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s clearing and that by our own door. Out of school Larry and I were inseparable. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made in the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other’s approbation.” One of his school-fellows here was Isaac McLellan, who afterwards became a contributor to Willis’s “American Monthly.” He published a long poem, “The Fall of the Indian,” which Willis reviewed in the same periodical, referring to the poet as “the very boy that has tracked the woods with us, and called us by our nickname over a hedge, and cracked nuts with us by the fire in the winter evenings. Which of us dreamed, as we read in our blotted classic, ‘Quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum,’ that he should ever be guilty of a book? How it would have swelled our idle veins, as we lay half asleep, bobbing our lines over the bank of the Shawsheen on those long Saturday afternoons, that we should ever play for each other the gentle office of critic!”