This sacred nook--reserved from purchase--was the spot where his own hands had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and disappointment found a voice in one of the most naturally and simply written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836, Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then “a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description, hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs. Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets “slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842, regretting that he should not have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.