Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular “Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His “Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the mental disease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in them,--to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the “Cyclopædia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so that, should I live to see him sixteen, I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it appeared.” During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28, 1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was born April 27, 1850.