Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon, it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton Falls--which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith Linsey”--occurs a startling anticipation of the most admired figure in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”-- “As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight, the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall, drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam, spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to make famous--a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind--there is your similitude: _Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a cataract_.” Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from “Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meet often and familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new, and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a part of “Pencillings by the Way.” CHAPTER VIII. 1853-1867. IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS.