“All my friends have been to see me, and justify me in my conduct. There are two professors of religion in the sophomore class who have done exactly so, and will be treated accordingly. And though it is a matter of policy with the government to pursue this course, it is said, and justly, that they despise an informer. My meeting with this squirt was entirely unavoidable, not originating (as perhaps you may suppose) from being in company where I ought not to be.” Willis suffered frequently from homesickness and low spirits during the winter of his freshman year. He had the poetic temperament, and was subject to his moods, easily elated and easily depressed. His chum was away somewhere teaching, and Willis, in his loneliness, had recourse to his pen. “I find but few among the students,” he wrote to his father, “whom I should choose as companions. Most of them are profane and dissipated, and their highest ambition seems to be to show off as a high fellow, and one who can overreach the government and laugh at its officers. The pious students in my class are mostly _men_, without any refinement either of manners or feeling,--fresh from the country,--whose piety renders them respectable, and who without it would be but boors. But there are a few students who have both piety and refinement, and some who, though not professors of religion, respect it, and who are moral in their outward conduct, whatever be the state of their hearts. These I can generally associate with, but when they are _all_ out of the way, and I am in need of something to brighten my feelings, I can find in the flow of fancy a forgetfulness of the darker side. I have written a great deal in this way since my college life commenced, and my writing will _always_ depend on the thermometer of my feelings.” As the youthful scribe gained readier power of expression his home correspondence became fuller and more effusive. He wrote with much minuteness a narrative of an evening spent at a country parsonage in West Haven, of a walk to the light-house, a visit to the cave of the hermit of East Rock, and of a trip by steamboat to New York. He dwelt at length upon all the impressions which the varying seasons and his daily experiences made upon his mind. There is, of course, no literary art in most of these juvenile confidences. The language is apt to be sophomorical, and the letters, as a whole, will seldom repay quotation, but an extract may be given here and there as a specimen of his epistolary style. The following is from a letter of July 11, 1824, to his sister Julia, with whom he was always particularly unreserved:--