At the completion of the senior examinations Willis delivered the valedictory poem to his class, “with a simplicity and feeling which thrilled the audience,” says one who was present. Portions of this were printed in his “Sketches” and in subsequent editions of his poems. It is one of the hardest things in the world to write a good occasional poem, and Willis’s Class Day address does not differ much from other performances of the kind. It is in blank verse, laboriously didactic, and expresses the usual conventional sentiments and noble moral reflections proper to the occasion. It is by no means as good as another occasional poem of his, “The Death of Arnold,” written upon the burial of the class champion, and first printed in the “Connecticut Journal.” Willis spent the senior vacation--a halcyon period of six weeks that formerly intervened between Class Day and Commencement--in a trip through New York State and Canada; taking what is now known as the grand tour, and gathering impressions which he ultimately worked into the texture of his vivid sketches of “Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence.” He traveled by the Erie Canal, then newly opened through an almost unbroken wilderness, dotted here and there with stripling cities, Utica, Palmyra, Rochester,--the last only a few years old. “The burnt stumps of the first settlers are all over the town: you find them close by the doors and in the yards of the people, and you may look between elegant blocks of stone and brick buildings and see the _natural forest_ within five minutes’ walk. It is complete mushroom. We saw Colonel Rochester, who first settled it. He and his wife were sitting at their front door, enjoying the evening under trees which twelve years ago were the depth of the wilderness.” There was a perpetual novelty in these contrasts. He saw the country, as it were, in the making. The canal-boat went only four miles an hour, and the voyager could get out, when so minded, to stretch his legs and pick the wild flowers along the tow-path. Odd experiences relieved the monotony of this quiet sail along the amber Mohawk, “bonniest stream that ever dimpled.” One Sunday, at the request of old General Wadsworth of Geneseo, who happened to be aboard and took a great fancy to Willis, the latter preached a sermon to the passengers assembled in the cabin, and passed among them, in consequence, as a young minister who “had geten him yet no benefice.” And here is a little idyl perhaps worth recording:--