indolence, and refinement, hereditary for generations, seemed no more than the birthright of this New England printer’s son, from which some envious fairy had hitherto shut him out. “I have now and then a fit of low spirits,” he says, in a letter from Marseilles, April 28, 1832, “though generally the excessive excitement of new scenes and constant interest occupies me quite. It is like an intoxication to travel in Europe. I feel no annoyance, grumble at no imposition, am never out of temper. Fatigue is the only thing that bears me down. I want leisure and money. I shall come back, I think, to America after my engagement with Morris is over, and marry and come out again. As to settling down for these ten years, I cannot think of it without a sickness at my heart. I wish to heaven I could keep a journal and publish after I got home. This writing and sending off unrevised is the worst thing in the world for one’s reputation. However, I see a world of things that I cannot put into letters, and I feel every day that my mind is ripening and laying up material which I could get nowhere else. You can have no idea of the stirring, vivid habit one’s mind gets into abroad. Living at home forever would never be of half the use to me.” Willis arrived at Havre November 3d, and went on by diligence to Paris, where he spent between five and six months. He had taken out with him a number of good letters, some from Martin Van Buren among the rest. The American colony in Paris was then small and select. It was under the wing of Lafayette, who was very polite to Willis during his stay. Cooper was there and his _protégé_, Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, who had come from Florence to execute a bust of Lafayette. Morse, the artist, too, who, on his return trip to America in a Havre packet, in the year following, was to hit upon his invention of the electric telegraph. And lastly, Willis’s fellow-townsman, Dr. Howe, then a zealous young philanthropist, who had won much glory by his recent campaign in Greece, and was now attending medical lectures at the French capital. Willis took lodgings with Howe until the latter, having been appointed president of the American committee for the relief of the Poles, went off on his dangerous mission of distributing supplies among the insurgent bands in Polish Prussia, an enterprise which ended in his capture and confinement for six weeks in a Prussian prison. All these gentlemen Willis had the good fortune to meet in familiar and cordial intercourse. Cooper asked him to breakfast with Morse and Howe, and walked and talked with him in the gardens of the Tuileries. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun between the two authors was afterwards renewed at home, though, from accidents of geography, they never became really intimate.