In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer. It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in time the founder and first president of the University of California, and a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and “Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek.

Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of 1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same hall—the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed, athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after years,—in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.

Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia—afterwards, with the titular embellishment of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”—happened to be in New Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,” published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:—

The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of ’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman, were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s counsel, and Willis as a particeps criminis and witness for the plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere, was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.

Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman, Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church. Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of to-day such a stirring microcosm,—with its athletic and social clubs, its regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls, boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.,—was all undreamed of. Far from owning a yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown, to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on “necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.

Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used, between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.

New Haven in 1823-27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia” or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor of Rhetoric, used to go to “explode the elements.” Down by the bay, in a region now occupied by great factories, stood the old “Pavilion,” a famous seaside hotel much resorted to by Southern families. The first railroad from New Haven was laid in 1839. As yet even the Farmington Canal was only projected. Willis and the Boston contingent used to come all the way by stage-coach, passing through Framingham, Worcester, and Hartford,—in which last he had acquaintances, with whom he sometimes spent a day en route. Anthracite coal was not in use in New Haven before 1827. Citizens and students alike depended on wood, the latter buying theirs at the regular wood-stand near South College, and having it cut in the yard behind the colleges, wood-saws not being in general vogue. The habits of the collegians, from a hygienic point of view, were usually bad. They sat up late drinking strong coffee in their rooms, rose very early perforce, prayed and recited on an empty stomach, and took little regular exercise. Dyspepsia was naturally rife.

But en revanche New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already, thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets,—a dream-city of shaded squares and white—piazzaed mansions shining among cool green gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known,—that class of freshmen. It was a fair arena.… Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth,—of the few, the very few, that have no recoil and leave no repentance,—this leaping from the starting post of mind, this first spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge, is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most unmingled.”

This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823. His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman, simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home, thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor, who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards if you wish, but it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the entry,”—a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way five or six dollars, and had a scrape upon it, and the conclusion of the matter was their getting so intoxicated as to be unable to reach home.” The freshmen have likewise had their windows broken, and Willis’s chum has been smoked out, during the former’s absence from his room, by cigars inserted in the keyhole. A somewhat distant and impersonal form of the persecution this will seem to modern freshmen. But Sophomore Kneeland, from Georgia, having been collared by Tutor Stoddard, red-handed, in the act of breaking windows, and having knocked down the tutor and run, has been publicly expelled, the president reading out his mittimus in chapel to the whole college. Willis has joined the Linonian Society,—“Calhoun, the candidate for the presidency, was once a member of it” (an ancient “campaign” argument); also a freshman debating club, the officers of which “are almost all professors of religion,” and in which he has been chosen, in his absence, “critic on composition and speaking.” He has drunk tea at Miss Dunning’s. He has called upon Mrs. Daggett and Mrs. T. Dwight, finding the former of these two ladies to be “a very pious woman, and a woman of uncommon understanding,” and the latter “a woman of noble mind, though plain in person.” He has taken a walk to the Cave of the Regicides on West Rock,—time out of mind the goal of the freshman’s first pilgrimage. He has been appointed one of the committee to solicit subscriptions in his own class for the Greeks, and is also one of the managers of the Bible Society, and active at the Friday evening prayer-meetings, there being just at present considerable “engagedness” among “professors” in the several classes. Meanwhile Tutor Twining has been hissed and scraped at while conducting services in chapel. The government “are growing more and more rigorous. Almost every member of the freshman class is called up and questioned. Many are dismissed, and an examination is made of everything, from the stealing of a sugar-bowl out of the hall to the prostration of a tutor. Tutor Woolsey was smoked the other evening by two fellows who were too drunk to make their escape, and were caught without any difficulty. They did it at twelve o’clock at night, wrapped in sheets, and are both dismissed.” The disturbances between the sophomores and freshmen culminated for Willis in a short suspension in the winter of 1823-24 for honorably refusing to disclose the names of sophomores by whom he had been smoked and squirted, or the names of persons in whose rooms he had seen a squirt,—an instrument of torture whose possession involved expulsion. The letter in which he announced his suspension is very long and filled with heroic sentiments.

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.

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:—

This fancy, that he was peculiarly affected by the light of the moon, was the first suggestion of his wild tale, “The Lunatic’s Skate,” one of his most imaginative stories, and not unworthy of comparison with the weird fictions of Edgar Poe.

In the summer term of his sophomore year Willis was again suspended for a few weeks, this time in common with a majority of his class and in consequence of what was known as “the Conic Sections Rebellion.” The class had been assured by the tutors that they would not have to learn the corollaries to the propositions in that branch of mathematics, and when the objectionable corollaries were, notwithstanding, imposed upon them, the mercury then standing at 90° and the annual examinations at hand, eighty-four members bound themselves by a solemn pledge not to recite them. The government were firm, and the recalcitrant sophomores were suspended in platoons, day after day. Horace Bushnell was a ring-leader in this revolt, which included the “professors” equally with the worldly. All the suspended men were taken back at the end of the term.

In some recollections of Willis by his classmate, Hugh Blair Grigsby, published in the latter’s journal, the “Norfolk Beacon,” in the autumn of 1834, he says:—

Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824-25, about an old man planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,” where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of these juvenilia were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the “Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,” “The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.” It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best poem printed in their columns during the year,—a device now relegated to the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his “Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the ‘Christian Watchman,’” as announced in the issue of that paper for March 30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,” and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode Island,” and other publications.

All this literary glory gave the young undergraduate great Éclat in New Haven. He received many invitations out, and was teased for verses by the owners of countless albums. He began to frequent the society of the town, where his rapidly developing social gifts soon made him a favorite. He was at this time a tall, handsome stripling, with an easy assurance of manner and a good deal of the dandy in his dress. His portrait, painted by Miss Stuart of Boston, a daughter of the famous portrait-painter, Gilbert Stuart, shows him with a rosy face, very fair hair hanging in natural curls over the forehead, a retroussÉ nose, long upper lip, pale gray eye with uncommonly full lid (a family trait), and a confident and joyous expression. He carried himself with an airy, jaunty grace, and there was something particularly spirited and vif about the poise and movement of his head,—a something which no portrait could reproduce. With naturally elegant tastes, an expansive temper, and an eagerness to see the more brilliant side of life, Willis could at all times make himself agreeable to those whom he cared to please. But he was quick to feel the chill of a hostile presence, and toward any one, in especial, who seemed to disapprove of him he could be curt and defiant. He had a winning way with women, who were flattered by his recognition of their influence over him and grateful for les petits soins which he never neglected.

Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to literature.

Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia, that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:—

Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines have gone through this species of measles.

The specifications of this painful charge were several. He had been walking with a beautiful girl one glorious night, with his soul uplifted by the influences of the hour, when she rudely jarred upon his mood by remarking that “their kitchen chimney smoked again.” Another young woman, with whom he was viewing a Crucifixion in a picture gallery, had “coldly curled her lip and praised the high priest’s garment.” A third had profaned one of his religious hours.

Worse than all, he had been watching by a corpse, in company with a young lady of his acquaintance, when

These misogynistic musings called forth a remonstrance,—“Woman—to Roy,”—by one of the “Recorder’s” poetesses, who signed herself “Rob.” “Ye know her not,” she sang,

Meanwhile, rumors of his idleness and dissipation began to reach Boston, and caused his family much distress. These reports were absurdly exaggerated, and were warmly denied by his friends, who asserted that the head and front of his offending were an occasional moonlight drive to “the Lake” and a supper, with a glass of ale at “Barney’s.” Willis was gay in college, but very far from dissipated. In the select circles where he was made at home nothing like dissipation was tolerated. The society of the little university town was as simple as it was refined. He was cordially welcomed in such families as the Whitings, the Bishops, the Hubbards, and the entire Woolsey, Devereux, and Johnson connection in New Haven, Stratford, and New York. His winter holidays were spent partly at New York with his classmates Rankin and Richards, partly at Stratford with the Johnsons, once at New London among the kinsfolk of his grandmother, Lucy Douglas; and once he traveled as far as Philadelphia. His “dissipations” in New Haven were picnics to East Rock, rehearsals of “The Lady of the Lake” at a seminary for young ladies, pie-banquets in Thanksgiving week,—paid for with verses,—and New Year’s calls with their accompaniments of a cooky and a glass of wine.

That his head was a little turned by his literary and social successes is not wonderful. He had his share of vanity, and in his confidential letters to his parents and sisters he made no effort to conceal his elation. A passage from one of these, dated January 7, 1827, will give a good idea of his occupations and his frame of mind at this point in his senior year:—

In another letter he says:—

One of the families in which Willis was an habituÉ was the household of Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that “in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W——, Two Years of Age”—one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s “Parnassus”—were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune, who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters, Julia and Pastora—matre pulchra filiÆ pulchriores—were great belles among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.”

The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:—

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.

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:—

“On Sunday morning I saw a girl on a hillside in the wildest part of the Mohawk Valley, milking. So I leaped ashore, to the great amusement of the passengers, and ran up to give her a lecture. She was quite pretty, and blushed when I asked her if she knew it was wicked to milk on Sunday. She had a pretty little clean foot, probably washed by the wet grass, and held up the milking-pail for me to drink with considerable grace. I should have begged a kiss if the boat had not been in sight. I have just been called up to look at Palmyra. It is curious to sail through the centre of a town, and see people in the windows above you and on the steps of the houses, crowding to see the strange faces on board. They look so much at home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”