Nathaniel Parker Willis - Out-Doors at Idlewild; or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson

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OUT-DOORS

AT

IDLEWILD;

OR, THE

Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson

NEW YORK CLASSICS

OUT-DOORS

AT

IDLEWILD;

OR, THE

Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY

EDWARD RENEHAN

Cover Image: Idlewood, the Residence of N.P. Willis at his Hudson River estate, Idlewild: stereoview by E. & H.T. Anthony, New York Public Library Digital Images collection.

Out-Doors at Idlewild: or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson was originally published in 1855 by Charles Scribner.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2021 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 18061867, author. | Renehan, Edward, 1956 writer of introduction.

Title: Out-doors at Idlewild; or, the shaping of a home on the banks of the Hudson / Nathaniel Parker Willis ; with a new introduction by Edward Renehan.

Other titles: Facsimile title page: Out-doors at Idlewild; or, the shaping of a home on the banks of the Hudson

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Series: New York classics | Originally published in 1855 by Charles Scribner. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021025111 | ISBN 9781438486239 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486246 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Idlewild (Cornwall, N.Y.) | Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)

Classification: LCC PS3324 .O8 2021 | DDC 814/.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025111

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Edward Renehan

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New Introduction

Edward Renehan

During the 1850s and 1860s, by the far the most prominent man in all of Cornwall-on-Hudsonindeed in all of Orange County if not New York Statewas the writer, editor, and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis (18061867). And nearly as prominent as the man was his Hudson Valley estate, Idlewild, where literary elites gathered and about which Willis himself wrote and published extensively.

Although largely forgotten today, Willis was a true lion of his era. The writers he worked with included in their ranks Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was, as well, a close personal friend of Charles Dickens, with whom he famously dined on champagne and oysters. He founded the magazine Home Journal in 1846, the name of this publication eventually evolving into Town and Country, still published monthly.

Williss entire clan was highly accomplished. His grandfather, Nathaniel Willis, was the publisher of newspapers in Massachusetts and Virginia. His father, another Nathaniel Willis, founded the Youths Companion magazine. Williss sister Sara Payson Willis was a widely respected author who published under the pen name Fanny Fern. A brother, Richard Storrs Willis, was a noted composer of sacred music, his most lasting work being the melody for the Christmas Carol It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. The African American writer (and runaway slave) Harriett Jacobs lived in the Willis household (Idlewild), while drafting her now-classic abolitionist memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published with Williss help in 1861.

Willis sited the home close by a deep two-hundred-foot gorge via which what came to be known as Idlewild Creek cascaded down toward the river. Here, as health issues began to invalid him and confine him to home, Willis wrote a series of papers for his Home Journal documenting life at the seventy-acre estate; these eventually collected in Out-Doors at Idlewild.

With such contemporaries as William Cullen Bryant and Benson Lossing, Willis extolled picturesque America as represented in the works of the artists of the Hudson River School. Willis wrote a two-volume work entitled American Scenery, illustrated by William Henry Bartlett, in which he discussed at length the various natural wonders of the countrynever overlooking the sights along the Hudson. In conjunction with such enterprises, he also strenuously lobbied on more than one occasion for the revision of names applied to elements of the countryside whenever he thought those names inadequate. Thus Murderers Creek in Cornwall became Moodna Creek and Butter Hill (the massive granite mountain that forms the western edge of the great Wind Gate entrance to the Hudson Highlands between Cornwall and Breakneck Ridge on the eastern shore) became Storm King Mountain.

In the varied scenery of our country, he wrote, there is many a natural beauty, destined to be the theme of our national poetry, which is desecrated by any vile name given it by vulgar chance. Willis began dreaming up new names. Williss efforts were far from silly or trite. They accurately reflected the value placed on the scenery by the Romantics of the nineteenth century. In bestowing Romantic names on the mountains which form the northern gate to the [Hudson] Highlands, Willis captured the emotional appeal of the Highland scenery and helped assure its preservation a century later.

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