216 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



would show that Wilson was no stranger to the use of 

 good drawing materials, however frugal his habits in 

 this respect may have been. The young lady is said 

 to have been not indifferent to her poet lover, and some 

 of her family were friendly; the father, however, had 

 no notion of bestowing his daughter's hand upon a poor 

 schoolmaster, and for the third time Wilson's dreams of 

 domestic bliss were shattered. 



Such experiences no doubt tended to chasten the sen- 

 sitive spirit of this real genius, whose whole life seemed 

 to have been a continuous and losing struggle, while he 

 felt within him an inspiration and a power that had failed 

 to find adequate expression in labor at the loom, in verse, 

 or in the hated vocation of teaching rough country 

 schools at starvation wages. Though depressed by his 

 misadventures in love, Wilson does not seem to have 

 been embittered, and by way of diversion, he set out 

 in the autumn of 1804, on a long walking tour from 

 Philadelphia to Niagara Falls and back; in the follow- 

 ing winter the experiences of this journey were embodied 

 in a descriptive poem of 2,018 lines which he called "The 

 Foresters," an effort which would have been less prosaic 

 if frankly expressed in prose. Wilson's friendship for 

 the Bartrams continued under the changed conditions, 

 and he was invited to make his home under their hos- 

 pitable roof. He was now free to devote himself heart 

 and soul to birds and to birds alone. 



Wilson etched the first two plates of his American 

 Ornithology before he had obtained an engraver or a 

 publisher. In April, 1806, he resigned his school at 

 Gray's Ferry to accept an editorial position on a New 

 American Cyclopaedia? then in course of preparation, 



8 This was the American edition of Abraham Rees' revision of Ephraim 

 Chambers' Cyclopaedia, which had appeared in London in 1728; it was pub- 



