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 Cyclopedia’ then in course of preparation, 
* This was the American edition of Abraham Rees’ revision of Ephraim 
Chambers’ Cyclopedia, which had appeared in London in 1728; it was pub- 
