ASHER BROWN DURAND research uncovers Halleck link--:
"In 1867, evidently in anticipation of making a grand gesture on his wedding anniversary, Field prevailed upon his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck to invent a second verse:

And that I am all the world to her,
It joys my breath to say, For her beating heart has told me so
For many a happy day. For many a happy day-
And her bonny lip and eye, Oh! my darling Floy Van Cortlandt,
'Tis for thee Id live and die.

Then, Field asked Durand to complete the three-way collaborative gift. It was not unusual for Durand to accept a landscape commission in which setting and various details were stipulated by the patron. He enhanced Field's memory image of thirty years by setting the courting couple, moon, clouds, and the shores of a winding I Hudson River into the type of landscape in vogue when both he and his patron were young men by reverting to the classical landscape formula of tile seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain, on which he hid frequently relied thirty ' years earlier. During the 1860s, Durand occasionally created landscapes in which such older formulas reappear."