It was while he was there living hy miscellaneous ventures that J. R. Hawley, now U. S. Senator from Connecticut, was attracted by the letters which Mr. Warner was contributing to his paper, the Hartford Press, and invited his correspondent to remove to Hartford and become assistant editor of the paper. This was shortly before the opening of the war for the Union. When Mr. Hawley entered the army, Mr. Warner became editor in chief; and when the Press became merged in the older and more substantial Courant, he became one of the proprietors and editors of that paper.
In that position he remained until his death, although in his last years he was relieved from much of the office work of an editor. It was in connection with his journalistic duties that his first real stroke in literature was made. He was busy with the political discussions in which the press was involved, and most of his writing was of this sort. But his morning recreation in his garden suggested to him the relief of writing playful sketches for his paper, drawn from this occupation, and the popularity attending them led to a collection of the sketches in the well-known volume My Summer in a Garden.
In 1868 Mr. Warner went to Europe for a year and turned his travel-experience into sketches which were gathered into Saunterings. This was the beginning of his more distinctly literary life. He found his pleasure as well as his recuperation thereafter chiefly in rambling and in noting men and things. The more distinctive of his books of travel growing out of this habit were Baddeck and That Sort of Thing, which is a humorous sketch of a journey in Nova Scotia and among the scenes of Longfellow’s Evangeline; books of eastern travel, My Winter on the Nile and In the Levant; rambles chiefly in the Spanish peninsula under the name A Roundabout Journey, and a number of papers relating to American life and scenery gathered into the two volumes Studies in the South and West and Our Italy
