Nathaniel Parker Willis

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Title: Nathaniel Parker Willis
Author: Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
Language: English
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American Men of Letters.

Edited by

Charles Dudley Warner.

[Illustration: S. Lawrence, 1837. Illman & Sons.

N. P. Willis.]

American Men of Letters.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

HENRY A. BEERS.

[Illustration]

Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1890.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

PREFACE.

The materials for a life of Willis are rich enough to be embarrassing.
Most of his writings are, in a greater or less degree, autobiographical;
and it would be possible to make a very tolerable life of him, by
arranging passages from these in the right order, and linking them
together with a few paragraphs of cold facts. Then, he lived very much in
the world’s eye, and was constantly talked and written about, so that
there is abundant mention of him in newspaper files, and in volumes of
“Recollections,” etc., by his contemporaries. In addition to these printed
sources, I have been furnished, by the kindness of Mrs. N. P. Willis, Miss
Julia Willis, and Mrs. Imogen Willis Eddy, with private letters, journals,
and other MS. memoranda by Willis, which extend from his school days at
Andover down to a few weeks before his death--of course not without
_lacunæ_. Although I have not quoted very freely from these letters, they
have been of the greatest service, by supplying facts which I have
incorporated with the body of the narrative, and by correcting or
verifying data otherwise obtained. A biography of Willis could have been
written without them, but this particular biography could not; and I take
occasion hereby to acknowledge my debt to the ladies whose courtesy gave
me access to this material.

There are many others who have helped my undertaking in various ways--too
many for me to thank them all by name. But I cannot withhold mention of my
obligations to Mr. Richard S. Willis and to Mr. Morris Phillips, the
editor of the “Home Journal.”

HENRY A. BEERS.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 1

CHAPTER II.

COLLEGE LIFE 31

CHAPTER III.

BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY 71

CHAPTER IV.

LIFE ABROAD 107

CHAPTER V.

LIFE ABROAD CONTINUED 154

CHAPTER VI.

GLENMARY--THE CORSAIR--THE NEW MIRROR 219

CHAPTER VII.

THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND--THE HOME JOURNAL 283

CHAPTER VIII.

IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS 326

BIBLIOGRAPHY 353

INDEX 357

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

CHAPTER I.

1806-1823.

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.

Willis was born January 20, 1806, in the little old seaport city of
Portland, Maine, celebrated by the “Autocrat” for its great square
mansions, the homes of retired sea-captains. The town had already made
some noise in literature, as the residence of that wild genius, John Neal;
and on February 27, 1807, little more than a year after the date with
which this biography begins, it witnessed the birth of its most
illustrious citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A comparison at once suggests itself between the subsequent fortunes in
the republic of letters of these two infant poets, fellow townsmen for
some five years. Willis was the earlier in the field. In 1832, when
Longfellow, then a young professor at Bowdoin College, began to
contribute scholarly articles to the “North American Review,” the former
had been five years before the public, and was already well known as a
poet, a magazine editor, and a foreign correspondent. When “Outre-Mer” was
issued in 1835, Willis had won a reputation as a prose writer on both
sides of the Atlantic by his “Pencillings” in the “New York Mirror;” and
by 1839, when Longfellow published his first volume of original poetry,
“Voices of the Night,” his senior by a year had printed five books of
verse. But there is no question as to which has proved the better
continuer. Longfellow is still the favorite poet of two peoples; a singer
dearer, perhaps, to the general heart than any other who has sung in the
English tongue. His brilliant contemporary, after being for about fifteen
years the most popular magazinist in America, has sunk into comparative
oblivion.[1] This is the fate of all fashionable literature. Every
generation begins by imitating the literary fashions of the last, and ends
with a reaction against them. At present “realism” has the floor,
sentiment is at a discount, and Willis’s glittering, high-colored pictures
of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact,
have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James.

Without presuming any native equality between Willis and the Cambridge
poet, it is fair to add that the former never found opportunity to deepen
and ripen such gift as was in him. His life was passed not “in the quiet
and still air of delightful studies,” but in the rush of the gay world and
the daily drudgery of the pen; in the toil of journalism, that most
exhausting of mental occupations, which is forever giving forth and never
bringing in. His best work--all of his work which claims remembrance--was
done before he was forty. His earlier writings are not only his freshest,
but his strongest and most carefully executed.

Willis is a glaring instance of inherited tendencies, being the third
journalist in succession in his line of descent. The founder of the family
in this country, and the progenitor of our subject in the seventh
generation, was a certain George Willis, born in England in 1602, who
arrived in New England probably about 1630. He was a brickmaker and
builder by trade, and is described as “a Puritan of considerable
distinction,” who resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some sixty years,
having been admitted to the Freeman’s Oath in 1638 and elected a deputy to
the General Court. Probably the most noteworthy of the poet’s forbears, at
least upon the father’s side, was the Rev. John Bailey, his ancestor in
the fifth generation, a non-conforming Independent minister in Lancashire,
who, having been silenced and afterwards imprisoned, escaped to
Massachusetts in 1684, and was settled, first as minister over the church
in Watertown, and later as associate minister over the First Church in
Boston, where he died in 1697. Increase Mather preached his funeral
sermon. His tomb is in the Granary Burying Ground, adjoining Park Street
Church, and his portrait in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical
Society. What more could a man ask for in an ancestor? No New England
pedigree which respects itself is without one or more fine old Puritan
divines of this kind. Accordingly, when Willis began to take that mild,
retrospective interest in his own genealogy which foretokens the oncoming
of age,--when new twigs upon the family tree give an unthought-of
importance to the roots,--he bestowed the name of this particular
forefather upon his youngest boy, Bailey Willis.

The poet’s great-grandmother Willis, born Abigail Belknap, was
granddaughter to this Rev. John Bailey, and had some traits which cropped
out in her posterity. At the time of the destruction of the tea in Boston
harbor, she cannily saved a little for private use. She used to say, “I
have got some Belknap pride in me yet;” and among her favorite maxims
were, “Never go into the back door when you can go into the front,” and
“Never eat brown bread when you can get white.” The husband of this lady
was Charles Willis, a sail-maker and patriot, who was present on the
occasion when tar and feathers and hot tea were administered to his
Majesty’s tax-collector in Boston. His position and action in the affair
were represented in an ancient engraving, bought long afterwards by his
grandson, Deacon Nathaniel Willis, our Willis’s father. A copy of the same
is now in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The son of
Charles and Abigail Willis was Nathaniel, the third, though by no means
the last, Willis with that baptismal name; the first literary man in the
family, and the poet’s grandfather. He conducted in Boston, during the
Revolutionary War, the “Independent Chronicle,” a Whig newspaper,
published from the same building in which Franklin had worked as a
printer. This Nathaniel senior, as we may call him, was an active man. He
was a fine horseman, took part in the Boston tea-party, and was adjutant
of the Boston regiment sent on an expedition to Rhode Island under General
Sullivan. In 1784 he sold his interest in the “Independent Chronicle,” and
became one of the pioneer journalists of the unsettled West. He removed
first to Winchester, Virginia, where he published a paper for a short
time; then to Shepardstown, where he also published a paper; and thence in
1790 to Martinsburg, Virginia, where he founded the “Potomac Guardian” and
edited it till 1796. In that year he went to Chillicothe, Ohio, and
established the “Scioto Gazette,” the first newspaper in what was then
known as the Northwestern Territory. He was printer to the government of
the territory, and afterwards held an agency in the Post Office
Department. He bought and cultivated a farm near Chillicothe, on which he
ended his days April 1, 1831. His wife was Lucy Douglas, of New London,
Connecticut.

His son and the poet’s father, Nathaniel Willis, Junior,--the fourth
Nathaniel in the family,--was born at Boston in 1780, and remained there
until 1787, when he joined his father at Winchester and was employed in
his newspaper office, and subsequently at Martinsburg on the “Potomac
Guardian.” In the infancy of American journalism, the editor and publisher
of a paper was usually a practical printer. Young Nathaniel was put to
work at once in folding papers and setting types. At Martinsburg he used
to ride post, with tin horn and saddle-bags, delivering papers to
scattered subscribers in the thinly settled country. N. P. Willis himself
served a year’s apprenticeship at his father’s press in Boston, in an
interval of his schooling; and in his letters home from England alluded
triumphantly to his having once been destined by his parents to the trade
of a printer. His particular duty was to ink the types. “We remember
_balling_ an edition of ‘Watts’s Psalms and Hymns,’ and there are lines in
that good book that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the
ink-balls, while conning them over.” A sketch of the old office of the
“Potomac Guardian,” made by “Porte Crayon,” is in the possession of Mr.
Richard Storrs Willis of Detroit.

At the age of fifteen young Nathaniel returned to Boston and entered the
office of his father’s old paper, the “Independent Chronicle,” working in
the same press-room in Court Street where his father had once worked, and
the great Franklin before him. He also found time, while in Boston, to
drill with the “Fusiliers.” In 1803, invited by a Maine congressman and
other gentlemen of the Republican party, he went to Portland and
established the “Eastern Argus” in opposition to the Federalists. Here the
subject of this biography was born three years later. “Well do I remember
that day,” his father wrote to him fifty-seven years after the event, “and
the driving snow-storm in which I had to go, in an open sleigh, to bring
in the nurse from the country. Francis Douglas boarded with us at that
time. He was a very pleasant young man, and had a half promise (if it was
a boy) it should be called _Francis_. But your mother soon overruled that,
and decided that you should have both of our names, for fear she should
never have another son! You was a fine fat baby, with a face as round as
an apple.”

Party spirit ran high at this time, and political articles were
acrimonious. Libel suits were brought against the publisher of the
“Argus,” which involved him in trouble and expense; and six years after
its establishment it was sold for four thousand dollars to the same
Francis Douglas who had come so near imposing his Christian name on the
infant Willis. At Portland Nathaniel Willis came under the ministrations
and influence of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D.,--on whose death, many
years after, his son composed some rather perfunctory verses,--and began
henceforth to devote himself to the cause of religion. From 1810 to 1812
he sought to establish a religious newspaper in Portland, but met with no
substantial encouragement. At the latter date he returned to Boston,
where, after years of effort, during which he supported himself by
publishing tracts and devotional books, he started, in January, 1816, the
“Boston Recorder,” which he asserted to be the first religious newspaper
in the world. It was in this periodical that the earliest lispings of
Willis’s muse reached the ear of the public. The “Recorder” was conducted
by his father down to 1844, in which year it was sold to the Rev. Martin
Moore. It still lives as the “Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.”

Nathaniel Willis also originated the idea of a religious paper for
children. “The Youth’s Companion,” which he commenced in 1827 and edited
for about thirty years, was the first, and remains one of the best,
publications of the kind in existence. In a letter to his son he gave the
following account of its inception: “He was in the habit of teaching his
children, statedly, the Assembly’s Catechism, and to encourage them to
commit to memory the answers, he rewarded them by telling them stories
from Scripture history without giving names. The result was that the
Catechism was all committed to memory by the children, and the idea
occurred of a children’s department in the ‘Recorder.’ This department
being much sought for by children, it suggested the experiment of having a
paper exclusively for children.” Around the fireplace where Mr. Willis sat
with his children were some old-fashioned Dutch tiles, representing scenes
from the New Testament, and it was in answer to their questions about
these that he began his narrations. One sees in this little domestic
picture the beginnings of the young Nathaniel’s literary training and the
germ of his “Scripture Sketches.” Years after, a college lad, when shaping
into smooth blank verse the story of the widow of Nain or the healing of
Jairus’s daughter, his memory must have gone back to their rude figures
about his father’s hearth, seeming to move and stir in the flickering
light of the wood fire; and the recollection of his father’s voice and the
listening group of brothers and sisters gave tenderness to the strain.

He was only six when the family removed from Portland to Boston, and he
appears to have kept little remembrance of his birthplace. The noble
harbor, with its islands, which were the Hesperides of Longfellow’s boyish
dreams, the old fort on the hill, the mystery of the ships, the Spanish
sailors with bearded lips, the noise of the sea fight far away, and the
faces of the dead captains as they lay in their coffins, did not enter
into Willis’s experience. Indeed, the period of childhood, which has been
to many poets so fruitful in precious memories, seems to have left few
deep traces on his mind, if we except its religious impressions. The life
of his father’s household, though rich in domestic affections, was
probably not stimulating to the imagination. It was the life of a Puritan
home, of what is called in England a “serious family,”--that life which
oppresses Matthew Arnold with its _ennui_; its interests divided between
“business and Bethels;” its round of long family devotions, strict Sabbath
observances, catechisms, and visiting missionaries. Dancing, card-playing,
and theatre-going were, of course, forbidden pleasures. The elder Willis,
though a thoroughly good man and good father, was a rather wooden person.
His youth and early manhood had been full of hardship; his education was
scanty, and he had the formal and narrow piety of the new evangelicals of
that day, revolting against the latitudinarianism of the Boston churches.
He was for twenty years deacon of Park Street Church, profanely nicknamed
by the Unitarians “Brimstone Corner.” “My recollection of a particular
occasion,” says an old member of that society, “when, at a conference
meeting in the church, he, as presider, was expounding John xv., is that I
regarded it as a memorable illustration of a man’s attempting to expound
without ideas. I hear him saying,--more than fifty years ago,--‘v. 4.
Abide in me. Abide is to dwell,’ in a most monotonous tone, and the rest
in the same manner of appreciation.” His rigidity was, perhaps, more in
his principles than in his character, and his austerity was tempered by
two qualities which have not seldom been found to consist with the
diaconate, namely, a sense of humor--“dry,” of course, to the correct
degree--and an admiration for pretty women, or, in the dialect of that
day, for “female loveliness.” These tastes he bequeathed to his son, as
also a certain tenacity of will, which, latent throughout the latter’s
career, came to the surface in an astonishing way during the trials of his
last years. This trait is amusingly illustrated in the senior Willis’s
correspondence with his son by his allusions to an interminable litigation
that he was carrying on in his eighty-fourth year. “I should have written
you sooner,” he says, “but that Irishman, Garbrey, has sued me the
_fourth_ time about that old drain which he dug up before my front door,
in Atkinson Street, that we never knew before was there. He has lost his
case in three different courts, and now sends to the Supreme Court a ‘Bill
of Exceptions,’ which all my friends think he cannot recover. It has been
a great trouble and expense to me. But I have carried the case in prayer
to God, constantly, and He has three times defeated the extortioner.”
Willis always retained a cordial affection and respect for his father, but
between two such different natures and divergent lives there could be
little genial sympathy or real intellectual intimacy. The tough old deacon
outlived the inheritor of his name and calling by some three years, and
died May 26, 1870, at the age of ninety.

For his mother Willis cherished, as boy and man, a devotion that may well
be called passionate, and which found utterance in many of his most
heartfelt poems, such as his “Birth-Day Verses,” “Lines on Leaving
Europe,” and “To my Mother from the Apennines.” Her maiden name was Hannah
Parker. She was born at Holliston, Massachusetts, and was two years
younger than her husband. She was a woman whose strong character and
fervent piety were mingled with a playful affectionateness which made her
to her children the object of that perfect love which casteth out fear.
Like many another poet’s mother,--like Goethe’s, for example,--she
supplied to her son those elements of gayety and softness which were
wanting in the stiffer composition of the father:--

“Von Mutterchen die Fröhnatur,
Die Lust zu fabuliren.”

He inherited from her the emotional, impulsive part of his nature as well
as his physical constitution, his light complexion, full face, and
tendency, in youth, to a plethoric habit. “My veins,” he wrote, “are
teeming with the quicksilver spirit which my mother gave me. Whatever I
accomplish must be gained by ardor, and not by patience.” She was his
confidant, his sympathizer, his elder sister. The testimony to her worth
and her sweetness is universal. The Rev. Dr. Storrs of Braintree, in an
obituary notice written on her death, in 1844, at the age of sixty-two,
spoke of her as “the light and joy of every circle in which she moved; the
idol of her family; the faithful companion, the tender mother, the
affectionate sister, the fast and assiduous friend.”

Willis was the second in a family of nine children, all of whom reached
maturity, and two of whom, besides himself, achieved literary reputation.
These were Sarah Payson Willis, afterwards famous, under the _nom de
plume_ of “Fanny Fern,” as a prolific and successful writer for children,
and Richard Storrs Willis, his youngest brother, formerly editor of the
“Musical World,” the author of “Our Church Music,” and known both as a
musical composer and a poet. Julia Willis, his favorite sister and
constant correspondent, was also a woman of remarkable talent, with a gift
of tongues and a sounder scholarship than her more showy brother. She
wrote many of the book reviews in the “Home Journal,” but always declined
to renounce her anonymity.

Such were the influences which surrounded Willis’s early years. And if, at
the first touch of the world, the youthful members of the household flew
off like the dry seeds of the _Impatiens_, it need not therefore be
hastily concluded that the home training, though perhaps too repressive
and severe, was without lasting effect for good. Among the children and
grandchildren of Nathaniel Willis are Catholics, Episcopalians,
Unitarians, and representatives of other shades of belief and unbelief.
But this is the history of many a New England Puritan family, and such are
the disintegrating forces of American life. In the case of the eldest
brother, it may be affirmed that, from a career which was certainly
worldly, and in some of its aspects by no means edifying, the light that
shone from his mother’s face uplifted in prayer for him never altogether
faded away.

Willis began school life under the tuition of the Rev. Dr. McFarland, of
Concord, New Hampshire. “I have forgotten every circumstance,” he wrote
long after, “of a year or two that I was at school at Concord, New
Hampshire, when a boy, except the natural scenery of the place. The faces
of my teacher and my playmates have long ago faded from my memory, while I
remember the rocks and eddies of the Merrimac, the forms of the trees on
the meadow opposite the town, and every bend of the river’s current.”
Later he was brought home and sent to the Boston Latin School, then under
“its well-remembered Pythagoras, Ben Gould.” A few reminiscences of his
slate-and-satchel days are scattered here and there through his writings.
Thus he vaguely recalled Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one of the boys whose
fathers were Unitarians,” and he was greatly impressed by Edward Everett,
then a young Harvard professor, whose stylishly dressed figure used to
appear occasionally in Atkinson Street, at No. 31, in which thoroughfare
the Willises dwelt. He remembered “the rousings before daylight,” on
May-day, “to go to Dorchester Heights, and the shivering search after
never found green leaves and flowers; the buttoning up of boy-jacket to
keep out the cold wind, and pulling out of penknife to cut off the bare
stems of the sweet-brier in search of the hidden odor of the belated
bud.” In “The Pharisee and the Barber,” one of the two or three stories of
Willis whose scenes are laid in Boston, the description of Sheafe Lane is
evidently from the life. The Pharisee of that tale, Mr. Flint, an “active
member of a church famed for its zeal,” who “dressed in black, as all
religious men must (in Boston),” was doubtless a sketch from memory of
some pious familiar of his father’s house, whose black eyes and formal
talk left upon the lad a mixed impression of awe and distrust.

Harvard was the natural destination of a Boston Latin School boy intending
college. But the line between the Orthodox and the Unitarians was drawn
more sharply in 1820 than in 1884. Even now stray youths from Boston are
found at other colleges than Harvard, attracted elsewhere by family ties
or theological affinities. But at that time the cleavage made by the
schism in Eastern Massachusetts was still raw, and Deacon Willis would
almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a
hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college.

“Larry’s father,” wrote Willis in “The Lunatic’s Skate,” “was a
disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon
zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands
of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds
that could resist a four years’ ordeal in either. A student was as
certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the
other; and in the New England States these two sects are bitterly
hostile. So to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett
went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the
sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn
Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of
‘election and free grace,’ whether or no.”

Of the two great fitting-schools founded by Samuel and John Phillips
respectively at Andover and at Exeter, the latter had been captured by the
Unitarians. But the Andover academy, under the sheltering wing of the
famed theological seminary in the same town, though barely thirty miles
from Boston, remained an insoluble lump of Calvinism, a wedge of defiant
Orthodoxy _in partibus infidelium_. To Andover, accordingly, young Willis
was sent, after a course in the Latin School, to complete his preparation
for Yale. The academy was then under the headship of that sound classical
master, John Adams, who was principal from 1810 to 1833. It gave an
excellent fit in the classics, insomuch that Willis, though the reverse of
diligent in college, was carried along a good way, with little study, by
the impetus acquired at Andover. At Andover, too, he began to give signs
of literary tastes and in particular to scribble verses, which had already
given him the reputation of a poet among his fellows before he came up to
college. A letter dated July 3, 1823, and addressed to his elder sister
Lucy, about a fortnight before her marriage, incloses a copy of verses
which is perhaps the earliest poem of Willis now extant. It has no merit,
but as containing hints of his later manner and the unformed germs of that
smooth, diffuse blank verse in which his “Scripture Sketches” were
written, the opening lines may be not without interest:--

“There was a bride, and she was beautiful
And fond, affectionate; her soul did love.
’Twas not the transient feeling of an hour,
That loves and hates, and loves and hates again,--
Oh, no; it was a purer, kindlier feeling,--
A something rooted, grafted on the soul,
That cannot help but live and bud and blossom.”

He also began to wreak thought upon expression in that common vent to the
_cacoethes scribendi_, of young writers,--keeping a diary, “a red morocco
volume, of very ornate slenderness and thinness, in which I recorded my
raptures at spring mornings and blue sashes, my unappreciated
sensibilities, my mysterious emotions by moonlight, and the charms of the
incognita whom I ran against at the corner. This precious record shared
in the final and glorious conflagration of Latin themes, grammars,
graduses, and old shirts, on leaving academy for college.”

“The Lunatic’s Skate” opens with some reminiscences of school life at
Andover:--

“In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen
(a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver
thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest
boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake
of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s
Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over
with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within
anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from
him), and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by
an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s
clearing and that by our own door. Out of school Larry and I were
inseparable. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our
tomahawks made in the same fashion, united our property in
fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each
other’s approbation.”

One of his school-fellows here was Isaac McLellan, who afterwards became a
contributor to Willis’s “American Monthly.” He published a long poem, “The
Fall of the Indian,” which Willis reviewed in the same periodical,
referring to the poet as “the very boy that has tracked the woods with
us, and called us by our nickname over a hedge, and cracked nuts with us
by the fire in the winter evenings. Which of us dreamed, as we read in our
blotted classic, ‘Quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum,’ that he
should ever be guilty of a book? How it would have swelled our idle veins,
as we lay half asleep, bobbing our lines over the bank of the Shawsheen on
those long Saturday afternoons, that we should ever play for each other
the gentle office of critic!”

In after years the rice fields of Georgia, with their embankments and
green surfaces, reminded Willis of “the gooseberry pies which formed part
of my early education at Andover, and which are among the warmest of my
recollections of that classic academy.” “We have fine times picking
berries here,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “Every kind grows in
profusion in Andover,--raspberries, black, blue, thimble, and whortle
berries. The woods are crowded with them. After tea we generally start,
and after we have eat enough go and bathe in the Shawsheen, our Andover
river.”

This Indian Ilyssus was the scene of an adventure recorded in certain
“Tête-à-tête Confessions” in the “American Monthly,” doubtless with some
exaggerations for literary effect and with a _dénoûment_ suspiciously
dramatic. The passage may be given, however, for what it is worth:--

“Cytherean Venus! How I did love Miss Polly D. Low, the pride of the
factory on the romantic Shawsheen! I saw her first in the tenderest
twilight of a Saturday evening, washing her feet in the river. I was
a lad of some impudence, and I sat down on a stone beside her, and
by the time it was dark we were the best friends possible. She was
beautiful. I think so _now_. She was about eighteen, and, though
four years older than I, my education had more than equalized us. At
least, if not the wiser of the two, I was the most skilled in the
subtlety of love, and practiced with great success _les petites
ruses_. She was a tall brunette, and I sometimes fancied, when her
eye exhibited more than ordinary feeling, that there was Indian
blood under that dark and glowing skin. The valley of the Shawsheen,
just below the village where I was at school, is a gem of solitary
and rich scenery, and the overhanging woods and long meadows
afforded the most picturesque and desirable haunts for ramblers who
did not care to be met. There on Sunday afternoons, when she was
released from her shuttle and I from my Schrevelius, did we meet and
stroll till the nine o’clock bell of the factory summoned her
unwillingly home. I could go without my supper in those days, though
I doubt if I would now on such slight occasion. By the time vacation
came, I found myself seriously in love, declared my passion, and
left her with my heart half broken. We were gone four weeks, and
when I returned the butcher’s boy was engaged to Miss Low, and I was
warned to avoid the factory at the peril of a flogging.”

In his last year at Andover Willis experienced religion and joined the
church. Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called
“revivals,” in some school or college needs no description of the kind of
pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young
consciences there assembled. At the first rumor of an unwonted
“seriousness” abroad, occasioned perhaps by the death of a fellow-student,
by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in a winter
term, the machinery is set in motion. Daily prayer-meetings are held, in
which the elders play part,--the movement at Andover was taken in hand by
the “Seminarians,” that is, the students of the Divinity School;--the
unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already
church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and
submit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of
stimulus there follows a great awakening. Many are “under conviction,” the
air becomes electric, and there is a strange spiritual tension which is
felt even by the resisting. Momentous choices are made in an instant and
under the stress of contagious emotions. The awful issues of eternity are
set before a roomful of boys in the midst of prayers and sobs and eloquent
words, exhorting the sinner not to let pass this opportunity of
salvation,--perhaps his last. And then the movement subsides, leaving an
impression which endures with some, and with others quickly wears off.
Those who believe that the Christian character and the Christian life are
the result of nurture and slow endeavor look with distrust upon these
sudden conversions. The hardened sinner may need some such violent call to
repentance, but there is a sort of indecency in this premature forcing
open of the simple and healthful heart of a boy, substituting morbid
self-questionings, exaggerated remorse, and the terrors of perdition for
his natural brave outlook on a world of hope and enjoyment. The story of
Willis’s conversion is fully told in his letters home, and it reads like a
chapter of “Doctor Johns.”

In 1821, being then fifteen years of age, he had written to his father:--

“I can plainly see an answer to prayer in the delay of my admission
to the church. I prayed that God would, if I was in danger of making
a hasty step, by some means or other prevent it. I doubted, till it
became almost a certainty, whether it was proper. I doubted myself,
my pretensions to a change of heart; and my very heart seemed to
sink under me every time I thought of the solemn engagement I was
unhappy, extremely unhappy, when in Boston, and have been, I might
say, miserable ever since.”

And again in 1822:--

“As to becoming a Christian, it is morally _beyond my power_. I have
not an objection against it that would weigh a feather, and yet I
feel no more solicitude than I ever did about my eternal welfare.”

In a letter of the same year to his mother, who had his conversion much at
heart, he says:--

“I do have times when the tears of regret flow, and I make the
resolution of attending to the subject of religion. But my light
head and still lighter heart dismisses the subject as soon as
another object arrests my attention, and my resolutions and regrets
are soon lost in the mazes of pleasure and folly.”

It is curious to reflect that these “mazes of pleasure and folly” meant
nothing more than innocent school-boy diversions, such as black-berrying
and swimming parties, or at worst a juvenile flirtation with some rural
belle. The oldness and gravity of the phrase, in contrast with the boyish
tone of other parts of his letters, illustrate well that moral
precocity--precocity of the conscience as distinguished from the
mind--developed in New England boys of the last generation by the Puritan
training.

In January, 1823, the great revival which had been in progress at Boston
struck the Andover academy. Mr. Willis made his son a visit, and urged him
to join the church. After his return to Boston he received the following
letter:--

ANDOVER, MASS., _January 12, 1823_.
Sunday afternoon.

DEAR FATHER,--I received your package last evening, with my
Testament, etc., inclosed. As the word of God I prize it, and as the
gift of my affectionate father I love it, and shall always look upon
it as a remembrance of an era in my feelings which I hope I shall
always be thankful for. You cannot imagine how much your visit and
advice strengthened me in my resolutions, and spurred me forward in
the good work I had begun. I hope I have now the assurance of being
an heir of life and a recipient of the protection which the wings of
a Saviour’s mercy must afford to those who are gathered under them.
My hope is sometimes shaken when I find my thoughts wandering to
other subjects while the ordinances of God are administering before
my eyes. But the moment that I get upon my knees and pray for
strength I feel my assurance renewed, and rise happier and happier
from every renewal of my supplications.… Saturday evening I attended
our usual meeting in the academy for the _first time_ since I have
been in Andover. It is conducted by the pious scholars of the
academy in succession, and is very interesting. This evening Dr.
Shedd preached the lecture, and after meeting there is to be another
at Mr. Adams’s house. So you see, pa, we are engaged here, and have
reason to hope that _many_ will be inquiring the way to the foot of
the cross.…--_Nine o’clock._ I have been to meeting at the chapel,
and after that attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Adams’s. They were
both very solemn. Louis Dwight led the last.--_Monday evening, 12
o’clock._ I have truly spent an evening of happiness, and I thought
I must open my letter and tell you. At half-past six William Adams
and I had appointed a meeting, to be conducted wholly by ourselves.
We had invited only a few, but when we got there it was so crowded
that I could scarcely make my way through the room to the
Bible-stand. I believe nearly all our unconverted brethren were
there.… After it was dismissed, many seemed to linger, as if they
did not want to go, and we conversed with some of them. I then went
into Cutler’s room, and Allen and I stayed there till almost eleven
o’clock. There were several of the Seminarians there, and we prayed
and sung, _prayed and sung_, till it seemed a little heaven on
earth. The seriousness increases; many more are deeply impressed,
and the academy presents solemn countenances generally. It is late,
and my eyes smart badly.

Your affectionate son,

N. P. WILLIS.

The William Adams here mentioned was a son of the principal of the
academy, and was afterwards Willis’s classmate at Yale. Louis Dwight was a
theological student, who a year later was married to Willis’s second
sister, Louisa. The subsequent progress of the revival is related in the
following letter, written two or three days later:--

ANDOVER, MASS., _January 15_.
Wednesday evening, 12 o’clock.

MY DEAR FATHER,--My heart is so overflowing with joy and gratitude
and happiness that I could not rest till I had sat down and told you
_all_. We have had a meeting in Allen’s room to-night. Mr. Styles
was there, and talked so that I thought I could almost see a halo
round his head, and expected him to turn into St. Paul come down
again from heaven. After meeting Mr. S. told them the meeting was
closed, but if any wished to converse with him or the other
professors of religion in the room, they might tarry. The room was
crowded, body and all, so that you could not have got through, but
no one stirred. Sobbing and weeping was heard all round the room.
William Adams, Allen, Styles, and I then went round and conversed
with them. They all burst into tears immediately, and listened with
the greatest eagerness, and when I got up to go to the next one,
they held on to me as though salvation depended on my talking with
them. _Isaac Stuart_ sobbed aloud the whole meeting time. _Joseph
Jenkins was in tears_, and came down to my room after meeting and
asked me to pray for and with him. He said he _could not_ pray
himself; he _dared_ not. I gave him the best advice I could and
prayed with him, and he is now in his room, as I _hope praying for
himself_. I talked with little Joshua Huntingdon, and told him about
his father. He wept, and promised to go home and pray. J. C. Alvord,
a member of my class and a _fine fellow_, was in the greatest
misery. He could not sit upon his chair, and took me out of the
meeting to go to my room and pray with him. Jno. Tappan of Boston
was very deeply affected. I conversed with Darrach of Philadelphia,
Carter of Virginia, King of Convers, and several others. They all
seemed to feel very deeply, and all begged me earnestly to pray for
them. We could not get them away. They stood round weeping and
looking for some one to say something to them. Oh, my dear father,
what _can_ we render to God for all his mercies! Allen has been down
in my room several times to pray for some _particular one_. There
were so many to pray for that we have been on our knees from seven
o’clock till now almost all the time. Kennett, my room-mate, is very
much affected. He fears to delay repentance, but says his father
won’t like it when he goes back to Russia, and that there are no
Christians in Russia.… Prayer ascends continually, sinners are
repenting, and I am as proud as Lucifer. I feel as if I was going to
do all myself; as if I could convert a thousand without God, if I
only told them the truth. Oh, pray that I may have humility! It is
and must be the burden of my supplications.

Of the names mentioned in this letter, that of Isaac Stuart is not unknown
to fame. Joseph Jenkins afterwards became Willis’s brother-in-law,
marrying his sister Mary in 1831. He was from Boston, and was graduated at
Yale the year after Willis.

CHAPTER II.

1823-1827.

COLLEGE LIFE.

In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in
September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more
enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer.
It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the
sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of
uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in
the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of
the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s
chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded
lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his
influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in
time the founder and first president of the University of California, and
a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the
Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph
H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and
“Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and
introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not
drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George
J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed
in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of
Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek.

Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of
1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same
hall--the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of
Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited
much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam
classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell
once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described
him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed,
athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both
blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly
not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common
between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong
farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after
years,--in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.

Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia--afterwards, with the titular embellishment
of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several
European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny
Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”--happened to be in New
Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which
he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of
sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,”
published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates
with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:--

“I also remember two men who graduated in the class of 1827, that
were frequently pointed out to me as its most conspicuous members.
One was the son of a very prominent statesman, which, in fact,
explained the notice he attracted; but there was enough of
individuality about John Van Buren to command attention. He had
already revealed the traits which distinguished him in after
life,--easy and careless in manner, bold in character, and of an
aggressive turn of mind. His rival in notoriety had no hereditary
claims to support him, but he was gifted with a rare poetical talent
that had already secured him distinction both in and out of college.
His tone and bearing were aristocratic, not unmixed with _hauteur_,
and though admired for his abilities he never commanded the
sympathies of his comrades. Such was N. P. Willis, and such he
remained to the end of his life. Neither of these graduates, if I
remember, bore off ‘honors;’ but Willis was requested by his class,
with the approval of the faculty, to deliver a poem at the
Commencement of 1827. I was too young to approach these Titans, as I
regarded them, and was content to gaze on them with deference as
they swept by me in the street. In after years I became intimate
with them both.”

The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince
John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of
’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a
great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman,
were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in
the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s
counsel, and Willis as a _particeps criminis_ and witness for the
plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his
marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere,
was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his
name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.

Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman,
Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among
the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards
sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church.
Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in
the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of
to-day such a stirring microcosm,--with its athletic and social clubs, its
regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate
newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls,
boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.,--was all undreamed of. Far from owning a
yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or
a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his
room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten
sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He
visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown,
to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues
indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your
spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on
“necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That
paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred
a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of
his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not
only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and
gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint
the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the
belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had
been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at
Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan
college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.

“The day,” wrote Willis in a freshman letter to his father, “is the
greatest of the year at the South, and our Southern students seem
disposed to be restless under the restriction of a lesson on
playday. There were many of them drunk last evening, and still more
to-day. Christmas has always been, ever since the establishment of
the college, emphatically a _day of tricks_: windows broken,
bell-rope cut, freshmen squirted, and every imaginable scene of
dissipation acted out in full. Last night they barred the entry
doors of the South College, to exclude the government, and then
illuminated the building. This morning the recitation-room doors
were locked and the key stolen, and we were obliged to knock down
the doors to get in; and then we were not much better off, for the
lamps were full of water and the wicks gone. However, we procured
others, and went on with the lesson.”

Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used,
between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another
Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at
the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a
member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.

New Haven in 1823-27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of
to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of
the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the
Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with
grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia”
or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor of Rhetoric, used
to go to “explode the elements.” Down by the bay, in a region now occupied
by great factories, stood the old “Pavilion,” a famous seaside hotel much
resorted to by Southern families. The first railroad from New Haven was
laid in 1839. As yet even the Farmington Canal was only projected. Willis
and the Boston contingent used to come all the way by stage-coach, passing
through Framingham, Worcester, and Hartford,--in which last he had
acquaintances, with whom he sometimes spent a day _en route_. Anthracite
coal was not in use in New Haven before 1827. Citizens and students alike
depended on wood, the latter buying theirs at the regular wood-stand near
South College, and having it _cut_ in the yard behind the colleges,
wood-saws not being in general vogue. The habits of the collegians, from a
hygienic point of view, were usually bad. They sat up late drinking strong
coffee in their rooms, rose very early perforce, prayed and recited on an
empty stomach, and took little regular exercise. Dyspepsia was naturally
rife.

But _en revanche_ New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a
homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some
respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already,
thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and
it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a
regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith
Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets,--a dream-city
of shaded squares and white--piazzaed mansions shining among cool green
gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager
impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and
looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of
the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known,--that class of
freshmen. It was a fair arena.… Of the feelings that stir the heart in our
youth,--of the few, the _very_ few, that have no recoil and leave no
repentance,--this leaping from the starting post of mind, this first
spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge,
is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most
unmingled.”

This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823.
His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman,
simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home,
thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts
and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the
prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its
twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor,
who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the
dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards _if you wish_, but
it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the
college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make
pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we
can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest
generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his
piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the
morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At
recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York
on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his
history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of
Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours
there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is
not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last
have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the
entry,”--a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way
five or six dollars, and had a scrape upon it, and the conclusion of the
matter was their getting so intoxicated as to be unable to reach home.”
The freshmen have likewise had their windows broken, and Willis’s chum has
been smoked out, during the former’s absence from his room, by cigars
inserted in the keyhole. A somewhat distant and impersonal form of the
persecution this will seem to modern freshmen. But Sophomore Kneeland,
from Georgia, having been collared by Tutor Stoddard, red-handed, in the
act of breaking windows, and having knocked down the tutor and run, has
been publicly expelled, the president reading out his mittimus in chapel
to the whole college. Willis has joined the Linonian Society,--“Calhoun,
the candidate for the presidency, was once a member of it” (an ancient
“campaign” argument); also a freshman debating club, the officers of which
“are almost all professors of religion,” and in which he has been chosen,
in his absence, “critic on composition and speaking.” He has drunk tea at
Miss Dunning’s. He has called upon Mrs. Daggett and Mrs. T. Dwight,
finding the former of these two ladies to be “a very pious woman, and a
woman of uncommon understanding,” and the latter “a woman of noble mind,
though plain in person.” He has taken a walk to the Cave of the Regicides
on West Rock,--time out of mind the goal of the freshman’s first
pilgrimage. He has been appointed one of the committee to solicit
subscriptions in his own class for the Greeks, and is also one of the
managers of the Bible Society, and active at the Friday evening
prayer-meetings, there being just at present considerable “engagedness”
among “professors” in the several classes. Meanwhile Tutor Twining has
been hissed and scraped at while conducting services in chapel. The
government “are growing more and more rigorous. Almost every member of the
freshman class is called up and questioned. Many are dismissed, and an
examination is made of everything, from the stealing of a sugar-bowl out
of the hall to the prostration of a tutor. Tutor Woolsey was smoked the
other evening by two fellows who were too drunk to make their escape, and
were caught without any difficulty. They did it at twelve o’clock at
night, wrapped in sheets, and are both dismissed.” The disturbances
between the sophomores and freshmen culminated for Willis in a short
suspension in the winter of 1823-24 for honorably refusing to disclose the
names of sophomores by whom he had been smoked and squirted, or the names
of persons in whose rooms he had seen a squirt,--an instrument of torture
whose possession involved expulsion. The letter in which he announced his
suspension is very long and filled with heroic sentiments.

“All my friends have been to see me, and justify me in my conduct.
There are two professors of religion in the sophomore class who have
done exactly so, and will be treated accordingly. And though it is a
matter of policy with the government to pursue this course, it is
said, and justly, that they despise an informer. My meeting with
this squirt was entirely unavoidable, not originating (as perhaps
you may suppose) from being in company where I ought not to be.”

Willis suffered frequently from homesickness and low spirits during the
winter of his freshman year. He had the poetic temperament, and was
subject to his moods, easily elated and easily depressed. His chum was
away somewhere teaching, and Willis, in his loneliness, had recourse to
his pen.

“I find but few among the students,” he wrote to his father, “whom I
should choose as companions. Most of them are profane and
dissipated, and their highest ambition seems to be to show off as a
high fellow, and one who can overreach the government and laugh at
its officers. The pious students in my class are mostly _men_,
without any refinement either of manners or feeling,--fresh from
the country,--whose piety renders them respectable, and who without
it would be but boors. But there are a few students who have both
piety and refinement, and some who, though not professors of
religion, respect it, and who are moral in their outward conduct,
whatever be the state of their hearts. These I can generally
associate with, but when they are _all_ out of the way, and I am in
need of something to brighten my feelings, I can find in the flow of
fancy a forgetfulness of the darker side. I have written a great
deal in this way since my college life commenced, and my writing
will _always_ depend on the thermometer of my feelings.”

As the youthful scribe gained readier power of expression his home
correspondence became fuller and more effusive. He wrote with much
minuteness a narrative of an evening spent at a country parsonage in West
Haven, of a walk to the light-house, a visit to the cave of the hermit of
East Rock, and of a trip by steamboat to New York. He dwelt at length upon
all the impressions which the varying seasons and his daily experiences
made upon his mind. There is, of course, no literary art in most of these
juvenile confidences. The language is apt to be sophomorical, and the
letters, as a whole, will seldom repay quotation, but an extract may be
given here and there as a specimen of his epistolary style. The following
is from a letter of July 11, 1824, to his sister Julia, with whom he was
always particularly unreserved:--

“I wish you were here to walk with me these beautiful moonlight
evenings. I have seldom gone to bed and left the mild Queen of the
Night riding in the heavens, for it seems a waste of noble feelings.
When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past,
and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and
softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I
have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in
sleep without reluctance. I really think we had better lay it down
as a rule never to go to sleep while the moon is shining. In fact,
Julia, I suspect (for I find no one who sympathizes with me in this
feeling) that I am something of a lunatic,--affected by the rays of
that beautiful planet with a kind of happiness which is the result
of a heated imagination, and which is not felt by the generality of
the common-sense people of the world. Last Friday evening, you know,
was beautiful. I attended a meeting of the professors of religion,
statedly held on that evening in the theological chamber, and when
it was out went alone to walk. I strolled along upon the shore of
the bay towards the light-house a mile or more, and never did I meet
with so delightful a scene. There was no wind stirring, or not
enough to make a ripple on the wave, and the hardly perceptible
swell of the tide cast its waters upon the pebbles without a sound.
You know the appearance of a bay when the light is shed obliquely
upon it--looking like one immense sheet of liquid silver, and if
you have ever seen a boat pass across it at such a moment, and seen
that beautiful phenomena of the phosphorus dripping like fire from
the oars and gilding the foam before the prow, you can have some
idea of the scene I then witnessed. Now and then a sloop stole
languidly across the bay, hardly appearing to move, and presenting
an alternate light and shade as the moon struck upon the flapping
sail or the helmsman tacked to take advantage of the hardly
perceptible breeze which swept him slowly from the land. I declare
it did seem like enchantment. The clock struck one, but I felt no
disposition to go home, and, as the air was pure and balmy, the
thought struck me that it would be a pleasant hour to bathe.
Accordingly I undressed, and swam along the shore slowly for about
half a mile in the cool, refreshing waters, with sensations which
must be felt to be understood. After this delightful exercise I
walked home, and, seating myself by the window where I could look at
the moon, fell asleep, and did not wake till near morning.”

This fancy, that he was peculiarly affected by the light of the moon, was
the first suggestion of his wild tale, “The Lunatic’s Skate,” one of his
most imaginative stories, and not unworthy of comparison with the weird
fictions of Edgar Poe.

In the summer term of his sophomore year Willis was again suspended for a
few weeks, this time in common with a majority of his class and in
consequence of what was known as “the Conic Sections Rebellion.” The class
had been assured by the tutors that they would not have to learn the
corollaries to the propositions in that branch of mathematics, and when
the objectionable corollaries were, notwithstanding, imposed upon them,
the mercury then standing at 90° and the annual examinations at hand,
eighty-four members bound themselves by a solemn pledge not to recite
them. The government were firm, and the recalcitrant sophomores were
suspended in platoons, day after day. Horace Bushnell was a ring-leader in
this revolt, which included the “professors” equally with the worldly. All
the suspended men were taken back at the end of the term.

In some recollections of Willis by his classmate, Hugh Blair Grigsby,
published in the latter’s journal, the “Norfolk Beacon,” in the autumn of
1834, he says:--

“The first notice that the public had of his budding genius was a
little poem in six verses, the two first lines of the first verse
being,--

‘The leaf floats by upon the stream
Unheeded in its silent way,’

We cannot recall the whole stanza; but our fair readers may remember
that their albums contained, some time since, a beautiful vignette
representing a lady resting in her bower, listening to the notes of
a pretty songster perched above her. This engraving was taken from
these lines in this poem:--

‘The bird that sings in lady’s bower,
To-morrow will she think of him?’”

Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York
Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous
character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824-25, about an old man
planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in
the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural
subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,”
where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions
from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of
these _juvenilia_ were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never
put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,”
and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They
were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted
in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his
memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the
“Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,”
“The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.”
It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who
ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant
muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best
poem printed in their columns during the year,--a device now relegated to
the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s
share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid
him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his
“Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the
‘Christian Watchman,’” as announced in the issue of that paper for March
30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the
judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for
the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,”
and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a
paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of
Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode
Island,” and other publications.

All this literary glory gave the young undergraduate great _éclat_ in New
Haven. He received many invitations out, and was teased for verses by the
owners of countless albums. He began to frequent the society of the town,
where his rapidly developing social gifts soon made him a favorite. He was
at this time a tall, handsome stripling, with an easy assurance of manner
and a good deal of the dandy in his dress. His portrait, painted by Miss
Stuart of Boston, a daughter of the famous portrait-painter, Gilbert
Stuart, shows him with a rosy face, very fair hair hanging in natural
curls over the forehead, a _retroussé_ nose, long upper lip, pale gray eye
with uncommonly full lid (a family trait), and a confident and joyous
expression. He carried himself with an airy, jaunty grace, and there was
something particularly spirited and _vif_ about the poise and movement of
his head,--a something which no portrait could reproduce. With naturally
elegant tastes, an expansive temper, and an eagerness to see the more
brilliant side of life, Willis could at all times make himself agreeable
to those whom he cared to please. But he was quick to feel the chill of a
hostile presence, and toward any one, in especial, who seemed to
disapprove of him he could be curt and defiant. He had a winning way with
women, who were flattered by his recognition of their influence over him
and grateful for _les petits soins_ which he never neglected.

Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply
himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in
the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste
and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet
aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a
liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like
Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to
the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly
before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to
literature.

Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the
choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and
preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia,
that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to
returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial
question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a
comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without
scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of
many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee
Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:--

“I sunk some pocket money in a blank book on reading Wilson’s
‘Noctes.’ Celestial nights I thought _we_ had of it, at old black
Stanley’s forbidden oyster house in New Haven; and it struck me it
was robbery of posterity (no less!) not to record the brilliant
efflorescence of our conviviality. Regularly on reaching my chambers
(or as soon after morning prayers as my head became pellucid), I
attempted to reduce to dialogue the wit of our Christopher North,
‘Shepherd’ and ‘Tickler;’ but alas! it became what may be called
‘productive labor.’ Either my memory did not serve me, or wit (I
shouldn’t be surprised) reads cold by repentant daylight. It was
heavy work, as reluctant as a college exercise, and after using up
for cigar-lighters the short-lived ‘Noctes,’ I devoted the remainder
of the book to outlines of the antique (that is to say, of old
shoes), my passion just then being a collection of French slippers
from the prettiest feet in the known world (‘known,’ to me).”

Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly
Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that
the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced
by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines
have gone through this species of measles.

“I do not hate, but I have felt
Indifferent to woman long:
I bow not where I once have knelt,
I lisp not what I poured in song.
They are too beautifully made
For their tame earthliness of thought;
Ay, their immortal minds degrade
The meaner work His hands have wrought.”

The specifications of this painful charge were several. He had been
walking with a beautiful girl one glorious night, with his soul uplifted
by the influences of the hour, when she rudely jarred upon his mood by
remarking that “their kitchen chimney smoked again.” Another young woman,
with whom he was viewing a Crucifixion in a picture gallery, had “coldly
curled her lip and praised the high priest’s garment.” A third had
profaned one of his religious hours.

“I turned me at the slow Amen
And wiped my drowning eyes, and met
A trifling smile! Think ye of _men_?
I tell you _man_ hath heart:--no, no,
It was a woman’s smile. They tell
Of her bright ruby lip, and eye
That shames the Arabic gazelle;
They tell of her cheek’s glowing dye,
Of her arch look and witching spell:
But there is not that man on earth
Who at that hour had felt like mirth.”

Worse than all, he had been watching by a corpse, in company with a young
lady of his acquaintance, when

“She trifled, ay, that _angel_ maid,
She _trifled_ where the dead was laid!”

These misogynistic musings called forth a remonstrance,--“Woman--to
Roy,”--by one of the “Recorder’s” poetesses, who signed herself “Rob.” “Ye
know her not,” she sang,

“An idle name
Ye give to toys of fashion’s mould,
And well ye scorn those guilty ones
Who curl their smiles of pride to heaven.
Oh, seek her not in halls of mirth,
But in those calm dwellings of earth,” etc.

Meanwhile, rumors of his idleness and dissipation began to reach Boston,
and caused his family much distress. These reports were absurdly
exaggerated, and were warmly denied by his friends, who asserted that the
head and front of his offending were an occasional moonlight drive to “the
Lake” and a supper, with a glass of ale at “Barney’s.” Willis was gay in
college, but very far from dissipated. In the select circles where he was
made at home nothing like dissipation was tolerated. The society of the
little university town was as simple as it was refined. He was cordially
welcomed in such families as the Whitings, the Bishops, the Hubbards, and
the entire Woolsey, Devereux, and Johnson connection in New Haven,
Stratford, and New York. His winter holidays were spent partly at New York
with his classmates Rankin and Richards, partly at Stratford with the
Johnsons, once at New London among the kinsfolk of his grandmother, Lucy
Douglas; and once he traveled as far as Philadelphia. His “dissipations”
in New Haven were picnics to East Rock, rehearsals of “The Lady of the
Lake” at a seminary for young ladies, pie-banquets in Thanksgiving
week,--paid for with verses,--and New Year’s calls with their
accompaniments of a cooky and a glass of wine.

That his head was a little turned by his literary and social successes is
not wonderful. He had his share of vanity, and in his confidential letters
to his parents and sisters he made no effort to conceal his elation. A
passage from one of these, dated January 7, 1827, will give a good idea of
his occupations and his frame of mind at this point in his senior year:--

“I stayed in Stratford till Friday, and then the Johnsons offered me
a seat in the carriage to New York. This, of course, was
irresistible; and Friday night at ten o’clock I was presented to the
mayor of the city, at a splendid levee. It was his last before
leaving his office, and I never saw such magnificence. The fashion
and beauty and talent of the city were all there, crowding his
immense rooms to show their respect for his services.… I found many
old acquaintances there and made some new ones,--among the latter, a
Mrs. Brunson, as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and her sister,
Miss Catherine Bailey, also a most beautiful woman. I met the very
accomplished Adelaide Richards there, who patronized me and played
my dictionary, and from whose father and mother I received an
invitation to dine on New Year’s day. At two or three o’clock I went
_home_ to Mr. William Johnson’s (who married Miss Woolsey’s sister),
and in a glorious bed, with a good coal fire by my side, slept off
the fatigues of a sixty miles’ ride and four hours’ dissipation.

“On Saturday evening I went to a genuine _soirée_ at the great Dr.
Hosack’s. This man is the most luxurious liver in the city, and his
house is a perfect palace. You could not lay your hand on the wall
for costly paintings, and the furniture exceeds everything I have
seen. I met all the literary characters of the day there, and
Halleck, the poet, among them. With him I became quite acquainted,
and he is a most glorious fellow. More of him when we meet.… You
know on New Year’s day in New York all the gentlemen call on all
their acquaintances. I began at twelve o’clock at the Battery, and
went up to St. John’s Park, merely running in and right out again
till four, the dinner hour. I called on everybody. William Woolsey
went with me, and, by appointing a rendezvous in every street, we
kept along together. At four I went to Mr. George Richards’s to
dine. He is no relative of Robert’s, and lives in the best style in
a large house on St. John’s Park. We sat down to dinner between five
and six, and sat several hours with a very large party. I got a seat
next to the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed it much. They live
in the French style, and the last course was sugar-plums!”

In another letter he says:--

“I was much flattered in vacation by the attentions of literary men
and women; the latter more particularly, who seemed to consider it
quite the thing to find a poet who was not a bear, and who could
stoop so much from the _excelsa_ of his profession as to dress
fashionably and pay compliments like a lawyer. I heard of a very
_blue_ young lady who said, ‘La, how I should love to see Mr.
Willis! I am sure I should fall in love with a man who writes such
sweet poetry.’ She is both belle and bluestocking, they say.”

One of the families in which Willis was an _habitué_ was the household of
Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the
seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the
original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis
was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description
of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that
“in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely
found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were
assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His
lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the
death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W----,
Two Years of Age”--one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s
“Parnassus”--were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and
biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De
Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune,
who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave
fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters,
Julia and Pastora--_matre pulchra filiæ pulchriores_--were great belles
among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as
a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.”

The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the
Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of
undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and
remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the
state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon
him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father
during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the
eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:--

“My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy
of the hopes which are experienced in revivals. I understand your
anxiety for me, and I understand the feelings which prompted
mother’s most tender and affectionate addition to your letter. If I
perish it will not be because I do not _know_ my duty, for there are
few who have been better instructed. But my feelings are most
peculiar and most trying. I am under one ceaseless and enduring
conviction of sin; one wearing anxiety about my soul, without making
any visible progress. I know what you will write about it. I could
anticipate every word you can say upon the point. But so it is, and
I have done with _all_ discussion of it.”

At the completion of the senior examinations Willis delivered the
valedictory poem to his class, “with a simplicity and feeling which
thrilled the audience,” says one who was present. Portions of this were
printed in his “Sketches” and in subsequent editions of his poems. It is
one of the hardest things in the world to write a good occasional poem,
and Willis’s Class Day address does not differ much from other
performances of the kind. It is in blank verse, laboriously didactic, and
expresses the usual conventional sentiments and noble moral reflections
proper to the occasion. It is by no means as good as another occasional
poem of his, “The Death of Arnold,” written upon the burial of the class
champion, and first printed in the “Connecticut Journal.”

Willis spent the senior vacation--a halcyon period of six weeks that
formerly intervened between Class Day and Commencement--in a trip through
New York State and Canada; taking what is now known as the grand tour, and
gathering impressions which he ultimately worked into the texture of his
vivid sketches of “Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence.” He
traveled by the Erie Canal, then newly opened through an almost unbroken
wilderness, dotted here and there with stripling cities, Utica, Palmyra,
Rochester,--the last only a few years old.

“The burnt stumps of the first settlers are all over the town: you
find them close by the doors and in the yards of the people, and you
may look between elegant blocks of stone and brick buildings and see
the _natural forest_ within five minutes’ walk. It is complete
mushroom. We saw Colonel Rochester, who first settled it. He and his
wife were sitting at their front door, enjoying the evening under
trees which twelve years ago were the depth of the wilderness.”

There was a perpetual novelty in these contrasts. He saw the country, as
it were, in the making. The canal-boat went only four miles an hour, and
the voyager could get out, when so minded, to stretch his legs and pick
the wild flowers along the tow-path. Odd experiences relieved the
monotony of this quiet sail along the amber Mohawk, “bonniest stream that
ever dimpled.” One Sunday, at the request of old General Wadsworth of
Geneseo, who happened to be aboard and took a great fancy to Willis, the
latter preached a sermon to the passengers assembled in the cabin, and
passed among them, in consequence, as a young minister who “had geten him
yet no benefice.” And here is a little idyl perhaps worth recording:--

“On Sunday morning I saw a girl on a hillside in the wildest part of
the Mohawk Valley, milking. So I leaped ashore, to the great
amusement of the passengers, and ran up to give her a lecture. She
was quite pretty, and blushed when I asked her if she knew it was
wicked to milk on Sunday. She had a pretty little clean foot,
probably washed by the wet grass, and held up the milking-pail for
me to drink with considerable grace. I should have begged a kiss if
the boat had not been in sight. I have just been called up to look
at Palmyra. It is curious to sail through the centre of a town, and
see people in the windows above you and on the steps of the houses,
crowding to see the strange faces on board. They look so much at
home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall
be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”

At Utica he found a host of friends, was received with Western
hospitality, and had twenty or thirty invitations to dinners and parties.
A Utica belle whom he had known in New Haven made up a picnic in his
behoof to Trenton Falls, the scenery of which he described so admirably in
“Edith Linsey.” It was his hap to visit Trenton on the very day when a
Miss Suydam, a young lady from New York, fell over the falls and was
killed. From Auburn he drove out on a visit to another fair acquaintance,
Miss Adele Livingston, whose country house on Skaneateles Lake he found to
be a “little palace of cultivation and refinement” dropped down
unexpectedly in the wilderness. This was “Fleming Farm” in “Edith Linsey,”
though it would probably be a mistake to identify the heroine of that tale
with Willis’s hostess. With her he took a horseback ride round the head of
the lake, and then he returned to his canal. At Niagara he encountered a
pleasant party of Boston and Salem people, and was asked to attach himself
to their train on the way up Ontario and down the St. Lawrence. Among them
was a “Miss E. M----” (Emily Marshall?), a famous beauty, who figures in
Willis’s “Niagara” sketch in a romantic and perilous adventure behind the
fall. “I am sorry I may not mention her name,” he says, “for in more
chivalrous times she would have been a character of history. Everybody
who has been in America, however, will know whom I am describing.” At
Montreal he fell in with Chester Harding, the artist, with whom he
afterwards became intimate at Boston, and who painted an excellent
portrait of Willis, now owned by Mr. Charles A. Dana. In September he went
back to New Haven to take his degree and say good-by, and then college
life was over and the world before him.

Willis always looked back with tenderness to his college days. Years
after, in his “Slingsby” papers, contributed to an English magazine, he
made New Haven and the university the scene or background of some of his
best stories and sketches of American life, such as “Edith Linsey,” “F.
Smith,” “Scenes of Fear,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “The Cherokee’s
Threat.” These, however, are not college stories in the common meaning of
the term. The heroes of these amusing and often incredible adventures are
undergraduates, but they have the easy _savoir faire_ of men of the world,
and the incidents of the narrative are mainly enacted outside the college
fence, and consist for the most part of love-making, driving stanhope, and
touring about the country in an independent manner. The academic life of
the time offered but a meagre field to the romancer, nor indeed is the
case much altered since. There have been loud calls, at present
subsiding, for an “American Tom Brown.” A few patriotic Harvard graduates
have responded, but their success has been such that the alumni of other
colleges have congratulated themselves that no one has been moved to
perform the same office for their own _Almæ Matres_. It may be doubted
whether the four years of a college course are a broad enough base to
support a full-length novel. A man is not born in college, and he seldom
dies or marries there. The struggle which decides his final success or
failure is fought on other fields. As to the life itself, though
engrossing enough to those who lead it, as stuff for fiction it is
scant,--a life of pleasant monotony, varied by contests for honors and
prizes which seem paltry to the man, and made exciting by that most
fatuous of pursuits, college “politics.” Nevertheless, it has unique
features of its own, peculiar developments of sentiment and humor which
appeal to the imagination. To these, the man who has lived it and found it
sweet will often attempt to give shape, as he looks back upon it in less
happy years, even though he may understand well enough that such
fragmentary experiences want the unity and importance required in a
continuous fiction. As experiments of this nature, Willis’s college
stories should be regarded. It must be confessed that he idealized a good
deal. His geese were always swans, and he practiced an airy exaggeration
provoking to the statistician or the literal minded. He speaks, for
example, in an off-hand way of “the thousand students of the university,”
though the number never reached half a thousand at any time when he was a
student. But in the incidental glimpses of the life which he described, in
the atmosphere which he flung around it, he was true to the spirit of that
life,--the gay, irresponsible existence of half-idle, half-earnest youth,
whose friendships are warm and unquestioning, to whom the world is new,
the future full of promise, and every girl a Venus. There is a glamour
over it all--“the golden exhalations of the dawn”--and romance is the
proper medium in which to present it.

“Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater, however,” wrote
Willis in “Edith Linsey,” “and gayly as I describe it, it is to me a
picture of memory, glazed and put away; if I see it ever again it
will be but to walk through its embowered streets by a midnight
moon. It is vain and heartbreaking to go back after absence to any
spot of earth, of which the interest was the human love whose home
and cradle it had been. There is nothing on earth so mournful and
unavailing, as to return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look
to return to ourselves and others as we were when we thus knew
them.”

On leaving college, Willis signalized his entrance upon a literary career
of forty years by collecting and publishing a score of his juvenile poems,
in a thin volume entitled “Sketches,” and dedicated to his father. It
contained, among other things, four of the scriptural pieces which had
done more than anything else to give him reputation. This vein he
continued to cultivate, and added others in later volumes till they
reached the number of eighteen. Even in his last years he wrote one more
scriptural poem for the “New York Ledger,” at the persuasion of the
enterprising Mr. Bonner, reinforced by the proffer of a hundred dollars.
As there is little difference in value between the earliest and latest of
these, it may be well to speak of them here collectively. It is not hard
to explain the vogue which they obtained, or the reason why many people at
this day, who know nothing else of Willis, have read his Scripture poems.
One still encounters, here and there, a good old country lady who reads
little poetry, but who can quote from “Absalom” or “Jephthah’s Daughter”
and thinks them quite the best product of the American Parnassus. They
made good Sunday reading. They appealed to an intensely biblical and not
very literary constituency; to a public familiar with the Old and New
Testaments alike, and familiarized also with the life and scenery of the
East through Bible commentaries and the lectures of missionaries who had
traveled in Palestine. They were pleased to meet again the most striking
episodes and affecting situations in the sacred narratives, set forth in
easy verse, embroidered prettily, and with the sentiments and reflections
proper to the subject all duly marshaled before them. It lent concreteness
to the story to learn that in the room of Jairus’s daughter,

“The spice lamps in the alabaster urns
Burned dimly and the white and fragrant smoke
Curled indolently on the chamber walls;”

or that the Shunamite’s little son, on his way to the field, passed

“Through the light green hollows where the lambs
Go for the tender grass;”

or that the scene of Christ’s baptism

“Was a green spot in the wilderness
Touched by the river Jordan. The dark pine
Never had dropped its tassels on the moss
Tufting the leaning bank, nor on the grass
Of the broad circle stretching evenly
To the straight larches had a heavier foot
Than the wild heron’s trodden. Softly in
Through a long aisle of willows, dim and cool,
Stole the clear waters with their muffled feet,
And, hushing as they spread into the light,
Circled the edges of the pebbled tank
Slowly, then rippled through the woods away.”

For the merely literary quality of these poems, independent of their
sacred associations, not very much can be said. They were certainly
remarkably mature work for a college boy, pure in taste, delicate and
correct in execution. But there is a slightly hollow ring to them, as of
verse exercises on set themes. The inspiration is at second hand, from
books and not from life. As other juvenile poets have gone to their
classics for a subject, Willis went to his Bible. He drank at Siloa’s
fount instead of Helicon, and tuned the psaltery instead of the lyre. We
have evidently not reached the real Willis yet. In general the experiment
of paraphrasing the narrative portions of the Scriptures has not been
successful. Something is lost when the impressive simplicity of the
original is blown out into wordy and sentimental verse. This process of
spinning rhetorical commonplaces from brief texts is well illustrated in
the following passage from “Lazarus and Mary:”--

“But to the mighty heart
That in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,
Taking for us the cup that might not pass--
The heart whose breaking chord upon the cross
Made the earth tremble and the sun afraid
To look upon his agony--the heart
Of a lost world’s Redeemer--overflowed,
Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”

This is what Lowell called “inspiration and water.” Alfred de Vigny, a
fine spirit and good poet, has tried the same thing in French and
succeeded little, if at all, better than the Yankee collegian. The
inadequacy of Willis’s Scripture renderings is made more apparent by the
fact that his blank verse is not a good vehicle for strong feeling. It is
correct and flowing, sometimes musical, but seldom energetic. It favored
his tendency to diffuseness and it often degenerates into a kind of
accentless _oratio soluta_, which is only verse because it scans, and only
blank verse because it does not rhyme.

Upon the whole the most genuine expression of Willis’s talent in this
early volume was in the piece entitled “Better Moments,” which remains one
of his best, because one of his most spontaneous poems.

It makes one realize the startling growth of the United States in the last
fifty years, to remember that Willis had already won a “national
reputation” by his poetry when he left college. The air was much thinner
then, American literature much scantier, the population so small and so
comparatively homogeneous, that the suffrages of a few hundreds of readers
in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia, and the praises of a few
dozen journals were enough to bestow fame. What undergraduate nowadays,
however clever or precocious, could hope to make his voice heard beyond
the limits of the college yard?

It remains only to mention that the presence in New Haven of the two poets
Percival and Hillhouse, when Willis was a student there, was not without
influence on his literary development. Percival went to West Point as
Professor of Chemistry in 1824 and did not come back to New Haven until
1827, but Hillhouse resided constantly at his beautiful home in the
outskirts of the city, “Sachem’s Wood.” His Master’s Oration, “The
Education of a Poet,” and his Phi Beta Kappa poem, “The Judgment,” had
given him great fame in the university as an orator and poet. “‘Hadad’ was
published in 1825,” wrote Willis, “during my second year in college, and
to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading
characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious
language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.” Of its author he
said, “In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished
mien.… Though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me, in a
casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he
had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and
leisure he could command.”

CHAPTER III.

1827-1831.

BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY.

The profession of letters was Willis’s manifest destiny. Family tradition,
his inborn tastes and talents, the course of his studies, and his
achievements hitherto, all pointed that way. Yet in the then state of the
American press it took no small amount of self-confidence to decline a
paying profession and launch upon the uncertain currents of literary life.
His next four years were spent in Boston and were years of apprenticeship
in his life-work as an editor and journalist. He continued to write and
publish verses, but his hand was acquiring cunning, through constant
practice and frequent failure, in the production of that light, brilliant
prose which made him the favorite periodical writer of his day; and he was
also learning how to conduct a magazine. He still made occasional
contributions to the “Recorder”--among others the New Year’s verses, then
essential to every well-regulated paper--for 1828 and 1829. But his first
editorial engagement was with Samuel G. Goodrich, the well-known
bookseller and publisher, who had removed from Hartford to Boston in 1826.
One of the first books which he had published in Boston was Willis’s
“Sketches,” and he now employed the author of it to edit “The Legendary”
for 1828 and “The Token” for 1829. Goodrich was a fine example of Yankee
enterprise and versatility. He was one of the pioneers of “the trade” in
America, entering the field at the same time with the Harpers. Under the
pen-name of “Peter Parley,” he wrote or edited a long list of books for
the young, histories, travels, biographies, tales, works of natural
history, school text-books, etc. He had himself some pretensions as a
poet, by virtue of “The Outcast and Other Poems,” 1841. He was an
extensive traveler, and he became in 1851 United States consul at Paris.
It was the fashion among a certain set in Boston to abuse “Peter Parley”
and laugh at his literary claims. But he was a very successful publisher,
and in selecting his editorial assistants, he had a keen eye for the kind
of talent that takes, and the kind of work that pays. In his interesting
“Recollections of a Lifetime” he gives contrasted sketches of the two
principal contributors to his annuals--Willis and Hawthorne. Goodrich’s
perceptions were, perhaps, not of the finest, but he was a shrewd
observer of matters within his ken, and his recollections of Willis are
worth repeating.

“The most prominent writer for ‘The Token’ was N. P. Willis. His
articles were the most read, the most admired, the most abused, and
the most advantageous to the work. In 1827 I published his volume
entitled ‘Sketches.’ It brought out quite a shower of criticism, in
which praise and blame were about equally dispensed: at the same
time the work sold with a readiness quite unusual for a book of
poetry at that period. One thing is certain, everybody thought
Willis worth criticising. He has been, I suspect, more written about
than any other literary man in our history. Some of the attacks upon
him proceeded, no doubt, from a conviction that he was a man of
extraordinary gifts and yet of extraordinary affectations, and the
lash was applied in kindness, as that of a school-master to a loved
pupil’s back. Some of them were dictated by envy, for we have had no
other example of literary success so early, so general, and so
flattering. That Mr. Willis made mistakes in literature and life, at
the outset, may be admitted by his best friends; for it must be
remembered that before he was five-and-twenty he was more read than
any other American poet of his time; and besides, being possessed of
an easy and captivating address, he became the pet of society and
especially of the fairer portion of it. As to his personal
character, I need only say that, from the beginning, he has had a
larger circle of steadfast friends than almost any man within my
knowledge. It is curious to remark that everything Willis wrote
attracted immediate attention and excited ready praise, while the
productions of Hawthorne were almost entirely unnoticed. Willis was
slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheek ruddy, his aspect
cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand
and was received readily and with welcome.”

It is needless to pursue the contrast which the writer goes on to draw
between Willis and the other and greater Nathaniel, who was then “the
obscurest man of letters in America.” The publisher’s sympathies were
obviously with his more lively and popular contributor, and he is puzzled
to understand why such articles as “Sights from a Steeple,” “Sketches
beneath an Umbrella,” “The Wives of the Dead,” and “The Prophetic
Pictures,” should have “extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame”
when originally published in “The Token,” while “now universally
acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and
power.” He is inclined to attribute it to a “new sense” in a portion of
the reading world--obtained unluckily too late to profit the publisher of
“The Token”--“which led them to study the mystical.” To Goodrich’s
personal description of Willis may be added the following little portrait
by Dr. Holmes, who remembers him well, as he looked during this Boston
period.

“He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of
light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance, and his cheek was
as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights, and
he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a
remembrance of Count d’Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde.
There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of
Hippolytus and Phædra, in which the beautiful young man, who had
kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked stepmother, always
reminded me of Willis.”

“The Legendary” described itself as consisting of original pieces in prose
and verse; tales, ballads, and romances, chiefly illustrative of American
history, scenery, and manners. It was designed as a periodical, but only
two volumes were issued, one in the early, and one in the later part of
1828. “The work proved a miserable failure,” said Goodrich, though
numbering among its contributors Mrs. Sigourney, Miss Sedgwick, Halleck,
Pierpont, Willis, Gaylord Clark, George Lunt, Grenville Mellen, and others
less known to this generation. Willis wrote the two prefaces and
contributed half a dozen poems of no importance, unless we except “The
Annoyer,” which had considerable currency, and three prose papers,
“Unwritten Poetry,” “Unwritten Philosophy,” and “Leaves from a Colleger’s
Album.” These last were very juvenile and he never reprinted them. The
first two were tales with a moral, one depicting the restorative
influences of nature on a heart crushed by bereavement, the other
describing a scholarly recluse, who lived alone with nature and his books,
and finally educated and married his landlady’s daughter. The story in
both instances is very slight, overladen with sentiment, descriptive
digressions, and philosophy, that might better have stayed “unwritten.” In
short, they are tedious--which Willis in his later work never was.
“Unwritten Poetry” included, however, a description of Trenton Falls and a
fine rhapsody about water which he rehabilitated afterwards and
incorporated with “Edith Linsey.” Both of these had the honor--in the then
paucity of our literature--to be selected by Mary Russell Mitford for her
“Stories of American Life by American Authors.” “Leaves from a Colleger’s
Album” was a first experiment of another kind, a humorous sketch of a trip
on the Erie Canal, utilizing the experiences of his senior vacation, and,
in particular, the incident of his reading a sermon in the cabin of the
canal boat on Sunday. It contains, in the person of Job Clark, the nucleus
of Forbearance Smith in the “Slingsby” papers--the nearest approach that
Willis ever made to the genuine creation of a character. He was always
thus economical of his material, repeatedly working over the same stuff
into new shapes.

“The Token” belonged to the class of illustrated publications known as
Annuals. It was the age of Annuals, Gift Books, Boudoir Books, Books of
Beauty, Flowers of Loveliness, and Leaflets of Memory. The taste for these
ornate combinations of literature and art was imported from England, where
the Ackermans had published “The Forget-Me-Not,” the earliest specimen of
the kind, in 1823. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia brought out the first
American Annual, “The Atlantic Souvenir,” for which Willis had been asked
to write, when in college, and to which he actually did contribute a copy
of birthday verses, “I’m twenty-two--I’m twenty-two,” in the volume for
1829. These were written, he affirmed, “in a blank leaf of a barber’s
Testament, while waiting to be shaved.” They were also inserted in the
“London Literary Souvenir” for the same year, by Alaric A. Watts, a
copious editor of Annuals, whose middle initial was cruelly asserted by
Lockhart to stand for _Attila_. The rage for Annuals soon became general
and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates some forty of
them, bearing such fantastic titles as The Gem, The Opal, The Wreath, The
Casket, The Rose, The Amulet, The Keepsake, Pearls of the West,
Friendship’s Offering. And these are probably not half the list. There
were religious Annuals, juvenile Annuals, oriental, landscape, botanic
Annuals. Most rummagers among the upper shelves of an old library have
taken down two or three of them, blown the dust from their gilt edges,
ruffled the tissue papers that veil “The Bride,” “The Nun,” “The Sisters,”
and “The Fair Penitent,” and wondered in what age of the world these
remarkable “embellishments” and the still more remarkable letterpress
which they embellish could have reflected American life. There is a faded
elegance about them, as of an old ball dress: a faint aroma, as of
withered roses, breathes from the page. Those steel-engraved beauties,
languishing, simpering, insipid as fashion plates, with high-arched marble
brows, pearl necklaces, and glossy ringlets--not a line in their faces or
a bone in their bodies: that Highland Chieftain, that Young Buccaneer,
that Bandit’s Child, all in smoothest _mezzotint_,--what kind of a world
did they masquerade in? It was a needlework world, a world in which there
was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped
the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of
the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the
nightingale chanted in the grove ’neath the mouldering ivy-mantled tower;
where vesper chimes and the echoes of the merry bugle-ugle-ugle horn were
borne upon the zephyr across the yellow corn; where Isabella sang to the
harp (with her hair down) and the tinkling guitar of the serenader under
her balcony made response; a world in which there were fairy isles,
enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly
_rococo_ landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a
“sincere” art and an “earnest” literature.

In these Gems and Albums, the gemmy and albuminous illustrations
alternated with romantic tales of mediæval or eastern life and with “Lines
on Seeing----,” or “Stanzas occasioned by” something. “The May-Flowers of
Life,” for example, “suggested by the author’s having found a branch of
May in a volume of poems which a friend had left there several years ago.”
In the Annual dialect a ship was a “bark,” a bed was a “couch,” a window
was a “casement,” a shoe was a “sandal,” a boat was a “shallop,” and a
book was a “tome.” Certain properties became gemmy by force of
association, as sea-shells, lattices, and Æolian harps. In England L. E.
L. and in America Percival and Mrs. Sigourney were perhaps the gemmiest
poets. But much of Willis’s poetry was album verse, with an air of the
boudoir and the ball-room about it, a silky elegance and an exotic perfume
that smack of that very sentimental and artificial school. This passage
from “The Declaration” is in point:--

“’Twas late and the gay company was gone,
And light lay soft on the deserted room
From alabaster vases, and a scent
Of orange leaves and sweet verbena came
From the unshuttered window on the air,
And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,
Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things
Seemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,
The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,
Was leaning on her harp.”

“The Token,” begun in 1828 and continued to 1842, was edited by Goodrich
every year except 1829, when Willis had charge of it. Like other Annuals
it contained, in spots, some good art and good writing. There were
delicately designed and engraved vignette titles or presentation plates by
Cheney, the Hartford artist. There was an occasional contribution, in
prose, from Longfellow or Mrs. Child--then Miss Francis, and likewise a
contributor to “The Legendary.” Many of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales”
came out in “The Token.” Mrs. Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” divided
with Willis’s “The Soldier’s Widow” the $100 prize offered by the
publisher for 1828. Among the contributors to Willis’s volume (1829) were
John Neal, Colonel William L. Stone, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hale, the Rev.
T. H. Gallaudet, Willis’s Albany friend, J. B. Van Schaick, and Goodrich
himself. The Rev. G. W. Doane--afterward Bishop Doane--gave his well known
verses, “What is that, Mother?” Willis gave five poems of his own, the
only noteworthy one among which was “Saturday Afternoon,” written to
accompany the frontispiece, engraved by Ellis from a painting by Fisher,
and representing children swinging in a barn. This had more the character
of a simple, popular ballad than anything else which he had written, and
was liked by many readers who cared little about his more elaborate verse.
Another poem in “The Token,” “Psyche before the Tribunal of Venus,” he
wrote for the engraving by Cheney from a drawing of Fragonard. A college
tale, “The Ruse,” was a slight advance on the experiments in “The
Legendary;” the dialogue was handled more freely, but the story was weak
as a whole, hardly worth mentioning, certainly not worth preserving.
Willis continued to contribute verses to “The Token” after he had resigned
its editorship. “To a City Pigeon,” “On a Picture of a Girl leading her
Blind Mother through the Woods,” and doubtless other pieces were printed
in subsequent numbers. He wrote for other Annuals, at various times: “The
Power of an Injured Look,” for “The Gift,” a Christmas book, 1845; an
article “On Dress,” for “The Opal,” 1848, and edited “The Thought
Blossom,” a memorial volume, as late as 1854. “The Torn Hat” was
contributed to “The Youth’s Keepsake” for 1829, and “Contemplation” was
written in 1828 to accompany an engraving in “Remember Me,” a religious
Annual published in Philadelphia. But he had no very high opinion of the
class of literature that they cultivated, and spoke of them as “yearly
flotillas of trash.”

In the spring of 1829 he entered upon his first serious venture as a
journalist, by starting the “American Monthly Magazine,” which ran two
years and a half--from April, 1829, to August, 1831. Mr. Thomas Gold
Appleton describes Willis’s undertaking as “a slim monthly, written
chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Appleton and his
friend Motley, then students in Harvard, were both contributors. For a
young _littérateur_, only a year and a half out of college, without
capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of
a monthly magazine was certainly an enterprise of some boldness. His
expectations, however, were modest enough, and his preliminary card, “To
the Public,” casts some light on the conditions of literary journalism at
that time. He says that he cannot pay much for contributions, like the
English magazines which he took for his model. “The difficulties of
transmission over such an immense country and the comparatively small
proportion of literary readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two,
at the farthest.” He had, moreover, “the ebb of a boyish reputation”
against him. Notwithstanding he launched upon his voyage with excellent
pluck and vigor. He conducted his magazine with little assistance, writing
himself from thirty to forty pages of printed matter every month in the
shape of tales, poems, essays, book reviews, and sketches of life and
travel. Boston was not yet the Boston of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and
Holmes, but it had already as fair a claim to the title of literary
metropolis as New York. Everett and Channing were great names. Dana,
Pierpont, and Sprague were among its poets. These men were not available
for Willis’s purposes, but he rallied to his support a number of younger
men, such as Richard Hildreth, the historian, George Lunt, the poet, Park
Benjamin, Isaac McLellan, the Rev. George B. Cheever, Albert Pike,
afterwards the Arkansas poet and fire-eater, and Rufus Dawes,--then a
budding genius, subsequently a preacher of erratic doctrines,--J. O.
Rockwell, Mrs. Sigourney, and others whose names have fallen silent. Next
to the editor’s own graceful work, the most notable things given to the
public through the columns of the “American Monthly” were Pike’s “Hymns to
the Gods,” poems of a richly classical inspiration, which have often
provoked comparison with Keats’s odes; and which, if their workmanship
were equal to their imaginative fervor, would justify the comparison.

Willis led off in the opening number with a carefully written, but not
very characteristic, essay on “Unwritten Music.” It was thought monstrous
fine by his friends, but suggests, it must be confessed, that dreariest
product of the human mind,--a prize composition. As a study of the
harmonies of nature, it was much too general in its reflections and
descriptions to please a modern taste, wonted to the sharp and full detail
of Thoreau and his successors. The editorial articles, prose and verse, in
the “American Monthly” were too many to be mentioned here individually.
There were stories, “The Fancy Ball,” “The Elopement,” “P. Calamus, Esq.,”
and others which their author never recognized so far as to give them any
place in his collected writings. Others, as “Baron von Raffloff,”
“Captain Thompson,” “Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man,” etc., were the
rough drafts of later tales, such as “Pedlar Karl,” “Larks in Vacation,”
and “Scenes of Fear.” “Albina M’Lush” was the best of these. “The Death of
the Gentle Usher” contained an eloquent passage on the night heavens,
which obtained a better setting in “Edith Linsey.” “An Inkling of
Adventure” lent its name and nothing else to the first published
collection of Willis’s “Slingsby” stories. Then there were sketches of
travel in New York State and Canada, partly reminiscences of senior
vacation and partly memorials of holidays from the editorial desk, spent
at Saratoga, Lebanon Springs, or elsewhere: “Notes upon a Ramble,”
“Letters of Horace Fritz, Esq.,” and “Pencillings by the Way,”--a title
afterward used to better advantage. Parts of these were similarly
refurbished for later employment. The secret of that skillful blending of
gayety and sentiment, the quick, light transitions, which make much of the
charm of Willis’s best stories and sketches, like “F. Smith,” or
“Pasquali,” he had not yet learned. In these earlier efforts the serious
parts drag and the humorous parts are flashy and thin. Besides the monthly
“table” there were editorial articles of that rambling, chatty description
peculiar to the period, and which the “Noctes” had done as much as
anything to introduce: “Scribblings,” “The Scrap Book,” “The Idle Man,”
“Tête-à-tête Confessions,” etc., in which the editor takes the reader into
his confidence and his sanctum, makes him sit down in his red morocco
_dormeuse_, reads him bits of verse from his old scrap-books and his
favorite authors, calls attention to his japonica, his smoking pastille,
his scarlet South American trulian (a most familiar bird with Willis--he
gets it in again in “Lady Ravelgold”), and his two dogs Ugolino and L. E.
L., whose lair is in the rejected MSS. basket. He fosters an agreeable
fiction that he writes with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives
at his elbow, and he says now and then in a hospitable aside “Take another
olive,” or “Pass the Johannisbergh”; this to his imaginary interlocutor,
Cousin Florence, or Tom Lascelles, or The Idle Man, an epicure and dandy,
“who eats in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool.”

These amiable coxcombries of Willis gave dire offense to the critics, and
especially to Joseph T. Buckingham, the veteran of the Boston press and
editor of the “Courier,” then the most influential Whig newspaper in
Massachusetts. He published epigrams on Willis, with very blunt points,
administered fatherly rebukes to him for his affected English, and
objected strongly to Ugolino, L. E. L., and the trulian. Willis retorted
in kind, and a good-natured war raged between the “Courier” and the
“American Monthly,” though their editors were privately the best of
friends. In his “Specimens of Newspaper Literature,” Buckingham paid a
glowing and, indeed, extravagant compliment to the talents of his young
adversary. Willis’s experience in editing the “American Monthly” was of
great advantage to him. He had a natural instinct for journalism, and he
soon acquired by practice that personal, sympathetic attitude toward his
readers, and that ready adjustment of himself to the public taste, which
made him the most popular magazinist of his day and defined at once his
success and his limitations. For its purposes Willis’s crisp prose was
admirable: “delicate and brief like a white jacket,--transparent like a
lump of ice in champagne,--soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.” It
had an easy, conversational grace, the air of “the town,” the tone of good
society. In his review of Lady Morgan’s “Book of the Boudoir,” he made a
plea for that _negligé_ style which he practiced so daintily himself. “We
love this rambling, familiar gossip. It is the undress of the mind. There
are few people who possess the talent of graceful trifling, either in
writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is like
_naïveté_ in character,--nature let alone.” There was a great deal of good
writing in Willis’s “American Monthly” articles; bright thoughts expressed
in exquisite English, here and there a page which Charles Lamb or Leigh
Hunt might have been glad to claim. Some of these he rescued from the old
files of the magazine and inserted in his later work. The chapter on
“Minute Philosophies,” “A Morning in the Library,” and “The Substance of a
Diary of Sickness” were used again in “Edith Linsey,” and a spirited
description of Nahant in one of the “tables” did duty in “F. Smith.” But
many a nice bit was too small for resetting and remained lost in the
ephemeral context,--many such a scrap as this little picture of summer in
town:

“Was ever such intense, unmitigated sunshine? There is nothing on
the hard, opaque sky but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief
on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the shadow of that tall
chimney is as definite as a hair, and the young elm that leans over
the fence is copied in perfect and motionless leaves like a very
painting on the broad sidewalk.”

The “New England Galaxy,” which was also under Buckingham’s management,
was edited for a time by one William Joseph Snelling, who made quite a
stir in Boston newspaper circles. He had been an under-officer in the army
and stationed somewhere in the Northwest, but came to Boston about 1830
and devoted himself to sensational journalism and in particular to a
crusade against gamblers. His life was threatened for this, and he
converted his office into a sort of arsenal. In 1831 he published a
slashing lampoon, “Truth: a New Year’s Gift for Scribblers,” in which he
blackguarded American writers in general and paid his respects to Willis
as follows:--

“Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford
To give poor Natty P. his meet reward?
What has he done to be despised by all
Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall?
Why, as in band-box trim he walks the streets,
Turns up the nose of every man he meets,
As if it scented carrion? Why of late
Do all the critics claw his shallow pate?
True he’s a fool;--if that’s a hanging thing,
Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”

Some of this delicate banter was exhumed and quoted a few years later by
Captain Marryat, in the article in the “Metropolitan” which led to the
affair of honor between that warrior and Willis. The latter answered
Snelling “contemptuously but effectively,” Goodrich reports, “in some half
dozen verses inserted in the ‘Statesman,’ and addressed to _Smelling_
Joseph. The lines stuck to poor Smelling for the remainder of his life.”
The pasquinader himself afterwards went to New York and conducted a
meat-axe publication, “The Censor.” Goodrich adds, that he “fell into
habits of dissipation, which led from one degradation to another, till his
miserable career was ended,”--a victim, no doubt, to the angry muse.
Willis also contrived to offend Mrs. Lydia Maria Child by a satirical
review of her “Frugal Housewife” and by harping on a sentence from that
authority, “hard ginger-bread is nice.” She took this very much to heart,
and when she afterwards had charge of the literary department of the
“Traveller” showed an abiding hostility toward her whilom critic. He early
attained to the dignity of parody. “The Annoyer” was travestied in the
“Amateur” and a humorous imitation of “Albina M’Lush” was also printed.
Mere literary criticism, however unfair, need not greatly disturb any one.
But Willis was subjected, in Boston, to personalities of a very annoying
character. He was constantly in receipt of anonymous letters calling him a
puppy, a rake, etc. He was attacked in the newspapers for his frivolity,
his dandyism, and his conceit. Private scandal, circulated by word of
mouth, concerning his debts and his alleged immoralities, sometimes got
into print. It would not be easy to explain why so kind a man as Willis,
one always so eager to oblige and so prone to say good-natured things
about everybody, should have excited so much wrath, not only at this time,
but all through his life, by his harmless literary fopperies and foibles,
did we not remember that he was successful, that he was a favorite in
society, and, above all, that he wore conspicuously good clothes. There
was also something about his airy way of writing and the personality it
suggested that was and is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of
serious-minded people who resent all attempts to entertain them on the
part of any one whom they cannot entirely respect. Willis carried it off
lightly enough, though, of course, it must have stung him. He knew, he
said, “how easy it is to despise the ungentlemanly critic and forget the
poor wrong of his criticism.”

In intervals of work on the “American Monthly” he contributed frequently
to the “Boston Statesman,” having been engaged, together with Lunt and
Dawes, to write something for it every week, “short or long, prose or
verse,” at the rate of five dollars an article, an arrangement that lasted
for some months. This seems now beggarly pay, but Nathaniel Greene of the
“Statesman” was, according to Willis, the only editor in the country who,
as early as 1827, paid anything at all for verse. During these early
years of journalistic life Willis sojourned awhile in the pleasant land of
Bohemia. He was a member of a supper club, which included two
representatives of each profession. Washington Allston and Chester Harding
were the artists; Willis and Dawes the men of letters; Horace Mann and
five or six more completed the tale. Willis was a frequent lounger in
Harding’s studio, and some years after he was delighted to come across his
tracks at Gordon and Dalhousie castles, where Harding was known. Willis
was fond of fast horses, and used to drive his friends out to Nahant, for
a spin on the hard beach along the edge of the surf. This was the scene of
“F. Smith,” one of his most perfect and characteristic stories. With Dawes
and others he resorted, not seldom, for a game supper, to an ancient and
once somewhat stately hostelry, known as the “Stackpole House,” where the
wines were excellent and the landlord good-humored and disposed to
trust,--the original, doubtless, of Gallagher in “The Female Ward,” a
story written long afterwards, but whose incidents and descriptions are
assignable to this period.

Willis’s position in Boston was in some respects a difficult one. His
family connection were plain, good folks, not “in society,”--not, at
least, in the literary society, which was Unitarian, or in the so-called
aristocratic society, which was mainly either Unitarian or Episcopalian.
He himself was socially ambitious, and these were the circles which he
wished to frequent. “The pale of Unitarianism,” he wrote, “is the limit of
gentility.” He was a great favorite with Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, the
“lady autocrat” and leader of the _ton_ in the Puritan capital for many
years. He was constantly at her house when she was in town, and was
invited to be one of her party when she went to Saratoga in the summer.
Nor was this a passing fancy with Mrs. Otis, but stood the test of time
and separation. She made him a long visit at Idlewild during the latter
years of his life. But the Park Street Church people, among whom he had
been brought up, looked askance upon his fashionable associations. The old
stories of his college dissipations were revived, while rumors of his
Boston irregularities reached the ears of his New Haven acquaintances.
Willis himself took no notice of these slanders, but they were warmly
resented by his friends. His brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, wrote to Mr.
D. W. Whiting of New Haven: “Nat is a good fellow. He is not dissipated in
any way; nor traveling the Tartarean turnpike, as the good New Haven
people suppose. He is attending to his magazine, and doing his duty as
well as any of us.” Though Willis did not make the impression of a man of
very scrupulous morality, he was certainly not given to any serious
dissipations. It was not in his temperament to run into physical excesses.
His senses were delicate, and he always respected them. He never, for
example, used tobacco; he was never a hard drinker. In youth he affected a
moderate conviviality and had an æsthetic liking for champagne. In middle
age he was accustomed to mix a little spirit with his water, expressing a
horror for the pure element, on the whimsical ground that it tasted of
sinners ever since the flood. In this Boston period, his offenses were
probably limited to running up bills at livery stables and inns, with a
too sanguine expectation of being able to pay them from the proceeds of
his literary work. Edward Beecher, who had been a tutor at Yale during his
college course, was at this time pastor of the Park Street Church. Finding
himself unwilling to conform his life to the strict rules of that society,
Willis called on Mr. Beecher and stated the manner of his supposed
conversion in a revival at Andover, and the influences that had induced
him to join the church. He said that he was sincere in the act, but was
convinced afterward that he was mistaken in his conviction, and that he
had not experienced the change that qualified him for church membership;
and he requested Mr. Beecher to obtain for him an honorable dismission.
Mr. Beecher sympathized with him in his feelings, and made an effort to
satisfy his request, but failed, as the church then believed that there
were but three ways out of it, death, dismissal to another church, or
excommunication. Accordingly, at a church meeting on April 29, 1829, in
which Mr. Beecher took no part, the following sentence was passed:--

“Whereas certain charges have been made against Brother N. P.
Willis, which, in the opinion of this church has been fully proved,
namely: Absence from the communion of this church and attendance at
the theatre as a spectator; and whereas he has neglected to appear
before the church to answer the said charges, although duly
notified; and has not given to the church satisfactory evidence of
penitence, but has evinced by a letter laid before the church an
entirely different state of feeling; therefore voted, That Mr.
Nathaniel P. Willis be, and he hereby is, in the name and by the
authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, excommunicated from this
church.”

Deacon Willis was naturally grieved by this turn of affairs, although he
acquiesced silently in the church’s decision. Theatre going, indeed, was
an offense against family, as well as church discipline. Naturally, also,
the object of this _significavit_ always afterwards thought and spoke
with some bitterness of “the charity of a sect in religion.” He never
renounced definitely his Christian belief. He never became skeptical; was
not at any time, in fact, a thinker on such themes and subject to the
speculative doubts which beset the thinker. He remained through life
easily impressible in his religious emotions. “Worldling as I am,” he
wrote many years after, “and hardly as I dare claim any virtue as a
Christian, there is that within me which sin and folly never reached or
tainted.” But this ended his connection with organized Christianity, and
he ceased for a long time to be a church-goer.

His position in Boston was also made painful by an unsuccessful love
affair. He had paid court to Mary Benjamin, a woman of uncommon beauty of
person and graces of mind and character, the sister of Park Benjamin and
afterwards the wife of the historian Motley. She returned his feeling and
the two were engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken through
the determined opposition of the lady’s guardian, Mr. Savage. Willis
carried this thorn in his side for years, and it gave him many hours of
bitter homesickness while abroad. In a letter written a few days after
landing in England, in the summer of 1834, he said:--

“I loved Mary B., and never think of her without emotion; but with
all the world in France, Italy, and England treating me like a son
or a brother, I am not coming home to fight my way to her through
bitter relatives and slander and opposition. They nearly crushed me
once, and I shall take care how they get another opportunity. Still,
after three years’ separation, I think I never loved any one so
well, and if my way were not so hedged up, it would draw me home
now.”

To Mary Benjamin was addressed the lovely little poem, “To M----, from
Abroad,” with its motto from Metastasio,--

“L’alma, quel che non ha, sogna et figura.”

By 1829 Willis had accumulated verses enough to fill another slender
volume of “Fugitive Poetry.” Of the forty-three pieces in this, the
“Dedication Hymn,” written to be sung at the consecration of the Hanover
Street Church in Boston, has the best title to remembrance. It possesses a
brief energy seldom attained by Willis. As late as 1856, his old English
friend, Dr. William Beattie, wrote to him: “Your beautiful ‘Hymn’ was sung
in one of our cathedral towns, at the consecration of a new church, by an
overflowing congregation. Surely this is a fact worth noting. Miss Rogers
was the first who told me of it, and often have I repeated ‘The perfect
world by Adam trod,’ etc.” “The Annoyer” and “Saturday Afternoon” have
been already mentioned. “Contemplation”--

“They are all up, the innumerable stars”--

had the feeling, though not the artistic touch, of Tennyson’s “St. Agnes,”
and came near to being a fine poem. There were five sonnets, one of
them--an acrostic to Emily Marshall--with a good closing couplet,--

“Life in thy presence were a thing to keep,
Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep.”

“A Portrait,” also, which Willis did not republish, contained an effective
passage, beginning

“I go away like one who’s heard,
In some fine scene, the prompter’s word,” etc.

There were two more scriptural pieces, and the remainder of the book was
of no importance. Many of its contents were written before those of the
earlier volume of “Sketches.”

The “American Monthly” proved a failure financially, owing, doubtless, to
a lack of the right business management, for which Willis had no faculty,
and with which, in truth, he had nothing to do. At the close of the summer
of 1831 the magazine suspended publication, and its editor, shaking off
the dust of his feet against the New England metropolis, fled to more
genial climes. He left behind him the squibs of his brother journalists,
the cackle of the tea-tables, and some $3,000 of debts incurred through
the failure of his enterprise. He never quite forgave Boston. In a letter
to his mother from England, September 12, 1835, he wrote:--

“They have denied me patronage, abused me, misrepresented me,
refused me both character and genius, and I feel that I owe them
nothing. I have never suffered injustice except from my countrymen,
and I have in every other land found kindness and favor. I would not
write this for another human eye, but you know how unjustly I have
been treated, and can understand the wound that rankles even in so
light a heart as mine. The mines of Golconda would not tempt me to
return and live in Boston.”

The “New York Mirror” of September 10, 1831, contained the following item:
“We take much pleasure in announcing to our readers that the ‘American
Monthly Magazine’ has been united to the ‘New York Mirror,’ and that
Nathaniel P. Willis, Esq., will, from this period, be an associate editor
of the joint establishment.” This announcement was followed in the next
week’s issue by “A Card to the Public,” in which the new editor promises
that, “having transferred the only literary undertaking in which he has
any interest to the proprietor of the ‘Mirror,’ his whole time and
attention will hereafter be given to this work.” The “Mirrors” of
September 10th and 17th published, furthermore, two letters from
Saratoga, written by Willis in August, and containing some characteristic
verses, “The String that tied my Lady’s Shoe,” and “To----,”--

“’Tis midnight deep: I came but now
From the bright air of lighted halls;”

as also a “Pencilling by the Way,” descriptive of Providence and Brown
University, where he had just been delivering a Commencement poem. On
September 25th the editorial page for the first time bore the heading,
“Edited by George P. Morris, Theodore S. Fay, and Nathaniel P. Willis.”

The journal with which he had now connected himself--and with whose
successors, under different names, he continued to be identified until his
death, thirty-six years later--was a weekly paper, published on Saturdays,
and “devoted to literature and the fine arts.” It had been founded in 1823
by Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and General George
P. Morris, but Woodworth had withdrawn some time before Willis joined it.
Morris, with whom Willis now began a business partnership that lasted,
with slight interruptions, for the rest of their lives, and a personal
friendship almost romantic in its tenderness and fidelity, was the most
popular song writer of his generation in America,--a sort of cis-Atlantic
Tom Moore, whose songs, adapted to the piano, were on all the music-racks
in the land. “Near the Lake where droops the Willow” was a universal
favorite in the days of gem-book minstrelsy. “My Mother’s Bible” was dear
to the great heart of the people, and the air of “Woodman, spare that
Tree” was heard by wandering Americans ground out from every hurdy-gurdy
in the London streets. Unless a clever letter in the “Mirror” of March 2,
1839, is wholly a hoax, this last-mentioned song compared in popularity
with “Home Sweet Home,” having suffered translation into French
(“Bûcheron, épargne mon arbre”), German (“Haue nicht die alte Eiche
nieder”), Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; the German version being even
introduced by an essay, “Ueber Morris’s Entwickelung, Denken und Wirken.”
“The Amaranth” for 1840, an annual, edited by Nathaniel Brooks and
dedicated to Morris, contains Greek and Latin renderings of his “Woodman,”
as well as of Wilde’s almost equally familiar and far better lyric, “My
Life is like the Summer Rose.” Morris was a bustling, affable little man,
with a shrewd, practical side to him. He was a good business manager, and
as Willis had no talent in that kind, the association was mutually
advantageous. Morris’s intellectual stature was not great, and Willis,
who loved the man, was unable to admire the poet. He praised his songs in
print, but there was more of friendship than critical sincerity in his
praise. He had been in correspondence with Morris before, and had
contributed occasionally to the “Mirror,” having sent it a poem in
competition for a twenty-dollar prize when he was still in college. He now
began to decant into its columns a number of his “American Monthly”
articles, a circumstance which not only shows how local the circulation of
the latter must have been, but sheds a curious light on the methods of
journalism at that epoch. The old “New York Mirror” had a reputation for
brightness in its time and a circulation then considered large, but as
compared with the great magazines of to-day it seems a very primitive
affair, with its “Original Essays,” its “Popular Moral Tales,” “Desultory
Selections,” and “Extracts from an Unpublished Tragedy,” its poems “For
the ‘Mirror,’” by Isidora and Iolanthe, and its solemn “Answers to
Correspondents.” Now and then there is a contribution of more pronounced
individuality, a poem by Halleck, a story by Paulding or Fay. Theodore S.
Fay, the other editor, was a man of parts. He was the author of several
once popular novels, “The Countess Ida” and “Hoboken,” _tendenz_ romances
against dueling, “Ulric,” a poetical romance, and “Norman Leslie,” which
was afterwards dramatized, and was founded on a famous murder trial in
which Burr and Hamilton had figured as counsel. Fay contributed to the
“Mirror” satirical letters on New York society, “The Little Genius,” and
in 1832 published a volume of his “Mirror” articles under the title of
“Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man.” In 1833 he went abroad, and his
letters from Europe, “The Minute Book,” appeared in the paper side by side
with Willis’s “Pencillings.” He was appointed secretary of legation at
Berlin in 1837, and minister resident at Berne in 1853. His novels have
now gone quite out of sight, but many of his short tales are really very
clever,--written in a rattling style, with abrupt, jerky dialogues,--and
may be read even now without much effort. Another name connected with the
“Mirror” was that of William Cox, an English printer employed upon the
paper, whose “Crayon Sketches by an Amateur,” published in 1833, were
highly commended by Willis. He, too, was abroad during Willis’s and Fay’s
sojourn in Europe, and wrote letters from England to the “Mirror,” whose
foreign correspondence was thus uncommonly varied. The first thought of
sending Willis abroad occurred while the three editors were supping
together at Sandy Welsh’s oyster saloon. Long and earnestly they revolved
the question of ways and means. At length $500 were scraped together as
_viaticum_, and it was agreed that Willis was to write weekly letters at
ten dollars the letter. The investment proved a good one both for the
“Mirror” and for its traveling editor. With this slender capital in his
pocket he embarked at Philadelphia October 10th, the only passenger on the
merchant brig Pacific, bound for Havre. He was young, sanguine, eager to
see life, but in his most hopeful mood he could hardly have foreseen the
dazzling experiences of his next four years, or the far-reaching
consequences which the trip thus lightly undertaken were to have for him.

Before sailing he had found time to visit Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Washington, and Mount Vernon, and make a “Pencilling” of them for the
“Mirror.” Another letter gave his impressions of New York, now become his
American address. He had also put to press the poem delivered before the
“Society of United Brothers,” at Brown University, on September 6th, the
day before Commencement, together with a few other pieces written since
1829. The dedication was “To one of whom, in this moment of departure for
a foreign land, I think sadly and only--to my mother.” The name-poem was
one of those conventional performances with which unlucky recipients of
invitations to “speak a piece” before Phi Beta Kappas, United Brothers,
or other such academic bodies, are wont to dazzle the young alumni. It was
in blank verse, of course, and dealt with the usual commonplaces about
ambition, content, the beauty of human love, and the folly of skepticism
and contempt. It showed more maturity than the poem delivered before his
own Alma Mater four years before, but it was much the same sort of thing.
Of the remaining contents of the book two were Scripture sketches and four
were of a more ambitious description than Willis had previously attempted.
These were “Parrhasius,” “The Dying Alchemist,” “The Scholar of Thebet Ben
Chorat,” and “The Wife’s Appeal” to her husband to “awake to fame.” The
theme of all these and the central thought of this whole volume is the
vanity of an inordinate thirst for knowledge, power, or fame.
“Parrhasius,” the story of an old Olynthian captive who was tortured to
death by the Athenian painter that he might catch the expression of his
last agony for his picture of Prometheus, comes the nearest to success.
Willis had read the tale in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” “The Scholar
of Thebet Ben Chorat” was the story of a young Bedouin who grew mad and
died from too close application to astrology, on which science Willis
seems to have crammed up for the nonce, if one may judge from the
profusion of his foot-notes. But in truth these poems were little better
than wax-work. The sweet and natural lines, “To a City Pigeon,” were worth
all the rest of the book.

CHAPTER IV.

1831-1834.

LIFE ABROAD.

Whatever may have been the effect of Willis’s career in Europe upon his
character, its influence on his literary fortunes was most propitious.
Foreign travel furnished just the stimulus that he wanted. As a writer he
was at all times very dependent on his supplies. If they were fresh and
abundant his writing was correspondingly so; if life stagnated with him
his writing wore thin. Place is comparatively indifferent to men of deep
or intense genius, to a philosopher like Emerson or a brooding idealist
like Hawthorne. They strike root anywhere, and it is no great matter from
what corner they look forth upon the world. The life of the soul, the life
of nature, the problems of the conscience, may be studied in Concord or
Salem as well as anywhere else. A profound insight, a subtle imagination
will interpret the humblest environment into philosophy and poetry. And
yet even these are not quite free of their surroundings. To all but sworn
Emersonians “English Traits” is probably the most intelligible and
satisfactory of Emerson’s writings. “The Marble Faun” is not Hawthorne’s
greatest romance, but there is a richness about it, a _body_, that comes
simply from its material, and is not to be found in “The Scarlet Letter”
or “The House of the Seven Gables.”

As for Willis, his genius, such as it was, was frankly external. His
bright fancy played over the surface of things. His curiosity and his
senses demanded gratification. He needed stir, change, adventure. He was
always turning his own experiences to account, and the more crowded his
life was with impressions from outside, the more vivid his page. He had
the artist’s craving for luxury, and was fond of quoting a saying of
Godwin: “A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the
cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining
of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding.” This taste
for the sumptuous had been starved in Willis at home. Not only were
literature and society in America far more provincial then than now, but
life was plainer in every way. The rapid growth of wealth has obliterated
the most striking contrasts between cities like New York and Boston, on
the one hand, and cities like London and Paris, on the other. In every
foreign capital nowadays one finds his simple republican compatriots
grumbling at the absence of American conveniences, cursing the steamboats,
the railway carriages, the hotels, the luggage system, the portable baths
and bed-room candles, and proclaiming loudly that the Americans are the
most luxurious people on the face of the earth. In Europe, and especially
in England, circumstances threw Willis into a new world. He shared for a
time in the life of the titled aristocracy and the idle rich, and he took
to it like one to the manner born. He was at home at once amid all that
gay ease and leisure. The London clubs, the parks, the great country
houses, Almack’s and the Row, the beautiful haughty women, the grace,
indolence, and refinement, hereditary for generations, seemed no more than
the birthright of this New England printer’s son, from which some envious
fairy had hitherto shut him out.

“I have now and then a fit of low spirits,” he says, in a letter
from Marseilles, April 28, 1832, “though generally the excessive
excitement of new scenes and constant interest occupies me quite. It
is like an intoxication to travel in Europe. I feel no annoyance,
grumble at no imposition, am never out of temper. Fatigue is the
only thing that bears me down. I want leisure and money. I shall
come back, I think, to America after my engagement with Morris is
over, and marry and come out again. As to settling down for these
ten years, I cannot think of it without a sickness at my heart. I
wish to heaven I could keep a journal and publish after I got home.
This writing and sending off unrevised is the worst thing in the
world for one’s reputation. However, I see a world of things that I
cannot put into letters, and I feel every day that my mind is
ripening and laying up material which I could get nowhere else. You
can have no idea of the stirring, vivid habit one’s mind gets into
abroad. Living at home forever would never be of half the use to
me.”

Willis arrived at Havre November 3d, and went on by diligence to Paris,
where he spent between five and six months. He had taken out with him a
number of good letters, some from Martin Van Buren among the rest. The
American colony in Paris was then small and select. It was under the wing
of Lafayette, who was very polite to Willis during his stay. Cooper was
there and his _protégé_, Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, who had come
from Florence to execute a bust of Lafayette. Morse, the artist, too, who,
on his return trip to America in a Havre packet, in the year following,
was to hit upon his invention of the electric telegraph. And lastly,
Willis’s fellow-townsman, Dr. Howe, then a zealous young philanthropist,
who had won much glory by his recent campaign in Greece, and was now
attending medical lectures at the French capital. Willis took lodgings
with Howe until the latter, having been appointed president of the
American committee for the relief of the Poles, went off on his dangerous
mission of distributing supplies among the insurgent bands in Polish
Prussia, an enterprise which ended in his capture and confinement for six
weeks in a Prussian prison. All these gentlemen Willis had the good
fortune to meet in familiar and cordial intercourse. Cooper asked him to
breakfast with Morse and Howe, and walked and talked with him in the
gardens of the Tuileries. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun between
the two authors was afterwards renewed at home, though, from accidents of
geography, they never became really intimate.

Willis also made desirable acquaintances among the foreigners resident in
Paris. Morse took him to call upon Sir John Bowring, editor of the
“Westminster Review,” the translator of much of the national poetry of the
Russians and Hungarians, and afterwards the English governor of Hong Kong
at the time of the Opium War. He made acquaintance, too, with Spurzheim,
the phrenologist, who took a cast of his head; with General Bertrand, who
had been with Napoleon at St. Helena; and with the Countess Guiccioli,
who presented him with a sonnet by herself, and an autograph note from
Shelley. The glamour of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was still over
Europe, and everywhere the American traveler looked eagerly for his
footprints. Mr. Rives, the minister of the United States at Paris, was
very attentive to his young countryman, and presented him to the king,
with two other American gentlemen, Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Carr. The latter
was American consul at Tangiers. He took a great liking to Willis, made
him a number of presents, and offered to appoint him his secretary, and
take him to Morocco. This offer Willis was at first inclined to accept. It
was a tempting one in many particulars, and in a birthday letter to his
mother, January 20, 1832, he thus explained its advantages:--

“Mr. Carr takes me into his family and pays all my expenses. We go
to the old palaces of the Abencerrages, perhaps the most romantic
country in history, and one very little written about, and it will
double the value of my journey to Morris at the same time that it
secures me from any reverse of fortune. He means to spend his
summers in Spain, which is right opposite Tangiers at two hours’
sail, and next fall he will run down to Italy and the Sicilies, thus
giving me every opportunity I want. I have letters from Lord James
Hay to his brother-in-law, the governor of Gibraltar, and one from
Lord Fife to the governor of the Ionian Islands.”

Why he did not embrace this golden chance remains uncertain, though he
hints at a possible difficulty in the fact that his friend, the consul,
was a notorious duelist, who had shot seven or eight men and had a very
pretty wife. However, before he left Paris, Mr. Rives attached him to his
own embassy, a courtesy which proved of the greatest service to him. It
entitled him to wear the uniform of a secretary of legation, and the
diplomatic button gave him the _entrée_ to the court circles of every
country he visited.

Willis saw Paris at an interesting moment. The Polish revolution had just
failed, and the city swarmed with refugees. Louis Philippe was already
growing unpopular, and there were continual small _émeutes_ on the
Boulevard Montmartre, at the Porte Saint Denis, and in other quarters, led
by Polytechnic students and put down without much trouble by the troops.
It was a cholera year and people were dying by the hundreds daily.
Meanwhile the gay world went on much as ever. Carnival was kept with the
usual elaborate follies. There were masked balls at the palace. Malibran
and Taglioni were on the stage. Paris, with its novelties and splendors,
exercised the same fascination over Willis that it exercises proverbially
over his compatriots. He was never tired of promenading and sight-seeing.
His lodgings were in the Rue Rivoli, facing the Tuileries. Sismondi, the
historian, had the apartment under him. In a private letter he thus
describes his daily occupations:--

“I have bought a coffee maker and cups, and a loaf of sugar and a
pan, etc., etc., and my hostess’s daughter, Christine, brings me my
bread and butter, and I breakfast gloriously alone, the doctor
(Howe) being always at the hospitals in the morning. I breakfast and
write all along the forenoon till twelve, and then see sights and
hear lectures till dark, dine at five or six, and either go to some
party in the evening, or stay at home and study with Zelie.”

He had no fear of the cholera and firmly believed that it was not
contagious. He was advised that good living, frequent bathing, a cheerful
frame of mind, and regular habits were the best preventives. He even went
boldly through the cholera wards of the Hôtel Dieu, and sent a harrowing
description of them to the “Mirror.” But towards spring the pestilence
gained more and more. The theatres were shut, all gayeties suspended, and
thousands fled the city daily. The upper classes, who had thus far
escaped, began to be attacked. The streets were almost deserted, people
went about holding camphor bags to their nostrils, and the panic became
universal. Finally, toward the middle of April, while dancing at a party,
Willis was seized with violent pains in the stomach, vomiting, and chills.
He ran out of the room to an apothecary’s, swallowed thirty drops of
laudanum, took a carriage home, and a prescription of camphor and ether,
and went to bed. These instant remedies, he had no doubt, were all that
saved him, and on April 16th he started for Italy.

It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his
saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the
“Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the
issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began
them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first
seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his
return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but
he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.”
Both described well the character of these letters, which were written
hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision,
to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed
to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and
thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far
as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged
less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between
two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted
that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is
explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in
those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and
few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed
himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy
and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde
of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain
and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of
travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first
impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and
authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not
serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.”
There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such
as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of
James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s
“Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an
American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and
“Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid
sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born
“foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a
subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for
seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber.
Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated
places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are
sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous
works of art are often either at second hand or incorrect. His education
had not prepared him to pronounce on these, and he had not the patience to
cultivate a critical appreciation of them. But in the crowd and out of
doors--whither he gladly escapes--he is always happy, and there are many
pictures, scattered here and there through these excellent letters, which
for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled
either by Hawthorne, in his “Note-Books,” or by Bayard Taylor, in his
numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more
penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.

Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, and become the
interpreter to the New World of the Old World’s romantic past. He was
never much of a scholar. The literature and legends of the countries he
traveled had little to give him, though he possessed just enough of the
historic imagination for the proper equipment of a picturesque tourist. In
general it was the present that interested him: all this stirring modern
life, the strange manners and dresses, the changing landscapes, the gay
throngs in the streets, the pretty women and notable men at the drive or
the ball. Nor was his attitude that of criticism, but rather of intense
personal enjoyment. He had gone out ready to be pleased, and he was
pleased. He gave, in consequence, a somewhat rose-colored view of Europe
to his readers at home. Not that the disagreeable side escaped his notice,
but he was having his holiday and he gave a holiday account of it, and his
engaging egotism lent a personal interest to his descriptions. The
“Edinburgh Review,” in a just but rather heavy notice of “Pencillings,”
complained of the scantiness of useful information in them. Useful
information was a thing which Willis eschewed. He took small interest in
politics, public institutions, industrial conditions, etc.; and he knew
that they would bore nine out of ten among his readers. He lumped them
jauntily under the head of “statistics,” referred the anxious inquirer
concerning them to the cyclopædias, acknowledged with delightful candor
that he himself was an ornamental person, and went on with his sketches of
people and places. Yet “Pencillings by the Way” was a book which so solid
a man as Daniel Webster carried with him on a journey, and which, says his
biographer, “he read attentively and praised. He said the letters were
both instructive and amusing and evinced great talents on the part of the
author.” They inspired the young Bayard Taylor with his first longing to
travel. Thousands of Americans have taken their impressions of Europe from
them; and in spite of all that has since been written by more leisurely
and better instructed observers, they retain their freshness wonderfully,
and present to the reader of to-day vivid glimpses of the outside of
European life, at a time when steam had not yet made the byways of all
countries accessible.

Willis spent the summer and autumn of 1832 in the north of Italy, making
Florence his headquarters. Dr. Bowring had given him in Paris a letter to
Count Porro at Marseilles. The latter had been with Byron in Greece, where
Count Gamba, the Guiccioli’s brother, was of his corps and served under
him. He gave Willis letters to “half the rank of Italy:” among others, to
the Marquis Borromeo, who owned the “Isola Bella” in Lake Maggiore. Porro
assured Willis that Borromeo would give him the use of one of his
palazzos, “as he has five or six and is happy when people he knows occupy
his servants.” The nominal position of _attaché_ to the American legation
at Paris obtained for him a private presentation to the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and an invitation to the ducal balls and the receptions at the
Casino, both of which were given weekly. The Florentines did not entertain
much at their houses, but the foreign residents did, and especially the
English. Willis was dined by Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Westphalia,
who was living at the Tuscan capital with the title of Prince Montfort,
and giving very exclusive parties. He resorted to the Saturday _soirées_
of Prince Poniatowski, who professed love for Americans, and whose august
name was afterwards borne by the favorite pony of the Willis children at
Idlewild. In short, he was freely admitted to Florentine society and took
part in its fashionable intrigues and dissipations. He secured lodgings in
Florence in the same palazzo with Greenough, in the apartment just vacated
by Cole, the American landscape painter. Through Greenough he saw a great
deal of artist life in Italy. At Rome Greenough subsequently introduced
him to Gibson, the English sculptor, who presented him with a cast of his
bas-relief, Cupid and Psyche. Under the guidance of the two, Willis amused
himself by trying his hand, in an amateurish fashion, at moulding in clay.
He was flattered by their assurances that he had a good touch, and felt
half inclined, for a moment, to exchange his dilettantish pursuit of
letters for an equally dilettantish pursuit of art. His dreams of the
possibilities of such a career took shape long after in the novel of “Paul
Fane.” Greenough had moulded a bust of Willis at Florence, and some years
after he cut it in marble and gave it to him. There is a story about this
which is authentic, and too pretty to leave untold. Mr. Joseph Grinnell of
New Bedford happened to be in Florence in the spring of 1830 and had
employed Greenough to make him a statue of his niece Cornelia,--then a
child of five years,--who became in time Willis’s second wife. It was from
a remnant of the same block used for her statue that the sculptor,
unconscious of the omen, afterwards carved the bust of her future husband.
The two fragments thus strangely reunited stand now in the same
drawing-room, the head of the youthful poet, with its Hyperion curls, and
the full-length figure of the demure little Quaker maiden, holding in one
hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of
Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of
Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair
likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat
abroad. His inherited tendency to _embonpoint_ was counteracted in later
life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height
gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,”
apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms
that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.”

August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting,
and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a
private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting
for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to
Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season.

“In London I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then
live abroad altogether. It costs so little here and one lives so
luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one’s mind and eye,
that I think of returning to naked America with daily increasing
repugnance. I love my country, but the _ornamental_ is my vocation,
and of this she has none. I shall pass the next summer, perhaps, in
Germany at a university, and I mean to learn German thoroughly. You
would be astonished at the facility of learning a language _in the
country_. I speak French well and Italian passably, and you know how
little I knew and how short a time I have been abroad.”

This programme was altered for some reason. Instead of starting for
England, he made a second visit to Venice, then returned to Florence, and
when the autumn was far enough advanced to make it safe went on to Rome.
In the letter just quoted he mentions that he has made the acquaintance of
a young Mr. Noel, a cousin of Byron.

The winter of 1832-33 and the spring of 1833 were spent between Florence,
Rome, and Naples.

Wherever he traveled he made friends. He was not without a title to his
secretary’s button, for his whole progress through Europe was a ticklish
feat of diplomacy. Few of the people whom he met in society suspected what
thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant that the dashing
young _attaché_ was dependent for his bread and butter on weekly letters
to a newspaper. The failure of remittances from Morris sometimes put him
in an awkward predicament, but he always managed to find a way out. In one
of the letters which he made it a religion to write his mother on each
recurring birthday--this one dated at Florence, January 20, 1833--he
relates some of his experiences of the kind:--

“I have dined with a prince one day and alone for a shilling in a
cook-shop the next. I have twice been entirely destitute of money in
places where I had not an acquaintance, and the instant before the
last coin was out of my pocket, chances too improbable for a dream
have provided for me. One was at Marseilles. I had relied on
receiving a letter of credit when I got there. I was disappointed
and was at the hotel a week, wondering whether I should find fate
working its usual miracle for me. I had only two francs remaining,
when a gentlemanly man, who had commenced conversation with me at
table, asked me to his room and ended with offering me a seat in his
carriage to Nice. The quarantine drove him back, but he had brought
me two hundred miles on my route, and knowing my disappointment by
my inquiries at the post office, he offered me the use of his banker
to any amount and took drafts for the money on my partner in New
York. This now is a thing that does not occur once in a century. I
have corresponded with Doyne (that was his name) ever since. I find
that he is a _religious man_, and from one of the first families in
Dublin.”

With all his taste for luxury, Willis knew how to make economies, and
living was much cheaper then. He never affected a mystery, and in one of
his letters to the “Mirror” he explained how it was that he could live in
Florence on three hundred dollars a year “exclusive of postage and
pleasure,” paying four dollars a month for his apartment and attendance,
breakfasting for six cents, and dining “quite magnificently” for
twenty-five. Meanwhile a deal of gossip about him was in circulation in
America, and the editor of the “Mirror” had to contradict, _inter alia_, a
rumor that his foreign collaborator had married the widow of a British
nobleman and was faring sumptuously in Rome.

Having been invited by the officers of the frigate United States to join
them in a six months’ cruise up the Mediterranean, he repaired to Leghorn,
from which port the United States, with her consort the Constellation, set
sail on the 3d of June, 1833. Commodore Patterson of Baltimore commanded
the former ship and Captain Reed of Philadelphia the latter. Both
gentlemen were accompanied by their wives and the commodore by his three
beautiful daughters. These were all old friends of Willis, and he had made
acquaintance with the other officers of the squadron in Italy. He could
not have seen the East under pleasanter auspices, and the next half year
was the richest in literary fruit of his entire sojourn upon the
continent. The squadron loitered along like a pair of pleasure yachts,
touching at all the more interesting ports. The bright shores of the
Mediterranean and the Levant passed in a magic panorama before the eyes of
the passengers, who sailed and danced and ate the lotus day after day.
Elba, Naples, and Sicily; Trieste and Vienna; the Ionian Islands, Greece,
and the shores of the Dardanelles were visited in turn, and at length in
October the frigate dropped anchor in the Golden Horn. Willis’s
“Pencillings” of Constantinople are among the best in his portfolio, among
the best, indeed, that have ever been made of the surface of Oriental
life. Italy was hackneyed: the Rialto and Saint Mark’s, the Coliseum and
the Vatican, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples, had been described a thousand
times. But here he was off the track of common tourists. His nature
reveled in the barbaric riches of the East and cheerfully blinked the
discomforts and the dirt. The mysteries of the seraglio and the slave
market and the veiled women in the bazaars piqued his curiosity, and the
poetry of the Turkish cemeteries and mosques appealed to his sentiment. He
was never weary of wandering through the grand bazaar. “I have idled up
and down in the dim light and fingered the soft henna, and bought small
parcels of incense wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable
faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow
tinctured of the East, and my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable
odors of its thousand spices.” Willis was a born shopper and had a
feminine eye for the niceties not only of costume, but of upholstery,
pottery, and all kinds of purchasable knick-knacks. He relished a fine
appeal to his senses and his fancy all in one. So he liked to go through
the street of the confectioners and taste the queer sweetmeats with
flowery names, “peace to your throat” and “lumps of delight,” and to
inventory the merchants’ stock in trade, their gilded saucers, brass
spoons, and vases of rose water. He liked the opium-eating druggists,
smoking their narghiles and fingering their spice wood beads, the edges of
their jars “turned over with rich colored papers (a peculiar color to
every drug), and broad spoons of box-wood crossed on the top.” He
delighted to cheapen amber and embroidered slippers in the Bezestein, and
best of all to lounge on the cushioned divan, taking sherbet and aromatic
coffee and bargaining for attar of roses in the octagonal shop of
Mustapha, the perfumer to the Sultan, whom he has introduced as a _deus ex
machina_ into his story, “The Gypsy of Sardis.” In the “Letters from under
a Bridge,” he affirms, whether seriously or not I cannot say, that the
English artist Bartlett, who was his collaborator in “American Scenery,”
encountered old Mustapha in Constantinople, and that the latter showed him
Willis’s card “stained to a deep orange with the fingering of his fat
hand, unctuous from bath hour to bath hour with the precious oils he
traffics in.” He questioned Bartlett about America, “a country which to
Mustapha’s fancy is as far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt
tip of the seraglio,” and finally gave him a jar of attar of jasmine to
send to Willis. “The small gilt bottle, with its cubical edge and cap of
parchment, lies breathing before me.” Then there was the street of the
booksellers, where “the small brown reed stood in every clotted inkstand,”
and the bearded old Armenian bookworm, interrupted in eating rice from a
wooden bowl, took down an illuminated Hafiz, “and opening it with a
careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian.” Willis also struck up
an acquaintance with Dr. Millingen, the Sultan’s physician, who had
attended Byron in his last illness. He spent two days with him, by
invitation, at his house on the Bosphorus, and picked up a smattering of
Romaic from Mrs. Millingen, who was a Greek.

After five weeks at Constantinople, the frigate weighed anchor for Smyrna.
There he found an old schoolmate, Octavus Langdon, a Smyrniote merchant,
who entertained him very hospitably, and invited him to join a party for a
few days’ tour in Asia Minor. The party consisted of Willis and his host,
an American missionary named Brewer, and two other gentlemen, and their
adventures included a night in a real Oriental khan at Magnesia, and a
visit to the site of ancient Sardis. A beautiful girl, of whom Willis
caught a glimpse, through a tent door, in a gypsy encampment on the plain
of Hadjilar, was the original of his “Gypsy of Sardis.” At Smyrna he said
good-by to Commodore Patterson and his other friends on the United States;
and the ship which had been his home for more than six months sailed away
to winter at Minorca, leaving him “waiting for a vessel to go--I care not
where. I rather lean toward Palestine and Egypt, but there are no vessels
for Jaffa or Alexandria.”

By this time Willis’s literary reputation had penetrated to the London
press, though not as yet to the London public, possibly through scattered
copies of his “Mirror” letters; and while staying at Smyrna he received
“an offer of a thousand dollars a year to write for the London ‘Morning
Herald.’ But the articles were to be _political_, and that I had modesty
enough to think beyond my calibre. I was to live abroad, however, and go
wherever there was a war or the prospect of one. I would much rather
write about pictures and green fields.” The not unpleasant hesitation as
to his next move was ended at last by the departure from Smyrna of the
Yankee brig Metamora, bound for his native Portland with a cargo of figs
and opium. The skipper, a Down-Easter, agreed to take him as a passenger,
and land him at Malta. At Malta, accordingly, he arrived late in December,
after being nearly shipwrecked in a Levanter, and was put ashore through a
heavy sea in the brig’s long boat, narrowly escaping being carried all the
way to America. The letter to the “Mirror” in which this part of his
travels was recorded was lost, and the “Pencillings” leap at once from
Smyrna to Milan. He afterwards rewrote the episode, turning it into a
capital story (“A Lost Letter Rewritten,” in the “Mirror” for May 14 and
June 11, 1836), which figures in his collected writings as “A Log in the
Archipelago.” The startling conjunction of East and Down East on board the
Metamora suggested, no doubt, some of the incidents in “The Widow by
Brevet,” a tale which moves between the poles of Constantinople and Salem,
Massachusetts.

From Malta he made his way _via_ Italy, Switzerland, and France to
England, arriving at Dover on the 1st of June, 1834.

While at Florence, Willis had been introduced by Greenough to Walter
Savage Landor, who was then living in his villa at Fiesole. Landor
entertained him hospitably, and, at parting, made him a present of a Cuyp,
for which Willis had expressed admiration, and gave him some valuable
letters to people in England. One of these was to the Countess of
Blessington, and with it Landor intrusted to his American guest the
manuscript of his “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare,” for
delivery to the same lady, under whose superintendence it was duly
published the following autumn. He also put into his hands a package whose
temporary disappearance was the cause of some blame attaching to Willis.
Landor’s own story of the transaction, told in an addendum to the first
edition of “Pericles and Aspasia,” is as follows:--

“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and
favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to
reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary
Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the
most _thumbed_ books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an
expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him
unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed
volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, together with
my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in
England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their
destination.”

It seems from Willis’s public explanation in “Letters from under a
Bridge,” that he received the volumes, which were in a dilapidated
condition, at the moment of starting, and not knowing how to add them to
his baggage he--rather carelessly, perhaps--“sent them with a note to
Theodore Fay, who was then in Florence, requesting him to forward them to
America by ship from Leghorn.” Fay accordingly committed them to a Mr.
Miles, an American straw-bonnet-maker, who did send them to New York,
where Willis expected to follow in the course of the summer and take
charge of them. Instead of doing this, he spent the next two years in
England, and meanwhile wrote to Landor that the package had been left with
Miles, to forward it to America. Landor “called in consequence at the shop
of this person, who denied any knowledge of the books.” These, however,
after a brief stay in New York, were consigned to Willis at London, “and
Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, the explanation was
made, and the books and manuscripts restored unharmed to the author,” but
not in time to keep Willis from going down “to posterity astride the finis
of ‘Pericles and Aspasia.’ I trust,” he continues, “that his [Landor’s]
biographer will either let me slip off at Lethe’s wharf, by expurgating
the book of me, or do me justice in a note.” In spite of which trust the
biographers have been a little hard on Willis in the matter. Sidney
Colvin, heartened, probably, by the “Quarterly’s” onslaught, denounces him
as “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips,” and
says that he gave Landor occasion to repent of his hospitality by
consigning his books to America and then basely lingering on in England
“in obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom he found himself
invited:” while Forster, after declaring that Willis’s “fuss and fury of
boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim,” adds that “Landor
will perhaps be thought not without excuse for the way in which he always
afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.” But whatever inconvenience the
latter may have caused in this business, he certainly made the _amende
honorable_ in the letter to Landor from which Mr. Forster quotes:--

“I have to beg,” he writes, “that you will lay to the charge of
England a part of the annoyance you will feel about your books and
manuscripts. I was never more flattered by a commission and I have
never fulfilled one so ill. They went to America _via_ Leghorn, and
I expected fully to have arrived in New York a month or two after
them.”

Landor was a man of noble courtesy and most generous nature, although, to
put it mildly, often unreasonable. The delay and uncertainty about his
precious manuscripts were certainly vexatious and may, very likely, as his
biographer implies, have influenced “the way in which he always afterwards
spoke” of the man who, innocently enough, made him the trouble. But up to
the time of this little misunderstanding, his feelings toward Willis, as
expressed in their correspondence, were exceedingly cordial; as will
sufficiently appear from the following letter, undated, but written,
probably, during the winter of 1834-35:--

MR DEAR SIR,--By a singular and strange coincidence, I wrote this
morning and put into the post office a letter directed to you at New
York. And now comes Mr. Macquay, bringing me one from you,
delightful in all respects. I know not any man in whose fame and
fortunes I feel a deeper interest than in yours. Pardon me if I am
writing all this illegibly in some degree, for certainly I shall
scarcely be in time for the post with all the agility both of hand
and legs. For I am resolved to transcribe an ode to your President
in spite of the resistance his [MS. illegible] has met
with,--indeed, the more am I resolved for this very reason. I envy
you the evenings you pass with the most accomplished and graceful of
all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington. Do
not believe that I have written any paper in the magazine. Whatever
I write I submit to Lady B. My “Examination of Shakespeare” I
published for a particular and private purpose, which, however, it
has not answered. I should not be surprised if it procured me a
hundred pounds or more within seven years. Had I known of your being
in England I should have ordered a copy to have been sent to you.
Pray tell Lady Blessington I have at last received her Byron from
Colonel Hughes. It came a week ago. I think better of him than I
did, and thank her for it. Nevertheless, I suspect she has given him
powers of ratiocination which he never attained. I must now try to
recollect my verses. So adieu, and believe me,

Ever yours most sincerely,

W. S. LANDOR.

Pray write to me when you find time.

The verses accompanying this letter were the rough draft of the ode “To
Andrew Jackson,” numbered CCLXXXVIII. in Landor’s miscellaneous poems. On
his side Willis could not thank Landor enough for his introduction to Lady
Blessington. “She is my lode star and most valued friend,” he writes, “for
whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you that you will find it
difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.”

In England Willis fell at once upon his feet. While traveling on the
Continent, his intimacies had been principally among Englishmen and
Americans, and though well received in the native society of Florence by
virtue of his diplomatic credentials, he had remained, after all, a
stranger and a looker-on. A foreign language imperfectly learned is a
barrier to complete intercourse even in the most cosmopolitan society. In
France and Italy he had made acquaintances; in England he made friends and
formed domestic ties which bound him to the country as long as he lived.
He did not fancy the French and Italians, though he found their cities
interesting to visit; but he liked the English and they treated him well.
No American author except Irving and Cooper had received from them a tithe
of the attentions which they accorded to Willis; and Cooper, though
personally well liked, had offended British prejudices by his pugnacious
writings and was more popular in Paris than in London. The next two years
of Willis’s life were perhaps the acme of his social and literary career,
and he always looked back to them as the brightest spot in his memory. The
experience was not altogether healthy for him, though it was stimulating
at the time. He was not spoiled by success, but he was naturally a little
intoxicated by it, and a little dazzled by the courtly splendors of the
circles to which he was now admitted. When he went back to America, he did
so reluctantly, and with the hope of returning soon to make his home in
England. He found the change to the plainer conditions of American life a
chilling one, and he had acquired habits and standards which did not fit
in easily with the requirements of a journalist’s career in a new country.

As soon as he reached Dover he began to have that feeling of being at home
once more which is familiar to American travelers who make their first
entrance to England by way of the Channel. Everything was new, and yet
nothing was strange. The blazing coal fires--it was June--the warm
carpets, the quiet coffee-room with the London newspapers on the table,
the subdued, respectful servants, the mother-tongue again, the plain
richness of the furnishings, the snugness and comfort,--the Anglo-Saxon
knows by these that he is once more in Anglo-Saxondom. Arrived at London,
he lost no time in delivering his note of introduction from Landor to Lady
Blessington, who immediately asked him to dinner and presented him to the
_beaux esprits_ who frequented Seamore Place. For this charming woman her
young _protégé_ conceived at once the strongest admiration, tinctured, it
may be, by a tenderer sentiment. Her wit and beauty, her cordiality and
social graces, had drawn about her a court of statesmen, authors, and
notabilities of all kinds, over whom she presided like the queen of a
Parisian _salon_. It was natural that Willis should have formed, or at
least should have politely expressed, an exaggerated estimate of her
literary gifts. To posterity, who have not the advantage of her personal
acquaintance, Lady Blessington’s writings seem of very little importance,
with the possible exception of her “Conversations with Lord Byron,” whose
subject lends it a certain claim to remembrance. At her house Willis met
Bulwer, Moore, Lord Durham, Disraeli, James Smith, Galt, Procter,
Fonblanque of the “Examiner,” and many other distinguished men whose
portraits he has given in the “Pencillings” with a sharpness of outline
which makes them increasingly valuable as their figures recede into
history. It is not at all strange that an enthusiastic and fanciful young
American, without antecedents, ushered all at once into a roomful of
people about whom all the world was talking, should have been a little
imposed upon by these exalted personages. He was not in a critical mood,
and it may be freely conceded that he had too high an opinion of Barry
Cornwall’s poetry, and of the electroplated novels of the authors of
“Pelham” and “Vivian Grey;” and that he exclaimed more than was necessary
over the varied accomplishments of that gorgeous dandy--Byron’s _Cupidon
déchainé_--the Count d’Orsay.

Still he kept his head fairly well. Fortunate in his introductions, he was
the man to make the most of his chances. His talent for society and his
easy assurance put him quickly _de niveau_ with his new acquaintances. He
was not at all above owning that the English nobility, for example,
impressed his imagination. He liked to stay at their houses; he enjoyed
the wealth, the grandeur, the historic associations that surrounded them.
His appetite for luxury was gratified by the perfection of all their
appointments in the art of living. The fineness of their manners pleased
his aristocratic tastes and he could not sufficiently admire the high-bred
women and the simple, cordial, dignified gentlemen with whom he dined or
drove through the cultivated landscapes. But Willis was no snob or vulgar
tuft hunter. His enjoyment of his privileges was accompanied with an
entire reserve of his self-respect. He liked the company of those whom Dr.
Johnson was wont to call “the great.” But though he loved a lord, he
preferred a commoner, if the commoner was preferable. The Duke of
Richelieu, whom he had met at Lady Blessington’s, and previously at the
French court, he described as “the inheritor of nothing but the name of
his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool.”

“What a star is mine!” he wrote in a letter to his sister Julia,
three days after his landing in England. “All the best society of
London exclusives is now open to me--_me!_ a sometime apprentice at
setting types--_me!_ without a sou in the world beyond what my pen
brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but
a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a
countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the
standing in England which I have got in _three days_ only. I should
not boast of it if I had not been wounded and stung to the quick by
the calumnies and falsehoods of every description which come to me
from America. But let it pass! It reconciles me to my exile at
least, and may drive me to adopt the mother country for my own. In a
literary way, I have had already offers from the ‘Court Magazine,’
the ‘Metropolitan Monthly,’ and the ‘New Monthly’ of the first price
for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the
‘Court Magazine’ yesterday, and the publishers gave me eight guineas
for it at once. They all pay in this proportion, and you can easily
see, with my present resources of matter, how well I can live. I
lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town,
paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I
had been the son of the President, with as much as I could spend in
the year. Except my family now, I have forgotten everybody in
America. [Here follows the passage about Mary Benjamin already
quoted in chapter III.] I never can return, however, till I can pay
my debts, and it will take me long to lay up three thousand
dollars. When I can do it, I shall, and make America a farewell
visit for years.”

Willis followed up his advantages assiduously. He went constantly to Lady
Blessington’s, exchanged calls with Moore, breakfasted with Procter and
also with that entertaining diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson, to whom he
brought a letter from Landor, and in whose rooms in the Temple he met
Charles and Mary Lamb. His Parisian acquaintance, Dr. Bowring, was back in
London and introduced him to a number of people. At an evening party at
the Bulwers’ he met Sir Leicester Stanhope, who had been with Byron in
Greece, and with whose beautiful wife Willis became quite a favorite,
composing his verses “Upon the Portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope” to
accompany an engraving of her in Lady Blessington’s “Book of Beauty.” At
the Stanhopes’ he met that famous pair of beauties, “the Sheridan girls,”
Mrs. Norton and her sister, Lady Dufferin, to the former of whom he had
addressed a poem written at Paris in 1832 and printed in the “Mirror” of
July 7, 1834.

It was the height of the London season, and the opera was in full blast,
with Grisi singing and Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Willis was admitted to
the Alfred Club, and invitations to dinners and parties began to pour in
upon him. All these gayeties he described in his letters to Morris,
which, losing somewhat, it may be, in picturesqueness, gained greatly in
personal interest during his stay in England. It was in the course of this
first summer in London that he got acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford,
who invited him to spend a week at Reading, and with whom he maintained
for some time a friendly correspondence. A letter to Miss Jephson, July
23, 1834, gives her first impression of him:--

“I also liked very much Mr. Willis, an American author, whose
‘Unwritten Poetry’ and ‘Unwritten Philosophy’ you may remember in my
American book,[2] and who is now understood to be here to publish
his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, and more
like one of the best of our peers’ sons than a rough republican.”

The generally agreeable impression which Willis made in English society
was not without its exceptions. During this same summer in London he had
been taken by a friend to see Miss Harriet Martineau. She was then on the
point of embarking for that trip in America, her very outspoken narrative
of which afterwards caused so many heart-burnings in this country. Her
vinegary reminiscences of Willis, as recorded in her autobiography, though
rather long, are perhaps worth reproducing here, not only for their
liveliness, but because any contemporary impression, however unjust and
mistaken, helps to fill out a complete picture of the man, and there were
plenty of people who disliked Willis cordially.

“I encountered,” she says, “one specimen of American oddity before I
left home, which should certainly have lessened my surprise at any
that I met afterwards. While I was preparing for my travels, an
acquaintance one day brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced
to me under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging
in the round face, brisk air, and _enjouement_ of the young man; but
his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the
satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh. Mr. N.
P. Willis’s plea for coming to see me was his gratification that I
was going to America, and his real reason was presently apparent: a
desire to increase his consequence in London society by giving
apparent proof that he was on intimate terms with every eminent
person in America. He placed himself in an attitude of infinite
ease, and whipped his little bright boot with a little bright cane,
while he ran over the names of all his distinguished countrymen and
countrywomen, and declared he should send me letters to them all.
This offer of intervention went so very far that I said (what I have
ever since said in the case of introductions offered by strangers),
while thanking him for his intended good offices, that I was
sufficiently uncertain in my plans to beg for excuse beforehand, in
case I should find myself unable to use the letters. It appeared
afterwards that to supply them and not to have them used suited Mr.
Willis’s convenience exactly. It made him appear to have the
friendships he boasted of without putting the boast to the proof. It
was immediately before a late dinner that the gentleman called; and
I found on the breakfast-table next morning a great parcel of Mr.
Willis’s letters, inclosed in a prodigious one to myself, in which
he offered advice. Among other things, he desired me not to use his
letter to Dr. Channing if I had others from persons more intimate
with him; and he proceeded to warn me against two friends of Dr. and
Mrs. Channing’s, whose names I had never heard and whom Mr. Willis
represented as bad and dangerous people. This gratuitous defamation
of strangers whom I was likely to meet confirmed the suspicions my
mother and I had confided to each other about the quality of Mr.
Willis’s introductions. It seemed ungrateful to be so suspicious:
but we could not see any good reason for such prodigious efforts on
my behalf, nor for his naming any countrywomen of his to me in a way
so spontaneously slanderous. So I resolved to use that packet of
letters very cautiously, and to begin with one which should be well
accompanied. In New York harbor newspapers were brought on board, in
one of which was an extract from an article transmitted by Mr.
Willis to the ‘New York Mirror,’ containing a most audacious account
of me as an intimate friend of the writer. The friendship was not
stated as a matter of fact, but so conveyed that it cost me much
trouble to make it understood and believed, even by Mr. Willis’s own
family, that I had never seen him but once, and then without having
previously heard so much as his name. On my return the acquaintance
who brought him was anxious to ask pardon if he had done mischief,
events having by that time made Mr. Willis’s ways pretty well known.
His partner in the property and editorship of the ‘New York Mirror’
called on me at West Point, and offered and rendered such
extraordinary courtesy that I was at first almost as much perplexed
as he and his wife were when they learned that I had never seen Mr.
Willis but once. They pondered, they consulted, they
cross-questioned me, they inquired whether _I_ had any notion what
Mr. Willis could have meant by writing of me as in a state of close
intimacy with him. In like manner, when, some time after, I was in a
carriage with some members of a picnic party to Monument Mountain, a
little girl seated at my feet clasped my knees fondly, looked up in
my face, and said, ‘O Miss Martineau! You are _such_ a friend of my
Uncle Nathaniel’s!’ Her father was present; and I tried to get off
without explanation. But it was impossible,--they all knew how very
intimate I was with Nathaniel; and there was a renewal of the
amazement at my having seen him only once. I tried three of his
letters; and the reception was in each case much the same,--a
throwing down of the letter with an air not to be mistaken. In each
case the reply was the same, when I subsequently found myself at
liberty to ask what this might mean. ‘Mr. Willis is not entitled to
write to me: he is no acquaintance of mine.’ As for the two ladies
of whom I was especially to beware, I became exceedingly well
acquainted with them, to my own advantage and pleasure; and, as a
natural consequence, I discovered Mr. Willis’s reasons for desiring
to keep us apart. I hardly need add that I burned the rest of his
letters. He had better have spared himself the trouble of so much
manœuvring, by which he lost a good deal, and could hardly have
gained anything. I have simply stated the facts, because, in the
first place, I do not wish to be considered one of Mr. Willis’s
friends; and, in the next, it may be useful, and conducive to
justice, to show, by a practical instance, what Mr. Willis’s
pretensions to intimacy are worth. His countrymen and countrywomen
accept, in simplicity, his accounts of our aristocracy as from the
pen of one of their own coterie; and they may as well have the
opportunity of judging for themselves whether their notorious
‘Penciller’ is qualified to write of Scotch dukes and English
marquises and European celebrities of all kinds in the way he has
done.”

The simple American reader will have a chance to make up his mind, on
independent evidence, of how far Willis was qualified to write of Scotch
dukes, etc.; but meanwhile it is not true that the audacious article in
the “Mirror” of September 6, 1834 (which was not an “article,” by the way,
but an extract from a private letter to Morris), conveyed any implication
of an intimacy between Willis and Miss Martineau. On the contrary, it
expressly says that his acquaintance with the lady was of only one day’s
standing.

“I was taken yesterday,” it begins, “by the clever translator of
‘Faust’ to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at
this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and
is the only one of the literary _clique_ whose name is mentioned
without some envious qualification.”

After some entirely respectful mention of her manner and appearance, the
letter then goes on to say:--

“There is no necessity of bespeaking for so distinguished a visitor
as Miss Martineau the warmest attentions of our country. She goes
with high anticipations, and whatever she may find to object to in
our society and institutions, it will be done, there cannot be a
doubt, in a spirit of womanly and simple candor. She is sped on her
way by the best wishes of the best hearts in England. I trust she
will be met over there by wishes and welcomes as warm and as many.”

Any one who knew Willis would have felt sure that his “prodigious efforts”
on Miss Martineau’s behalf sprang from his always good-natured and
sometimes even officious eagerness to be of service. And most who knew him
would probably have admitted that there was some mixture of a “desire to
increase his consequence” in his offer of introductions. Motives are
usually mixed in this bad world and Willis was seldom indifferent to
opportunities for ingratiating himself with people worth knowing. But even
so, it would have been more gracious in the lady if, after accepting his
offers and the attentions of his partner at West Point, she had taken his
professions for what they were worth, and omitted this spiteful mention of
him in her book. Had he lived to read the passage, he would probably have
consoled himself with the reflection that it was better to win smiles from
beauty than approbation from a strong-minded Unitarian female with an
ear-trumpet, or, as he politely paraphrased it in his letter to Morris, a
“pliable, acoustic tube.”

The last fortnight in August he was ill of a bilious fever, during which
his new friends proved very kind. Lady Blessington called daily in her
carriage at his lodgings (over the shop of a baker, who gratified Willis
by being overwhelmed at her ladyship’s condescension), and Dr. William
Beattie, the king’s physician, attended his interesting patient devotedly
and refused to take any fee. This excellent gentleman, who was the
anonymous author of “Heliotrope” and a prolific contributor to the
Annuals, became a firm friend of Willis and his correspondent for many
years after his return to America. He was an intimate of Samuel Rogers and
of Thomas Campbell, whose life he afterwards wrote, and he introduced
Willis to both of them.

By September the latter was sufficiently convalescent to be ordered into
the country. He had received an invitation from the Earl of Dalhousie,
whom he had met in Italy, to make him a visit at Dalhousie Castle, near
Edinburgh, and accordingly he set out for Scotland on the second of the
month. Lady Charlotte Bury, a “scribbling woman,” had given him a letter
to her brother, the Duke of Argyle, and he carried a score beside to other
people in Scotland. At Dalhousie, the feudal castle of the Ramsays, nobly
situated on a branch of the Esk, Willis was heartily welcomed, and passed
a most agreeable fortnight. The earl had been governor of the Canadas in
1831; Lady Dalhousie was an invalid, and both of them were quiet, domestic
people, kindly and simple, living with the profuse and even splendid
hospitality proper to their rank, but without ostentation of fashion or
gayety. The house was full of guests, among them the countess’s niece,
Lady Moncrieff, a lovely widow of twenty-five, who was very polite to
Willis during his next winter in London. The earl’s son, Lord Ramsay, was
home from Oxford and initiated Willis into the mysteries of shooting over
the stubble. This young gentleman succeeded to his father’s title in 1838,
was a member of Sir Robert Peel’s ministry from 1843 to 1847, and in the
latter year was made Governor-General of India. It was during his
viceroyalty that the Burmese war was fought, the Punjaub annexed, and the
railway begun from Calcutta to Bombay.

After leaving Dalhousie, Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he
breakfasted with Professor Wilson, dined with Jeffrey, and danced till
three o’clock in the morning at the Whig ball given in honor of Lord Grey.
An attack of scrofula in his left leg, which he chose to describe in his
correspondence with his English friends as “gout,” was aggravated by this
last dissipation, and after two or three days more of poultices and
plasters at Edinburgh, he took steamer to Aberdeen. “The loss of a wedding
in Perthshire, by the way, a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol,
and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinvara (long standing
engagements all), I lay at the door of the Whigs.” He was laid up four
days at Aberdeen, but finally recovered so far as to take coach seventy
miles across country to Lochabers, a small town on the estates of the Duke
of Gordon, to whom he brought a letter from Dalhousie. At Gordon Castle he
found a distinguished company and passed ten days of unmixed enjoyment.
There were thirty guests, among whom were Lord Aberdeen, who had been
foreign secretary under Wellington; his son, Lord Claude Hamilton, a
handsome young Cantab, who invited Willis to visit him at the university
for a day’s hunt; Lord Aberdeen’s daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton,
“eighteen and brilliantly beautiful;” Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord
Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, the Duchess of Richmond and her
daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, “the palest, proudest, and most high-born
looking woman I ever saw.” This Lady Sophia Lennox was probably the
original of Mildred Ashly, the disdainful beauty in “Paul Fane.” She seems
to have impressed Willis as the type and embodiment of English
aristocracy. In a letter to Lady Blessington, written from Gordon Castle
and printed in Madden’s “Life of Lady Blessington,” he says, “There is a
Lady Something, very pale, tall and haughty, twenty-three and sarcastic,
whom I sat next at dinner yesterday,--a woman I came as near an antipathy
for as is possible, with a very handsome face for an apology.” The same
letter gives his opinion of his host and hostess more unreservedly than he
could venture to do in “Pencillings.” The duke he describes as “a
delightful, hearty old fellow full of fun and conversation.” Willis’s
letters from Gordon Castle were perhaps more criticised than any other
part of his “Pencillings” for their alleged violation of the sanctities of
private life. They are, nevertheless, among the very best passages in his
correspondence and, taken together, they present a brilliant picture of
what is, doubtless, so far as material conditions go, the most perfect
life lived by man; the life, namely, of a chosen party of guests, in late
September, at the country seat of a great British noble.

From this pleasant province in the land of Cockayne, Willis departed
toward the last of the month and, after a tour of the Highlands, returned
October 6th to Dalhousie, where he passed a few days more and then set out
for England. He had meant, on his way back to London, to call upon
Wordsworth and Surrey, having letters to both of them, and to pass some
days by appointment with Miss Mitford at Reading. But continued trouble
with his ankle altered his plans, and, after spending a few weeks at the
country house of a friend in Lancashire--whose acquaintance he had made
in Italy--and of another in Cheshire, he returned hastily to London by way
of Liverpool and Manchester, and on the 1st of November took up his
quarters there for the winter. At this stage of his journeyings
“Pencilling by the Way” come to an end. A number of supplementary letters
descriptive of London life, of the Isle of Wight, of Stratford-upon-Avon,
Charlecote, Kenilworth, Warwick Castle, etc., were published at irregular
intervals in the “Mirror” under the general heading “Loiterings of
Travel.” With letters from Washington and the paper on “The Four Rivers,”
they make up the “Sketches of Travel” in their author’s collected works.

CHAPTER V.

1834-1836.

LIFE ABROAD (CONTINUED).

Willis took lodgings at No. 2 Vigo Street. During the next ten months,
which he spent in London and its vicinity, he found himself something of a
lion. His articles in the English magazines had begun to be talked about
in the clubs, and society people who had known him abroad or in London
only as a dandy _attaché_ were surprised to learn that “that nice,
agreeable Mr. Willis” was identical with “Slingsby,” the brilliant
American _raconteur_ of the “New Monthly.” He had contributed in the
summer and autumn of 1834 a number of sketches--“By a Here and
Thereian”--to the “Court Magazine:” “Love and Diplomacy,” “Niagara and So
On;” to Captain Marryat’s “Metropolitan:” an episode of Italian travel,
“The Madhouse of Palermo;” and to Colburn’s “New Monthly:” “Incidents on
the Hudson,” “Tom Fane and I,” “Pedlar Karl,” “The Lunatic,” and “My
Hobby--Rather” (the same as “The Mad Senior” in “Scenes of Fear”). The
_nom de plume_ of Philip Slingsby he borrowed from the luckless wanderer
in Irving’s “Sketch-Book.” He followed these up during 1835-36 with “F.
Smith,” “Love in the Library” (“Edith Linsey”), “The Gypsy of Sardis,”
“The Cherokee’s Threat,” “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” and “Larks in
Vacation.” For his “Slingsby” papers Willis got double pay: Colburn gave
him a guinea a page, and Morris, in his contract with whom he had reserved
the right to print twelve sketches a year in the English magazines,
published them simultaneously in the “Mirror,” and paid for them at the
same rate as for original articles. They were forwarded to him in
proof-sheets or in duplicate MSS., so as to arrive in advance of the
English periodicals, which sometimes, however, reached America first,
because of the uncertainties of the mail-carriage by sailing packet. To
the “New Monthly” Willis also contributed a number of short poems,
“Thoughts in a Balcony at Daybreak,” “The Absent,” “Chamber Scene,” and
“To ----” (“Were I a star,” etc.). He wrote for it after his return to
America and after it was united with “The Humorist” in 1837, under the
editorship of Theodore Hook. His last contribution to it was “The Picker
and Piler,” in the April number for 1839.

Lady Blessington’s kindness continued after his return to London, and he
was taken up by other fashionable bluestockings, dined and wined, fêted
and caressed to a degree that may well have made him giddy. The two rival
_salons_ to Lady Blessington’s were Holland House and the residence of the
Dowager Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. It does not appear that
Willis was invited to the former, but he went to the reunions at
Charleville House, though not so constantly as to Seamore Place. Through
Lady Blessington’s influence he was admitted to the Travellers’ Club,
which was the resort of the ultra fashionable; and, on Sir George
Staunton’s nomination, to the Athenæum, which had more of a literary tinge
than the Alfred or the Travellers’. Sir George Staunton also presented him
at court, a favor which Mr. Vail, the American minister, who disliked
Willis for some reason, had declined to render. Another friend gave him a
perpetual ticket to the opera. Among his patronesses were the Countess of
Arundel and Lady Stepney, who wrote bad novels but gave good dinners. Lady
Blessington’s biographer, Madden, who saw a great deal of him in those
days, has recorded his recollections of him as follows:--

“I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Willis on many occasions at Gore
House, to which reference is made in the rather too celebrated
‘Pencillings by the Way,’ and also at the _soirées_ of the late Lady
Charleville in Cavendish Square. Mr. Willis was an extremely
agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little
too _demonstratif_, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing
reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence
there for some time as _attaché_ to a foreign legation. He was
observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation,
having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old
as well as young, _dégagé_ in his manner, and on exceedingly good
terms with himself and with the _élite_ of the best society,
wherever he went.”

The secret of Willis’s agreeableness to ladies lay in his unfailing
deference. It is extraordinary how many women much older than himself
cherished a warm affection for him. He had considered the meaning of
Bacon’s saying, “No Youth can be comely, but by Pardon,” and several of
his stories are studies on the thesis that there is a beauty in age which
may inspire passion. One in particular, not found among his collected
writings, deals with this speculation: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” published in “The
Ladies’ Companion” of December, 1842, where the hero falls violently in
love with a woman of sixty, to whose niece the family expected him to pay
his court.

Willis saw more “life” in London than was quite good for him, and went
into companies which were less select than the Gore House coterie,
although, to say truth, Lady Blessington herself was looked upon by “the
best people” as a trifle off color. Her house was frequented by men who
were entirely irreproachable, but the English ladies were shy of visiting
there. This was due mainly to her rather unusual relations with the Count
d’Orsay. In obedience to the wishes of the Earl of Blessington, his
daughter by a former marriage had been compelled to wed the count under
penalty of forfeiting her inheritance. The poor girl reluctantly espoused
the brilliant stranger provided for her by her father’s eccentric caprice;
but the match was unhappy, and was almost immediately followed by a
separation; notwithstanding which, D’Orsay continued to live in the
closest intimacy with his wife’s stepmother after the earl’s death, and in
time under the same roof with her. This last arrangement, which was, to
say the least, odd, and caused much scandal in British society, had not,
however, gone into effect when Willis first came to London. Lady
Blessington had not as yet moved to Gore House, but was living in Seamore
Place, while D’Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Nor did the latter’s
formal separation from his wife take place till 1838. Another intimate
friend of Willis in London was that very unconventional, not to say rapid,
woman, Lady Dudley Stuart, the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, “a lady of
remarkably small person, with the fairest foot ever seen,” under whose
bonnet “burn the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever
hid from the world.” She had about her a semi-foreign society, not without
its fascinations, of artists, actors, opera-singers, refugee nobles, and
adventurers of more or less shady antecedents. In his “Sketches of Travel”
Willis described a very free and easy supper party, following a private
concert given by Lady Antrobus, at which he and Lady Dudley Stuart
assisted, together with Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and other members of the
Italian opera troupe then in London. Of course neither Lady Antrobus nor
Lady Stuart was mentioned by name in this account.

But Willis’s acquaintance was by no means confined to the Blessington set,
or to the Bohemian circle that surrounded Lady Dudley Stuart, but included
many families of unquestioned position. The Ramsays, for instance, were
solid people, above any suspicion of queerness, and the earl’s niece, Lady
Moncrieff, whom Willis visited in London, was decidedly “evangelical.”
There were two households in particular which were like homes to him
during the last year and more of his stay in England. These were Shirley
Park, near Croydon in Surrey, the residence of the Skinner family, and the
Manor House of the Shaws at Lee, in Kent, only a ten miles’ drive across
country from Shirley Park. The Hon. Mrs. Fanny Shaw was a daughter to Lord
Erskine and a sworn friend of Willis. Mrs. Mary Skinner was wife to an
Indian nabob, a leader of fashion, and a woman of intellectual tastes, who
patronized letters and entertained literary people, a kind of Mrs. Leo
Hunter, in short. Willis was introduced to her at Lady Simpkins’s by Sir
John Franklin, in February, 1835, and met her again at a dinner given by
Longman, the publisher, at Hampstead, where were present, among others,
Moore, Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and Miss Pardoe. The last was a very
pretty woman, author of “Beauties of the Bosphorus,” and other books more
remarkable for their sumptuous illustrations than for their literary
quality. She was a poetess, too, after her fashion, and once addressed a
tribute in verse “To the Author of Melanie,” which was printed in the
“Mirror” of October 17, 1835. Both Mrs. Shaw and Mrs. Skinner treated
their young guest with the most delicate and considerate kindness. They
made him offers of pecuniary help, of which, fortunately, he had no need
to avail himself, as his letters to the “Mirror” and his “New Monthly”
stories (which added fifteen or twenty guineas a month to his “poor two
hundred a year”) brought him in returns which were ample for his
occasions. The Skinners had a town house in Portland Place, and their
carriage in London was always at Willis’s service. Both of these ladies
regarded him as a son or a younger brother. Bruce Skinner, a son of
Willis’s hostess, named one of his children after him. At Shirley Park and
at the Shaws’ he met a number of very charming people, and his time there
was spent in drives, lawn-parties, etc. In the library at Shirley Park two
nieces of Walter Scott, the Misses Swinton, copied for him “Melanie” and
“Love in the Library,” which he was preparing for the press. An extract
from a very confidential letter from Willis to Mrs. Skinner may be worth
transcribing, to show the terms of frank and cordial familiarity on which
he lived with these excellent people. After a brief history of his life
and a statement of his financial situation, the letter concludes as
follows:--

“There is a passage in your note which pleased me. You say if you
had a daughter you would give her to me. If you _had_ one I
certainly would take you at your word, provided this _exposé_ of my
poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in
England, and I feel every day (more and more) that my best years
and best affections are running to waste. I am proud to _be_ an
American, but as a literary man, I would rather live in England. So
if you know any affectionate and _good_ girl who would be content to
live rather a quiet life, and could love your humble servant, you
have full power of attorney to dispose of me, _provided_ she has
_five hundred_ a year, or as much more as she likes. I know enough
of the world to cut my throat sooner than bring a delicate woman
down to a dependence on my brains for support, though in a case of
exigency I could always retreat to America, and live comfortably by
my labors. Meantime I am the only sufferer by my poverty, and am
_not_ poor, for no man is so who lives upon his income.
_Comprends-tu?_ My dear friend, I have told you what I have told no
other person in the world. Most men and women would think it
incredible that an _attaché_ to a legation could keep up appearances
on two hundred a year, or pity him if he could; and I never thought
anybody worth the confidence--save only yourself. I would tell Miss
Porter just the same, or Mr. Swinton, but who else? No one! so
_gardez cela_!

“I enjoyed the ball at the Ravenshaws’ exceedingly, and am so much
obliged to you for introducing me to Praed, whom I like.”

“I have one or two homes in England,” wrote Willis to his mother,
July 22, 1835, “where I am loved like a child. I had a letter the
other day from Honorable Mrs. Shaw, who fancied I looked
low-spirited at the opera. ‘Young men have but two causes of
unhappiness,’ she says, ‘_love_ and _money_. If it is money, Mr.
Shaw wishes me to say, you shall have as much as you want; if it is
_love_, tell us the lady, and perhaps we can help you.’ Where could
be kinder friends? I spend my Sundays alternately at their splendid
country house and Mrs. Skinner’s, and they never can get enough of
me. I have a room always kept for me at both places, and there is
universal rejoicing when I come and mourning when I go. I am often
asked whether I carry a love philter with me; yet with all the
uncommon honors and favors shown me in England, I assure you I never
asked or made interest directly or indirectly for any acquaintance
or any favor since I landed at Dover. _What has come_ has come of
its own accord.”

Miss Porter and Miss Pardoe were both domesticated at Shirley Park, and he
met there at different times, as fellow guests, Lady Franklin, Lady Sidney
Morgan, author of once popular French and Italian travels, and the
brilliant young orator, poet, and wit, Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Of the
latter Willis wrote in the “Home Journal” many years later: “We were
followers together in the train of the admired belle (a visitor under the
same hospitable roof) whom I afterward brought home with me to Glenmary.”
Willis attributed to his religious poetry the honor of his first
acquaintance with Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and the Byrons. For the
authoress of “The Scottish Chiefs,” especially, he formed an enduring
attachment, and she regarded him with an almost motherly affection. A
lifelong correspondence was kept up between them, and at the death of
Admiral Robert Ker Porter at St. Petersburg in 1842, among the MSS. found
in his sea-chests were ninety letters from Willis to his sister. The
letters from Miss Porter, among Willis’s private papers, show that she was
an equally indefatigable, through a not very legible correspondent. Willis
encountered Ada Byron at an evening party in London, and thought her
“earnest and sweet.” Lady Byron, who was a Unitarian, was much interested
by the spirited sketch of Dr. Channing in a series of papers on American
literature which Willis had contributed to the “Athenæum,” and she
expressed her favorable opinion of them in a letter to Miss Baillie, as
also her pleasure that her daughter had made the author’s acquaintance.
Miss Baillie gave this note to Willis for his autograph book. Byron’s
sister, Augusta Leigh, he also met in London society. She gave him an
autograph letter of Byron, and on the appearance of “Melanie and Other
Poems,” in March 1835, he sent her a copy, and received an acknowledgment
in which she said that the book contained “some of the most touching and
exquisite lines I ever read.” The venerable Joanna Baillie wrote him, on
the same occasion, a letter filled with the most graceful compliments.

Among other London acquaintances of Willis’s at this time were John Leech,
the artist, and Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, who
afterwards visited him in America. A few extracts from a manuscript diary
irregularly kept by Willis from June, 1835, to March, 1836, will serve to
show the nature of his daily engagements and occupations:--

“June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of
Philadelphia, and Corbin, _ditto_. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and
Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that
‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure you possessed
_substance_.’ Coleridge said of Southey: ‘I never think of him but
as mending a pen.’ Southey said of Coleridge: ‘Whenever anything
presents itself to him in the shape of a duty, that moment he finds
himself incapable of looking at it.’

“Went to the opera with Hon. Mrs. Shaw and heard Grisi in ‘I
Puritani,’ and saw Taglioni: both divine. Visited Lady Blessington’s
box and Lady Vincent.

“After to a party at Mrs. Leicester Stanhope’s. Saw Guiccioli, and
was stuffed to the eyelids by Lady Mary Shepard about my shorter and
scriptural poems.

“July 1. Mrs. Skinner drove Jane Porter and myself to Harrow to hear
the speeches.…

“In the evening to a party at Lady Cork’s, and after to Lady
Vincent’s _soirée_.”

Lady Cork was the aged but still beautiful Dowager Countess of Cork and
Derry; who in her youth, as Miss Moncton, had been a favorite of Dr.
Johnson, and whose _soirées_ in New Burlington Street, between 1820 and
1840, were crowded with talent and fashion.

“2. Sat to Rand for my picture. Went to Lady Dundonald’s _fête
champêtre_ at her beautiful villa in Regent’s Park. D’Orsay and all
the world there.

“3. Dined with Tyndale and Greenfield at the Wyndham Club. Took tea
with Jane Porter and went to a ball at the Longmans’, Hampstead.

“4. Went to Lee on a visit to Hon. Mrs. Shaw.

“5. Drove to Lady Hislop’s to tea.

“6. Duke de Regina, Vail, Gen. and Mrs. Talmadge dined with the
Shaws.

“7. Returned to town. Dined with Mrs. Channon. Lady D. Stuart,
Counts Battaglia, Vodiski, De Grognon, and Miss Cockaine present.
Came home ill.

“8. Dined with Mrs. S., and went to Lady Dudley Stuart’s _soirée_.

“9. Dined with Dr. Beattie and met Thomas Campbell. Praised my
poetry to the skies and quoted from ‘Melanie,’--

‘She died
With her last sunshine in her eyes.’

Spoke of Scott’s slavishness to men of rank, and after said it did
not interfere with his genius. Said it sank a man’s heart to think
he and Byron were dead and there was nobody left to praise or
approve. Why should he write now? Told story of the man at the deaf
and dumb who did not know him as a poet. Abused the nobility
bitterly. Said they were ungrateful, and thought they honored you by
receiving a favor from you. Said he was sorry for his vindication of
Lady Byron. Story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend who, when
C. proposed the health of _Mr._ Burns, said, ‘Sir, you will always
be known as _Mr._ Campbell, but posterity will talk of _Burns_.’ He
was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water. Went after in
uniform to the grand Coliseum ball. Seven thousand people present.

“10. Grand review in Hyde Park. Went to a _déjeuner_ at Mrs. Wyndham
Lewis’s on the Park. Talked to Miss Caton and the Duchess of St.
Albans. Music after the review. Malibran sang.

“Received a congratulatory letter from Edward Everett.

“Party at Mrs. F.’s, Lady Franklin’s sister. Stupid.

“11. Went to the Duchess St. Albans’s _fête_ at Holly Lodge. The
duke flew a falcon and killed a pigeon. Fireworks, dinner in a tent,
dancing, singing, etc., etc., there. Mrs. Marjoribanks brought me
home.”

This _fête_ furnished some items for Willis’s story of “Lady Ravelgold.”

“12. Dined with Mrs. Joanna Baillie at Hampstead. She gave me some
of the wedding cake of Ada Byron. Said that her husband, Lord King,
was hated by his own father and mother and often in want of money,
but an excellent person and beloved by his own second brother, who
had received from the father all that was not entailed. On the death
of the father, Lord K. had nine thousand a year. Mrs. Baillie said
that Lady Byron had given to the present Lord B. her whole jointure
when he came to the title.

“Went to Lady Blessington at ten, and had a long talk with Countess
Guiccioli, who said she wished nevermore to be spoken of in good or
ill. The evil was remembered and the good forgotten. She made a
point of never reading the papers.

“Thence to Charles Kemble’s _soirée_. Countess d’Orsay there.”

And thus the journal proceeds with its daily count of dinners, balls,
_soirées_, garden parties, and opera-going, the diarist finally recording
himself as “fatigued to death with dinners and dissipations.” In fact the
pace began to tell upon him. Following the last entry that I have copied
here, for July 12th, comes the first draft of a poem, “Thoughts on the
Balcony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid Ball:”

“Morn in the East! How coldly fair
It breaks upon my fevered eye!
How chides the calm and dewy air;
How chides the pure and pearly sky!
The stars melt in a brighter fire,--
The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,--
They from their watch in light retire,
While we in sadness pass from ours.”

This is one of Willis’s most genuine utterances. The same revulsion of
feeling is expressed in “Better Moments” and “She was not There.” There
were two men in him, the worldling and the poet; and when worn with
fashionable dissipation he was sensitive to the rebuke of the midnight
heaven or of that “awful rose of dawn” which God makes for himself in the
“Vision of Sin.” But the mood, though sincere, was not lasting. “Recovered
my spirits,” runs the entry for July 15th, “after a causeless depression
for a week.”

Toward the end of July he escaped to the country and “passed a month at
Shirley Park and the Manor, Lee, alternately reading and lying on the
grass in delightful idleness, with the kindest friends and the greatest
contentment.” At Shirley Park there were archery _fêtes_, the
Archbishopess of Canterbury, “lords and ladies in abundance, and poets and
travelers _ad libitum_. It is midsummer,” continues the letter from which
I quote (August 5th), “in cool and breezy England, five o’clock in the
afternoon, and a beautiful day. The house is in the middle of a park
(nothing but grass and trees) as large as the Common in Boston, the soft
velvet greensward closely shaven all around the house, and a lovely
archery ground on the edge of the lake just beneath my window, with red
and gold targets, and a dozen young girls and beaux with beautiful bows
and quivers shooting with all the merriment conceivable. There is a
beautiful daughter of Sir Henry Brydges beating everybody, and my friend
Mrs. Shaw, and Lady Encombe, and quantities of nice people.”

At Shirley Park he had a letter from Jane Porter, inclosing an invitation
to him from Sir Charles Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman in
Warwickshire, at whose country seat she was staying. Willis joined her
there on September 10th, but meanwhile something else of great importance
to him had happened. While visiting at the Skinners’ he had met his fate
in the person of Miss Mary Stace, a daughter of General William Stace of
Woolwich. He saw her first at a picnic on the grounds of Lord Londonderry,
at North Cray, and “thought her the loveliest girl he had ever seen.” At
Shirley Park--whither she came as a guest--he was thrown much in her
company, and after a week’s acquaintance made her a proposal of marriage,
and was accepted. On the 1st of September he went to Woolwich on a visit
to the Staces, and in the course of a day or two asked the general for his
daughter’s hand. It was agreed that the engagement should be short, like
the courtship, and that the wedding should come off on the 1st of
October. Mary Stace, who became Mrs. Willis on the day fixed, was a girl
of uncommon beauty and sweetness. In appearance she was of the purest
Saxon type, a blonde, with bright color, blue eyes, light brown hair, and
delicate, regular features. She had a gentle, clinging, affectionate
disposition, adored her husband, had been religiously and carefully
educated, and possessed the true Englishwoman’s sense of the importance of
the male sex and the due subordination of woman. Her family were most
worthy and substantial people, and strictly evangelical. General Stace was
the Royal Ordnance Storekeeper at Woolwich Arsenal. He had been commissary
to the British navy in Egypt, and commissary of ordnance at the battle of
Waterloo, and had been rewarded for gallant service in that famous action.
He gave Willis, as a souvenir, a military cloak and an eagle clasp taken
from the body of a French officer after the battle, which are still
preserved in the family. His son-in-law described him as honest, hearty,
and plain-spoken, with the common soldierly weakness for telling
post-prandial stories of his campaigns. Mrs. Stace was Irish, a great
singer, and a friend of Tom Moore, who used to listen to her songs by the
hour. There were five other children besides Mary. Two of the sons were
in the army, and afterwards there were three Colonels Stace. The general
agreed to give his daughter £300 a year, which, with the £300 or £400
which Willis counted upon making by literary work, would do, wrote the
latter to Mrs. Skinner, for a poet. Having completed the arrangements for
his marriage, he set out from London, September 10th, by the Tantivy coach
for Sir Charles Throckmorton’s seat of Coughton Court. This was a fine old
Elizabethan mansion near Alcester, and Willis spent ten days there very
agreeably, visiting, in company with Miss Porter and his host, Warwick
Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford, and other points of interest in the
neighborhood. Of these jaunts an ample narrative is given in “Sketches of
Travel,” originally communicated to the “Mirror.” Thence he returned to
Woolwich, receiving on his departure an invitation from the hospitable
baronet to bring his wife and stay a fortnight with him. At Woolwich he
was again joined by Miss Porter, on the 25th, who came for a week’s visit
to the Staces and to be present at the wedding. From Coughton Court the
expectant groom had written to his friends announcing his engagement, and
received in reply many expressions of good wishes. Among others, Lady
Blessington wrote as follows:--

ANGLESEY-NEAR-GOSPORT, _September 19, 1835_.

MY DEAR MR. WILLIS,--Yours of the 16th has been forwarded to me
here, and I lose not an hour in replying to it. I congratulate you
with my whole heart on your approaching marriage, and wish you all
the happiness you so well deserve, and which a marriage well
assorted will alone bestow. I predict the happiness I wish you, for
you would not, I am sure, make an unworthy choice, and the distaste
which the scenes you have gone through during the last year must
have engendered in your mind will have taught you still more highly
to appreciate the society and affection of a pure-minded and amiable
woman, on whom your future happiness will depend. I think you have
acted most wisely, and am sure that the rational plans you have laid
down will insure your felicity. A residence _near_ London, which
gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages,
without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its
dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a
literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you
at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a
Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you
than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of
fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so
many months. A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a
circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his
sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded,
have reason to bless the gentle and benign influence that has
attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic
life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your
immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your
welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof
in my power shall ever be wanting. I shall be in London on the 22d,
and shall have great pleasure in seeing you. Your secret shall be
safe with me, you may be sure. I hope the little tale will be sent
for your correction in a day or two. Pray have “Ion” left at my
house. Mr. Talfourd requested that it might not leave my possession,
so that in lending it to you I disobeyed his request.

The old Earl of Dalhousie wrote a letter of hearty congratulation.

“Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as
being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please
God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be
truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.”

His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s
groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and
asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some
three weeks after the wedding:--

YESTER, _October 23, 1835_.

I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, at
_Niagara_, and to have descended from that to Woolwich would have
been a sad _bathos_, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice
was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you
before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a
distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we
proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you
on the prose reality.

I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank
to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you
frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the
porter with a “_non est inventus_” written on it. This to save my
character.

Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, so
_contagious_, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be
married, and as this is _not_ a lady’s letter, it will be as well
not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the
postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If
I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a
situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I
will take mercy even on you. I am happy,--happy now, and if I am not
happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my
own fault.

When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in
Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations.

May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis,
and believe me

Ever yours sincerely,

RAMSAY.

Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:--

“Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,--natural,
so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile.
She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will
make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no
heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere.
You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able
that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.”

In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis
insisted a good deal on this point of his _fiancée’s_ religiousness, and
he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of
the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing--in
woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their
understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and
which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed
rake makes the best husband.

“I should never have wished to marry you,” he wrote to his
betrothed, about a fortnight before the wedding, “if you had not
been religious, for I have confidence in no woman who is not so. I
only think there is sometimes an excess in the ostentation of
religious sanctity, and of that I have a dread, as you have
yourself, no doubt. Miss Porter,” he adds, “is sincere and _refined_
as few professedly religious people are.”

In another letter he says:--

“Mine is not a love such as I have fancied and written about. It is
more sober, more mingled with esteem and respect, and more fitted
for every-day life. It had well need be, indeed, for I have taken it
in lieu of what has hitherto been the principal occupation of my
life. I am to live for you, dear Mary, and you for me,--if you like!
That is to say, henceforth dissipation (if we indulge in it) will be
_your_ pleasure, not mine. I have lived the last ten years in gay
society, and I am sick at heart of it. I want an apology to try
something else. I am made for something better, and I feel sincerely
that this is the turning-point of both mind and heart, both of which
are injured in their best qualities with the kind of life I have
been leading. Do not understand me that I am to make a hermit of
myself, however, or a prisoner of you. You will have always friends
enough, and society enough, and change of place and scene enough. In
short, I shall exact but one thing,--four or five hours in my study
in the morning, and you may do what you like with the rest.”

They were married in Plumstead Church, by the Rev. Mr. Shackleton, on the
1st of October. “It was a kind of April day,” writes Willis, “half
sunshine, half rain,”--recalling, somehow, the coincidence in Julia
Mills’s diary between the checker-board tavern-sign and checkered human
existence on a similar occasion in David Copperfield’s life,--“but
everybody was kind, the villagers strewed flowers in the way, the church
was half full of people, and my heart and eyes were more than full of
tears.” The bridal pair were driven in Mr. Stace’s carriage to Rochester,
posted next day to Dover, and crossed the Channel on the 3d. They passed a
fortnight at the Hôtel Castiglione in Paris, and then returned to England,
where they spent the winter, partly in London and partly at Woolwich, and
in visits to the Shaws, Skinners, and other friends. Willis was busy in
getting out the first and second English editions of “Pencillings” and the
“Inklings of Adventure.” He presented his bride to his “swell”
acquaintances in London, and was himself introduced by his brothers-in-law
to numbers of military people, dined at the Artillery Mess, and was given
the freedom of the Army and Navy Club. He set up an “establishment,” a
cabriolet and a gray cab-horse, “tall, showy, and magnificent.” He had
taken into service a young fellow named William Michell, the son of his
landlady, a bright and handsome lad, who now made a very presentable
tiger. William went to America with his master in the spring, remained in
his service during his residence at Glenmary, and came back with him, in
1839, to England, where he ultimately got employment as a machinist,
having a good education and a knack at mechanics.

In May, 1836, after many leave-takings, Willis sailed with his wife for
America. His “Lines on Leaving Europe,”--

“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”--

dated in the English Channel, express the feelings at once of regret and
of hope with which he set his face homeward after an absence of four years
and a half. These spirited lines are among the very few poems of Willis
which seem destined to last. They have the real lyrical impulse, and it is
not easy to read them without emotion. Emerson, who gives part of the poem
in “Parnassus,” omits the closing stanza, in which the poet touchingly
bespeaks a welcome for his English bride.

“Room in thy heart! The hearth she left
Is darkened to lend light to ours.
There are bright flowers of care bereft,
And hearts--that languish more than flowers.
She was their light--their very air;
Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”

Willis published three books while in England. “Melanie and Other Poems”
appeared March 31, 1835. It was divided into three parts and included a
selection from the three volumes of verse published in America, but
unfamiliar to the British public, besides some half dozen new poems,
dated, said the author, in his prefatory note, from “the corner of a club
[the Travellers’] in the ungenial month of January.” It was introduced by
Barry Cornwall, who speaks of the poet as “a man of high talent and
sensibility,” and then goes on with some reflections of a friendly nature
on American literature and the desirableness of cultivating kinder
feelings between England and America. Wilson, who reviewed “Melanie” very
favorably in “Blackwood’s,” made Procter’s introduction to it the theme of
much elaborate ridicule, in the well-known style of “Maga,” when rending a
cockney author. He affected to have gathered an impression from the
title-page,--which described the poems as “edited” by Barry
Cornwall,--that Willis was dead, and that Procter was performing the
office of literary undertaker for “poor Willis’s remains.” “Alas! thought
we, on reading this title-page; is Willis dead? Then America has lost one
of the most promising of her young poets. We had seen him not many months
before in high health and spirits and had much enjoyed his various and
vivacious conversation.… But why weep for him, the accomplished
acquaintance of an hour?” He goes out on the street and tells the first
friend he meets that Willis is dead. “Impossible,” answers the friend;
“day before yesterday he was sitting very much alive in the Athenæum Club:
here is a letter from him franked Mahon,” etc. Another Scotch
professor--Aytoun--who belonged, like Wilson, to the Tory light artillery,
was moved to write a parody of “Melanie.” The same humorist also paid his
respects to Willis in one of his “Ballads of Bon Gaultier,”--a strenuous
piece of North British playfulness, in which Willis and Bryant are
represented as sallying forth like knights errant on the Quest of the
Snapping Turtle:--

“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby--
Slingsby of the manly chest?
How he slew the snapping turtle
In the regions of the west?”

The two longest and most ambitious poems in this volume were “Melanie” and
“Lord Ivon and his Daughter.” The first is the story “told during a walk
around the cascatelles of Tivoli,” of an English girl, “the last of the De
Brevern race,” who betroths herself in Italy to a young painter of unknown
parentage; but at their bridal at St. Mona’s altar a nun shrieks through
the lattice of the chapel:--

“The bridegroom is thy blood--thy brother!
Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”

and the bride thereupon “sunk and died, without a sign or word.” The
stanza and style are taken from Byron’s and Scott’s metrical romances. The
very first line--

“I stood on yonder rocky brow”--

is a reminiscence of “The Isles of Greece.” The second poem, which is
equally melodramatic in its catastrophe, is in blank verse and in the form
of a dialogue between the Lady Isidore and her father, Lord Ivon. He tells
his daughter (with a few interruptions from her, such as “Impossible!” and
“Nay, dear father! Was’t so indeed?”) how he had in vain wooed her
grandmother with minstrelsy and feats of arms, and then her mother more
successfully with gold: marrying whom, he had begotten Isidore, and
afterwards, in remorse for having dragged his young bride to the altar,
had been on the point of draining a poisoned chalice, when she had
anticipated him by running away with a younger lover, leaving to his care
the babe, now grown to a woman, who dutifully concludes the dialogue with,
“Thank God! Thank God!” Both of these poems were imitative and artificial,
and the last not a little absurd. Willis had no genius for narrative or
dramatic poetry, and when he tried to be impersonal and “objective,” he
wrought against the grain. The lyrical pieces in the book were almost all
of them graceful and sweet. He himself thought that the best thing in the
volume was “Birth-Day Verses,” addressed to his mother on January 20,
1835. Similar in theme were the lines, “To my Mother, from the Apennines,”
written at an _auberge_ on the mountains, August 3, 1832. The verses to
Mary Benjamin, written in Scotland in September, 1834, have been already
mentioned. They stand in his collected poems as “To M----, from Abroad,”
and were also incorporated in “Edith Linsey,” under the title “To Edith,
from the North.” “The Confessional,” dated Hellespont, October 1, 1833,
was also meant for Mary Benjamin. This and “Florence Gray” had the note of
travel. But a Boston poem, “The Belfry Pigeon,” was the most popular of
anything in the book and has retained a place in readers and collections
to the present day. These shorter pieces, like all of Willis’s truest
poetry, were purely poems of sentiment. His description, in “Edith
Linsey,” of Job Smith’s verses as “the mixed product of feeling and
courtesy” applies consciously to his own. They were “the delicate
offspring of tenderness and chivalry,” airy, facile, smooth, but thin in
content: not rich, full, concrete, but buoyed up by light currents of
emotion in a region, to quote his own words again, of “floating and
colorless sentiments.” This disembodied character is a mark of almost all
the American poetry of the Annual or _Gemmiferous_ period, and is seen at
its extreme in the unsubstantial prolixity of Percival and the drab
diffuseness of Mrs. Sigourney. It was the reflection on this side the
water from Shelley, from Byron’s earlier manner, from Wordsworth’s most
didactic passages, and from the imitations of all these by secondary
poets, like Mrs. Norton and L. E. L. Willis’s verses were much better than
Percival’s or Mrs. Sigourney’s--defter, briefer, more pointed. But they
had a certain poverty of imagery and allusion which belonged to the
school, a recurrence of stock properties, such as roses, stars, and bells.
He was ridiculed by the critics, in particular, for his constancy to the
Pleiades, which would almost seem to have been the only constellation in
his horizon.

Toward the last of November, 1835, the first edition of “Pencillings by
the Way” was published. It was an imperfect one, made up hastily for the
London market from a broken set of the “Mirror,” and gave only
seventy-nine out of the one hundred and thirty-nine letters since printed
in the complete editions. From this imperfect copy the first American
impression (1836) was taken, and all in fact down to 1844. The book
reached a second English edition in March, 1836, and a seventh in 1863.
For this first edition Willis received £250. He afterwards testified,
that from the republication of the original “Pencillings,” for which
Morris had paid him $500 a year, he had made, all told, about $5,000.
Their appearance in book form had been anticipated by a severe criticism
of the original “Mirror” letters, written by Lockhart for the “London
Quarterly” of September, 1835. This was echoed by the Tory press
generally, and it was their attacks which led to the issue of the London
edition and greatly stimulated its sale. There were several reasons why
the Tory papers were “down on” Willis. In the first place he was an
American. In the next place he had been admitted and made much of in
English social circles, where English men of letters, who were merely men
of letters, did not often go. And, finally, he had spoken disrespectfully
in these letters of the editor of the “Quarterly” himself. “Do you know
Lockhart?” Wilson is made to ask in Willis’s report of their conversation
at Edinburgh. “No, I do not,” replies his interlocutor. “He is almost the
only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor
of the ‘Quarterly,’ and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the
day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I
probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen
one who pretended to be his friend.”

This paragraph was enough to account for the “Quarterly” article; but the
personal grievance was kept well out of sight, and Willis was taken to
task for his alleged abuse of the rights of hospitality in reporting for a
public journal private conversations at gentlemen’s tables. The article
was a very offensive one, written with ability and with that air of cold
contempt of which Lockhart was master. It sneered at Willis as a “Yankee
poetaster,” and a “sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy;”
intimated that his surprise and delight at the manners of the English
aristocracy came from his not having been familiar with the usages of the
best society at home, and accused him of “conceited vulgarity” and
“cockneyism” (an awful word, under which the Scotch Tories connoted all
possible offenses against sound politics and good literature). The
passages that seem to have given most offense to the critic were the report
of the conversation with Lord Aberdeen at Gordon Castle and the remarks
of Moore about O’Connell at Lady Blessington’s. “It is fortunate in this
particular case,” wrote Lockhart, “that what Lord Aberdeen said to Mr.
Willis might be repeated in print without paining any of the persons his
lordship talked of; but what he did say, he said under the impression that
the guest of the Duke of Gordon was a gentleman, and there are abundance
of passages in Mr. Willis’s book which can leave no doubt that, had the
noble earl spoken in a different sense, it would not, at all events, have
been from any feeling of what was due to his lordship, or to himself, that
Mr. Willis would have hesitated to report the conversation with equal
freedom.” The article concludes as follows: “This is the first example of
a man creeping into your home and forthwith printing,--accurately or
inaccurately, no matter which,--before your claret is dry on his
lips,--unrestrained _table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of
compromising individuals_.” Lockhart, as usual, contrived to insult
Willis’s country, through her representative. “We can well believe,” he
said, “that Mr. Willis has been depicting the sort of society that most
interests his countrymen.

‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’

their servile adulation of rank and title, their stupid admiration of
processions and _levées_, and so forth, are leading features in almost all
the American books of travels that we have met with.”

To this censure Willis replied, in substance, in the preface to the first
London edition of “Pencillings,” first, that from “the distance of
America, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical
correspondence,” he had never expected that the “Mirror” letters would
reach England; nor would they have done so, had not the “Quarterly” “made
a long arm over the water,” and reprinted all the offending portions;
thereby forcing the author’s hand and compelling him to publish the entire
collection in justification of himself. Secondly, that his sketches of
distinguished people were neither ill-natured nor untrue; that he had said
nothing in them which could injure the feelings of those who had admitted
him to their confidence or hospitality. “There _are_ passages,” he allows,
“I would not rewrite, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall
at some cost,” but “I may state as a fact that the only instance in which
a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the
least offense in England was the one remark made by Moore, the poet, at a
dinner party, on the subject of O’Connell. It would have been harmless, as
it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my
‘Pencillings;’ yet with all my heart I wish it unwritten.” And finally,
that whatever violations of delicacy and good taste might have been
committed in the “Pencillings,” the author of “Peter’s Letters to his
Kinsfolk” was not the one to throw a stone at them. The first plea in this
defense was sincerely made, as might be easily proved from Willis’s
private letters. It _was_ a disagreeable surprise to him when the
“Quarterly” reprinted passages from the “Mirror” letters. And it is true
that America was much farther away from England than England was from
America. Still, if Willis had published anything that he should not have
published, it was not a perfect excuse to say that he had done it in a
corner. As the event showed, foreign correspondence in an American
newspaper might reach England. But this apology was not needed, for his
second plea covered the ground. There was, in truth, nothing malicious or
slanderous in “Pencillings;” almost nothing that could give pain even to
the most sensitive. The people described were, nearly all of them, in a
sense, public characters, accustomed to seeing themselves gossiped about
in print. In one or two instances Willis had been indiscreet, as he freely
admitted. But it is hard for one living in these times of society journals
and “interviewers” to understand why the papers should have made such a
pother over a comparatively trifling trespass upon the reserves of private
life. The best proof of Willis’s innocence in the matter is that the
people whose hospitality and confidence he was charged with abusing took
no kind of umbrage at the liberty. On the contrary, Lord Aberdeen, Wilson,
Dalhousie, and others wrote to him in warm approval of his book. “With
what feelings,” said the “Quarterly” article, apropos of the description
of Gordon Castle, “the whole may have been perused by the generous lord
and lady of the castle themselves, it is no business of ours to
conjecture.” This point, however, need not be left to conjecture, as it is
amply answered in the following letter to Willis from the Earl of
Dalhousie, dated February 25, 1836:--

… In the long evenings of winter we have beguiled the time with
“Pencillings by the Way,” and whatever critics and reviewers may
say, I take pleasure in assuring you that we all agree in one
sentiment, that a more amusing or more delightful production was
never issued by the press. In what we know of it, it is true and
graphic, and therefore in what is foreign to us, we think, must be
so also. _The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately and
expressed themselves in similar terms._

Lady D---- desires me to say that the reviews could not have done
more for its success by their amplest praises, for it is now in
every hand.

Our family has been much occupied by Ramsay’s marriage this winter,
he following your steps so closely. He has added greatly to his
parents’ happiness, and, I hope, to his own in life. Lady Susan Hay
is a handsome woman, and an amiable, pretty creature. They have
settled themselves at Coalstown, until called into a more active
life, which I hope he looks forward to, and you have thought him
fitted for. It is not unlikely that he will be chosen member for the
East Lothian, in which he has made his residence, triangular between
me and his father-in-law, Lord Tweeddale, about sixteen miles from
me.

Pray let me hear from you, as your sincere attached friend,

DALHOUSIE.

Lady Dalhousie had written some two mouths before:--

I feel that it is positive ingratitude not to offer our united
thanks for your book, which we received in safety, and Miss Hathorne
and I are now reading it aloud to Lord Dalhousie in the evening,
with very great pleasure and amusement. Your descriptions recall to
my mind admirably what I have seen, and paint to my mind’s eye what
I wish to see, and the happy sunshine which your own mind has shed
over every person and thing you have met is refreshing and
enlivening to us, living now much alone in this dark and gloomy
December. The “Quarterly” we read with extreme wrath and
indignation, and, believe me, it will afford us the most sincere
pleasure if you will take, if you find them worthy of it, a few more
of your spirited pencillings from D. Castle.… Believe me always very
sincerely yours.

C. B. DALHOUSIE.

It has been said above that there was almost nothing in “Pencillings” that
could give pain to any one; but to this statement there are one or two
exceptions. The first was the instance of Moore and O’Connell, in which
Willis acknowledged and regretted his imprudence. “This publication, to my
knowledge,” says Madden in his “Life of the Countess of Blessington,” “was
attended with results which I cannot think Mr. Willis contemplated when he
transmitted his hasty notes to America,--to estrangements of persons who,
previously to the printed reports of their private conversations, had been
on terms of intimate acquaintance. This was the case with respect to
O’Connell and Moore. Moore’s reported remarks on O’Connell gave offense to
the latter, and aroused bad feelings between them which had never
previously existed, and which, I believe, never ceased to exist.”

It also appears from a letter from Willis to Lady Blessington, and an
unsigned note from a friend of hers to Willis, both of which are printed
in Madden’s “Life,” that Fonblanque resented the description of himself in
“Pencillings,” and had written the author a note in terms which the latter
thought “very unjustifiable.” Fonblanque was an able and estimable man,
and Willis’s portrait, or caricature, of him, though not unkindly meant
and applying merely to his personal appearance, was certainly not pleasant
for the subject of it to see in print.

“I never saw,” it runs, “a much worse face; sallow, seamed, and
hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black
hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead; he looked as if he
might be the gentleman ‘whose coat was red and whose breeches were
blue.’ A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with
a smile like a skeleton’s, certainly did not improve his
physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill
dressed, but every word he uttered showed him to be a man of claims
very superior to exterior attraction.”

With the exception of Lockhart, Moore, Fonblanque, and Captain Marryat,
whose case will be mentioned presently, it does not appear that anyone
took offense at anything in “Pencillings.” As to Lady Blessington,
Lockhart’s misgiving as to whether she would ever “again admit to her
table the animal who has printed what ensues” was needless. It was she who
saw the book through the press while Willis was in France on his wedding
journey. He went to see her frequently during the remainder of his stay in
London, and called upon her on his two subsequent visits to England; and
their friendship and correspondence continued unbroken till her death in
1849. His poem, “To a Face Beloved,” originally printed in the “Mirror” of
November 14, 1835, was addressed to her. It may well have been, however,
that the noise made about the book, and the cause for complaint given to a
few of the _habitués_ of Gore House, put a certain constraint upon his
visits there, and he probably absented himself from the dinners and
receptions given by the mistress of the mansion, and which it had formerly
been his chief pleasure to attend. In a letter to her from Dublin, January
25, 1840, he says: “I have, I assure you, no deeper regret than that my
indiscretion (in ‘Pencillings’) should have checked the freedom of my
approach to you. Still my attachment and admiration (so unhappily
recorded) are always on the alert for some trace that I am still
remembered by you.… My first pleasure when I return to town will be to
avail myself of your kind invitation, and call at Gore House.”

In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack--partly no doubt in consequence of
it--“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception
from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary
criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It
was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice
from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s
friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord
Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and
the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the
lightest and brightest of the Tory organs, received it with uproarious
contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the
magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,--the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”--a witty
Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time,
except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking
songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys
and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and
Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with
such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while
rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really
a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of
a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the
last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then
goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a
jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling
albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony
matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited
sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic
monosyllable may import.[3] His writing is characterized as “chamber-maid
gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and
“Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have
appointed Willis _attaché_ to the French embassy, is “that most
open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in
Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally
set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly
man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet
should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in
disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed
from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such
persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of
criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could
not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a
wretched creature and no one minded what he said; though, to be sure, the
Hon. Grantley Berkeley thought it necessary, in this same year, 1836, to
call him out for a scurrilous attack upon himself and his cousin, Lady
Euston, in a notice of Berkeley’s novel, “Castle Berkeley.” The latter,
in his very diverting “Life and Recollections,” gives a circumstantial
history of this duel and of the flogging which he administered to Fraser
for publishing the article, and of Maginn’s shameful treatment of poor
Miss Landon.

But one of the notices provoked by “Pencillings” came near having serious
consequences for Willis. In a letter in the “Mirror” of April 18, 1835, he
had inserted a postscript, after his signature, as he claimed, and meant
only for Morris’s private eye, giving some information about the sales of
books in London. In this occurred, among other things, the sentence
following: “Captain Marryat’s gross trash sells immensely about Wapping
and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six hundred the book, but that can
scarce be called literature.” Morris printed it with the rest of the
letter, and when it reached England the gallant captain was naturally
displeased by it. His revenge was to publish in his magazine, the
“Metropolitan” for January, 1836, a review of “Pencillings,” or rather a
grossly personal review of the author of “Pencillings.” The article was
less telling than the “Quarterly’s,” simply because Marryat did not drive
so sharp a quill as the editor of the “Quarterly.” But the latter knew his
business as a reviewer and confined himself to the book in hand. Marryat,
on the contrary, traveled outside the record and helplessly allowed his
private grievance to appear. He declared that Willis was a “spurious
_attaché_,” who had made his way into English society under false colors.

“He makes invidious, uncharitable, and ill-natured remarks upon
authors and their works; all of which he dispatches for the benefit
of the reading public of America, and, at the same time that he has
thus stabbed them behind their backs, he is requesting to be
introduced to them--bowing, smiling, and simpering.” “Although we
are well acquainted with the birth, parentage, and history of Mr.
Willis, previous to his making his continental tour, we will pass
them over in silence; and we think that Mr. Willis will acknowledge
that we are generous in so doing.” “It is evident that Mr. Willis
has never, till lately, been in good society, either in England or
America.”

Finally he exhumed from some quarter the pasquinade of poor Joe Snelling,
referred to in our third chapter, from which he printed the following
lines by way of showing Willis’s standing at home:--

“Then Natty filled the ‘Statesman’s’ ribald page
With the rank breathings of his prurient age,
And told the world how many a half-bred Miss,
Like Shakspere’s fairy, gave an ass a kiss;
Long did he try the art of sinking on
The muddy pool he took for Helicon;
Long did he delve and grub with fins of lead
At its foul bottom for precarious bread.…
Dishonest critic and ungrateful friend,
Still on a woman[4] thy stale jokes expend.
Live--at thy meagre table still preside,
While foes commiserate and friends deride;
Yet live--thy wonted follies to repeat,
Live--till thy printer’s ruin is complete;
Strut out thy fleeting hour upon the stage,
Amidst the hisses of the passing age.”

Marryat’s article was a stupid one, ungrammatical and coarsely written.
But its clumsy malice made it all the more exasperating. Lockhart was a
gentleman and Maginn was an Irishman. The former took care not to say too
much, and what the latter said was of no consequence. Both of them,
besides, were clever writers, and a man of wit and spirit had rather be
pricked by a rapier in the hand of a dexterous adversary than pounded on
the head by an awkward bully with a bludgeon. Willis made a mistake in
noticing Marryat’s article at all, but he was stung by the implied insult
to his parents, and his military friends persuaded him that his honor was
touched. Accordingly he prepared an elaborate reply in the shape of a
letter, dated January 10th, and sent it to Marryat at Brussels, whither
the latter had gone about the middle of December, while his article was
still in proof.

“Of that part of the paper which refers to the merits of my book,” Willis
wrote, “I have nothing to say. You were at liberty, as a critic, to deal
with it as you pleased. You have transcended the limits of criticism,
however, to make an attack on my character, and your absence compels me to
represent, by my own letter, those claims for reparation which I should
have intrusted to a friend, had you been in England.” The letter then
proceeds to answer, in detail, the charges and innuendoes of the
“Metropolitan.” As to his seeking introductions, Willis declares, “I have
never, since my arrival in England, requested an introduction to _any
man_.… In the single interview which I had with yourself, I was informed
by the lady who was the medium of the introduction, that _you wished_ to
know me.” The letter concludes, apropos of Marryat’s slur on Willis’s
birth and parentage, “You will readily admit that this dark insinuation
must be completely withdrawn. My literary reputation and my position in
society are things I could outlive. My honesty as a critic is a point on
which the world may decide. But my own honor and that of my family are
sacred, and while I live, no breath of calumny shall rest on either. I
trust to receive, at your earliest convenience, that explanation which you
cannot but acknowledge is due to me on this point, and which is most
imperatively required by my own character and the feelings of my
friends.” As to the remark which had drawn the “Metropolitan” article upon
him, Willis confesses that it was an unjust one, but says that “it
occurred in a private communication to the editor of the ‘Mirror’ and was
never intended for publication.”

Willis had this letter lithographed and sent copies to seven of his
particular friends, to clear his character, as he said, in his own
immediate circle, of the aspersions in Marryat’s article. The reply to
this demand was a long letter, under date of January 21st, declining to
make any apology until Willis had publicly withdrawn his remark in the
“Mirror” about Marryat’s gross trash selling about Wapping, etc., which,
said the latter, amounted by implication to an attack on his private
character; denying, furthermore, that _he_ had attacked _Willis’s_ private
character. “The observations made by you upon my writings must be
considered as more or less injurious in proportion to the rank in society
and estimation of the person who made them.… It was therefore necessary,
in this instance, to point out that the critic had not been accustomed to
good society.… Now this, if true, is no crime, and therefore the remark
can be no attack upon private character.” Willis accepted this
explanation, in a second letter to Marryat, and then sent the entire
correspondence to the “Times” for publication. Marryat was furious at
this, and wrote at once to Willis, “I refuse all explanation--insist upon
immediate satisfaction--and that you forthwith repair to Ostend to meet
me.” If the captain thought that his opponent was a dandy poet, who would
be afraid to face his pistol, he mistook his man. “The puppies will
fight,” said the Duke. Willis was no shot, and the only weapon that he
knew how to handle was his pen, but he never showed any want of personal
courage. The correspondence that followed this challenge was long and
tedious. The documents in the case are a score in number and need not be
reproduced here. The substance of these various protocols and formalities
was as follows. Willis answered Marryat’s letter, explaining why he had
thought right to publish the first three letters that had passed between
them, accepting his challenge, in case he found this explanation
insufficient, but claiming his privilege, as the challenged party, to name
some place in England for the meeting. Meanwhile a duplicate of Marryat’s
challenge had been handed to Willis by the former’s “friend,” a Mr. F.
Mills, and Willis had referred him to _his_ friend, Captain Walker, and
had agreed to waive his right to name a place, and to meet Marryat at
Ostend. Mr. Mills and Captain Walker finally adjusted the matter and
arranged a basis for an amicable settlement. But while these negotiations
were pending, Marryat, on the receipt of Willis’s letter of explanation,
withdrew his challenge in a letter dated February 9th, which he sent to
the “Times,” along with his challenge and Willis’s reply to it. The terms
of this withdrawal Willis considered insulting, and the publication of the
challenge after it had been agreed upon between the friends of the parties
that Marryat “should entirely withdraw the offensive letter containing his
challenge,” he regarded as a further insult. He therefore wrote to the
“Times,” on the day following the appearance of these letters, that the
differences between himself and Captain Marryat were _not_ at an end; and
on February 17th he wrote to Marryat that his challenge still stood
accepted, insisting on his right to name England as the place of meeting,
but offering in case of interruption there to give him a meeting on the
other side of the Channel. Marryat accordingly came to England and--Mr.
Mills having withdrawn from the affair--named as his second Captain Edward
Belcher of the Royal Navy. Captain Belcher’s ship was at Chatham and
thither all parties repaired on the 27th of February. Willis’s second
declared to Captain Belcher that his principal “had come to fight, not to
negotiate,” but on a little discussion Captain Belcher found his principal
in the wrong, and made him concede what was necessary, the following
pronunciamento being signed by both seconds:--

CHATHAM.

Captain Marryat and Mr. Willis having placed the arrangement of the
dispute between them in our hands, and both parties having repaired
hither with the intent of a hostile meeting; we have, previously to
permitting such to take place, carefully gone through the original
grounds of quarrel, which do not appear to us of sufficient
importance to call for a meeting of such a nature.

We are perfectly borne out in this opinion by the arrangement of the
8th of February entered into by the mutual friends of the parties,
and on which we think Captain Marryat ought to have withdrawn his
challenge of the 4th inst.

That the new quarrel arises from the publication of the challenge
and subsequent letters, in which, in our opinion, Captain Marryat
was not justified. We are further of opinion that both parties
should mutually withdraw the offensive correspondence, the terms on
either side being unjustifiable, and we conceive that they more
honorably act in so doing than in meeting in the field.

EDWARD BELCHER.
F. G. WALKER.

Thus peacefully ended this tempest in a teapot. Willis had carried his
point and had acted throughout in a high-spirited and creditable
manner--barring the folly of entering into “an affair of honor,” in the
first place. His letters to Marryat are those of a gentleman, while his
adversary’s language is invariably hectoring and coarse. The quarrel, of
course, made a great deal of noise at the time in London literary and
social circles. “The United Service Gazette,” the organ of the British
Army and Navy, took Willis’s side in a long editorial in which much of the
correspondence was reprinted from the “Times.” The latter journal,
however, probably voiced the true sentiment of the community when it said:
“We confess that we have a great distaste for this sort of squabbling,
which exhibits, to say the least, an extraordinary want of judgment in the
disputing parties.”

From Chatham Willis posted at once to Woolwich, thirty miles away, where
he found his wife in convulsions. He had left a farewell letter for her,
fully expecting to be killed in a duel with Marryat, who was reputed a
crack shot. Two days later Willis went to London and called out Mr. F.
Mills, who had acted as Marryat’s “mediator,” for an offensive letter in
the “Times.” Mr. Mills named W. F. Campbell of Islay and Willis named John
Tyndale, between whom this subsidiary quarrel was soon patched up, in a
manner honorable to both. The assaults in the English magazines and the
rumors of the Marryat affair of course found their way speedily to
America, and were circulated and commented upon in the American
periodicals according to their various prepossessions. “The cultivated old
clergymen of the ‘North American Review,’” as Poe used to call them, lent
the support of that influential quarterly to Willis in an article by C. C.
Felton, a very friendly review of the “Pencillings,” and a defense of
their author--a favor which Willis gratefully appreciated.

In March, 1836, he published in London “Inklings of Adventure,” consisting
of thirteen stories and sketches of American and European life, reprinted
from the “New Monthly,” “The Metropolitan,” and the “Court Magazine,”
together with “Minute Philosophies” (from the “American Monthly”) and “A
Log in the Archipelago,” from the “Mirror.” The book was handsomely
published in three volumes, and dedicated to Edward Everett. For an
edition of 1,200 copies Willis was paid £300, reserving to himself the
copyright; and as he had received a guinea a page for the original
articles, besides what Morris gave him for their republication in the
“Mirror,” they may be said to have been fairly profitable.

These “Slingsby” papers are exceedingly clever. With the possible
exception of “Letters from under a Bridge” and portions of “Pencillings by
the Way,” they are the best work that Willis ever did; and they compare
well with such lighter fiction, in the way of short tales or sketches of
travel and adventure, as has been produced in America since Willis’s day.
Whatever else they are, they are never dull and always readable. They are
not read now only because the readers of light fiction habitually follow
the market and inquire merely for the last thing out. Many of them were
worked over from his “American Monthly” _juvenilia_, but his touch had
grown firmer and he had purchased experience, as his motto declared, by
his “penny of observation.” These “Inklings” do not penetrate to the
stratum of real character, of strong passion, and of the interplay of
motives and moral relations in which all vital fiction has its roots.
Their plots are commonly slight, their persons sketchy, their incidents
not seldom improbable, their coloring sometimes too high. As transcripts
of actual life such stories as “Pedlar Karl,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” and
“Tom Fane and I,” with the easy optimism of their conclusions and their
cheerful avoidance of all the responsibilities imposed upon the dwellers
in this workaday world, are of course misleading and false. Their air is
the air of every day, but their happenings are those of the wildest
romance. Their charm--and they have for many old-fashioned readers a quite
decided charm--does not lie in truth to life, but in the vivacious
movement of the narrative, the glimpses of scenery by the way, the
alternations of sentiment and gayety, neither very profound, but each for
the time sincere and passing quickly into one another; and finally in the
style, always graceful, and in passages really exquisite. It has recently
been announced that style is “increasingly unimportant,” but can this be
true? Not surely, unless fiction is to become hereafter a branch of social
science and valuable only for its accurate report of life. It will then be
the novelist’s duty to obliterate himself in his message, and any
intrusion of his personality between the reader and the subject will be an
impertinence. But it is hard to believe that the personal element is to
lose its place in fiction and be banished to the realm of autobiography
and lyric poetry. Style may be a purely external part of an artist’s
equipment, but it is a necessary part all the same. A bad man or a weak
man may have it, but that does not make it any the less indispensable for
the good man intending literature. Willis was born with it; it showed in
his manners, in his dress, in his writing. Whatever he did was done with
an air.

The American parts of “Inklings,” written for the English reader, are the
best. They reproduce for us the life of gay society, when society was, or
seemed, gayer, or at least fresher than at present. It was the era of
expansion and hope before the financial panic of 1837. The great waterway
lately opened through the state of New York had set people traveling. The
beauties of American lakes, forests, and rivers were being discovered, but
were as yet unhackneyed. Lake George, The Thousand Isles, and the St.
Lawrence, did not swarm with tourists. Nahant was still a fashionable
seaside resort and Niagara a watering-place, where people actually went to
spend months, and not a fleeting show for bridal couples and a mill-race
for manufacturers. Saratoga, and Ballston, and Lebanon were rival spas,
the first a “mushroom village” merely,--“the work of a lath and plaster
Aladdin,”--when Congress Hall, with its big wooden colonnades, was in its
glory. “A relic or two of the still astonished forest towers above the
chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy grove of firs, and five minutes’
walk from the door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on the
village.” In which wilderness was embosomed Barhydt’s once famous
hermitage, with its ear-shaped tarn and columnar pine shafts, whither one
resorted for trout dinners, and where “the long, soft mornings, quiet as a
shadowy elysium, on the rim of that ebon lake were as solitary as a
melancholy man could desire.”

This newness in life at the Springs, this background of primitive
wilderness against which the drives and dances and piazza promenades of
the fashionable frequenters were projected, has long since disappeared,
and with it has gone a certain old school exclusiveness which once marked
the society at American baths. That society, if not more aristocratic than
at present, was at all events more select, simply by virtue of being
smaller. Fewer people were in the habit of going into the country in
summer, and fashionable circles in the cities were not so large but that
“the best people” from all over the States might know each other at least
by name. A reigning belle or a distinguished beau had a national
reputation. Southern planters brought their families to Northern resorts
and supplied an element which has been missed since the war.

“In the fourteen millions of inhabitants in the United States,”
Willis explains, “there are precisely four authenticated and
undisputed aristocratic families. There is one in Boston, one in
New York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. With two
hundred miles’ interval between them, they agree passably, and
generally meet at one or another of the three watering-places of
Saratoga, Ballston, or Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as
the process of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. As it is
not known till the moment they arrive, there is, of course, great
excitement among the hotel-keepers in these different parts of the
country, and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants
one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many score. The vast and
solitary temples of Pæstum are gay in comparison with these halls of
disappointment.”

It is, for the most part, the life of this society which Willis so
engagingly portrays in the “Slingsby” sketches. His heroes are
devil-may-care young fellows, who wander about from one fashionable resort
to another, composing love verses, flirting, dancing, eloping, or
assisting at elopements. It was the era of the buck or beau, a joyous,
flamboyant creature who wore figured waistcoats, was a knowing whip,
danced with vigor, loved pink champagne, serenaded the ladies, was gallant
in speech, dashing and confident in bearing, and never in the least
_blasé_.

This freshness and youthfulness, this air of stir, adventure, excitement,
hope, which was impressed upon American life, books, and society of that
date are reflected from Willis’s sparkling pages and give them even a sort
of historical interest, apart from their claims as literature. There is a
breath of morning wind in them. With the homelier side of life he had
little concern, and his writing lacks gravity and simplicity. Whenever he
grows serious, it is to grow sentimental. “F. Smith” is perhaps the most
artistic of these sketches, and the most representative of its author’s
talent, in its quick interchange of poetic description, bright dialogue,
light, malicious humor, and natural sentiment; neither mood in excess, nor
dwelt on long enough to fatigue. It is a trifling episode--the caprice of
a summer belle at Nahant. Its hero is the same “gentle monster” who
reappears in many of the “Inklings”--in “Edith Linsey,” “The Gypsy of
Sardis,” and “Niagara,” a Green Mountain Frankenstein and Quixote in one,
absent-minded and uncouth of aspect, but with a soul filled with
enthusiasm for beauty and a delicate, chivalrous devotion to women. He is
half hero and half butt, and introduced as a constant foil to Slingsby,
the dandy exquisite and man of the world.

“Edith Linsey” was the most ambitious of the American sketches. It was a
novel in outline, and had an original plot, the intellectual passion of a
young student for a girl who is thought to be dying of consumption, and
whose disease has imparted an exaltation to her feelings, and a nervous,
spiritual intensity to her thoughts. The anti-climax comes when she
unexpectedly recovers her health, and with it her worldly ambitions, and
coolly jilts her quondam lover. There are passages in “Edith
Linsey”--particularly in the scenes between the lovers in the library--of
unusual thoughtfulness, eloquence, and emotional depth, but the story is
loosely put together, and interrupted by digressions, and in the latter
part of it the author seemed more concerned to deliver himself of college
reminiscences and descriptions of scenery than to carry on his narrative
with a firm hand.

“The Gypsy of Sardis” was the best of the European sketches, and had a
very moving, though slightly melodramatic, conclusion. It was a more
highly finished study of Eastern scenery and life than Willis had had
leisure to give in his “Pencillings.” A comparison of the two shows from
what slight hints he worked up the romance,--a momentary glimpse of a
gypsy girl at a tent door, and of an Arab in the slave market at Stamboul,
a ride up the Valley of Sweet Waters, and a morning in the shop of old
Mustapha, the perfumer. “Love and Diplomacy” and “The Revenge of the
Signor Basil” were less successful, because more remote from their
author’s experience. He had not the kind of imagination necessary to
transport him into alien characters and situations. His fancy required
some contact with its object before it would take off the electric spark.

Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut,
pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought
in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or
half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over
his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man
never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks.
But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later
prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. He had at all times,
however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures
had a daintiness which displeased severe critics. Thus: “The gold of the
sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops and disappeared, like a ring taken
slowly from an Ethiop’s finger.” “As much salt as could be tied up in the
cup of a large water-lily” is an instance of his superfine way of putting
things. He likened Daniel Webster’s forehead, among the heads at a Jenny
Lind concert, to “a massive magnolia blossom, too heavy for the breeze to
stir, splendid and silent amid fluttering poplar leaves.” The “crushed
orange blossom, clinging to one of the heels” of Ernest Clay’s boots, was
a touch which greatly amused Thackeray. And others have been amused by the
fantastic headings which he invented for certain columns in the “Home
Journal”: “Sparklings of Tenth Waves: or Bits Relished in Recent
Readings,” “Breezes from Spice Islands, passed in the Voyage of Life,” and
the like, which read like the title of a sixteenth century pamphlet. An
old lady in Hartford used to say that “Nat Willis ought to go about in
spring, in sky-blue breeches, with a rose-colored bellows to blow the buds
open.” It is remarkable with what consent all who have had occasion to
characterize Willis’s diction hit upon the metaphor of champagne. “The
wine of Bacon’s writings,” said Dr. Johnson, “is a dry wine.” The wine of
Willis’s writings was certainly a _Schaumwein_. It had not the rich, still
glow of burgundy, but a fizz and an up-streaming of golden bubbles, and
when the spirit had effervesced the residue, as in his later writings, was
rather flat.

During his stay abroad he made a few other contributions to literature
which have not yet been mentioned. Among these were some miscellaneous
papers in the “Mirror”: “Notes from a Scrap Book” and “Fragments of
Rambling Impressions,” portions of which he afterwards republished in
“Ephemera.” Also a short tale of no value, “The Dilemma,” from which he
rescued the verses “To Ermengarde” for his collected poems. He contributed
to the London “Athenæum” for January and February, 1835, a series of four
articles on American literature, which do not appear in his “Complete
Works.” That pioneer of literature in the West, the Rev. Timothy Flint,
some time editor of the “Cincinnati Monthly Review,” author of a novel
called “Francis Berrian,” and of a work on the Mississippi Valley, had
agreed to supply the required papers, but he having left New York for
Louisiana Territory, and failed to come to time, Willis was invited to
take his place. He wrote the articles hastily, though he asserted that he
had “read the productions of two hundred poets and seventy-two prose
writers whose works have been printed in America since the settlement of
New England.” He made no approach to an exhaustive treatment of the
subject, but gave a number of graphic personal sketches of American
authors, one in particular, of Channing as a pulpit orator, which excited
Lady Byron’s interest, as has been mentioned, and another of Cooper, whom
he indignantly defended against the slanders of a portion of the American
press. The literary judgments are not always sound (Poe said that Willis
had good taste, but was not a good critic), but they were the current
opinions of the day rather than of Willis individually. They were in the
air. Thus he pronounces Bryant’s “Evening Wind” the best thing he had
written, and prefers Percival to Bryant, saying that he is “the most
interesting man in America. He has not written anything equal to the
‘Evening Wind’ of Bryant, but his birthright lies a thousand leagues
higher up Parnassus.” Timothy Flint afterwards supplemented these papers
by a dozen of his own, which amply made up in heaviness for any want of
ballast in Willis’s, and were full of “general views,” which, if not
correct, were harmless because unreadable. Willis’s “Athenæum” articles
first introduced the English public to “The Culprit Fay,” long passages of
which he gave from a manuscript in his possession, the poem having not as
yet appeared in print. Miss Mitford, who took a warm interest in American
literature, wrote him a note of thanks on the publication of this series,
praising it in the highest terms.

It appears by a letter to Willis from Carl August, Freiherr von Killinger,
dated Carlsruhe, April 13, 1836, that some of the “Inklings” had already
attained to the honors of translation. The Freiherr, it seems, was
engaged in translating “Pencillings” also, and wanted material for a
biographical notice.

“To the author of the ‘Slingsby Papers,’” he wrote, “It is, perhaps,
flattering to hear that his ‘Lunatic,’ his ‘Incidents on the
Hudson,’ ‘Adventures on the Green Mountains,’[5] his ‘Niagara and So
Forth,’ etc., etc., which I had translated into a little periodical
of mine, or, rather, a choice collection of interesting articles
from English periodicals and annuals, have been read with much
interest, and repeatedly been reprinted in Germany.… I could wish to
be favored by you with some biographical notices _of your own_ in
token, as it were, of your consentment to my translatory attempt.”

CHAPTER VI.

1836-1845.

GLENMARY--THE CORSAIR--THE NEW MIRROR.

Willis was now fully committed to the profession of letters, but he wished
to connect it with foreign residence, if possible. His sojourn abroad had
been pleasant and successful, and when he sailed for home it was with a
strong expectation of returning before long to the Old World in some
diplomatic capacity. This hope he did not cease to entertain for several
years. In a letter to Mrs. Skinner, written from Niagara October 12, 1836,
he said that he had missed the secretaryship to France by a
hand’s-breadth, and that he wanted the next diplomatic mission that turned
up; that the climate of the United States did not agree either with him or
with Mrs. Willis; that he was constantly subject to the rheumatism, etc.
During the winter of 1836-37, while in Washington, he made interest to
secure the post of secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, with the view
of writing a book on Russia, but Mr. Dallas, the newly-appointed minister
to that country, had promised the place to a kinsman. Later, in a letter
to Mrs. Willis at Glenmary, written from Boston, where he had just met
Sumner and Longfellow and was about to dine with the latter, he speaks of
a letter from a friend who says that the President had told him that “no
young man in Washington had impressed him so favorably. It _looks_ like
going abroad,” he adds, “and not for six or nine months merely.” This
letter is dated simply “February,” but was written, probably, in 1842,
during Tyler’s administration. To the same year, doubtless, may be
referred another, dated at New York, July 9th, in which he speaks of
having made the rounds of the men-of-war in the harbor with John Tyler,
the President’s son, “who seems very much my friend,” and of being invited
to dinner by Dakin, to meet Tyler, Halleck, and Bryant. “A politician,” he
says, tells him that he will be appointed abroad soon. These hopes were
all doomed to disappointment, and to the end of his career his pen was
destined to be his best reliance.

The first few months after his return to America were spent in visiting
his home and friends, and in presenting his young English bride to her new
relatives. He stayed some time at the Astor House, in New York, then newly
opened under the hosting of the genial Stetson, and regarded as the
greatest wonder on the continent in the way of metropolitan caravansaries.
On September 20th he signed an agreement with the agent of George Virtue,
the London publisher, to furnish the letterpress for a big illustrated
work on American scenery, the drawings for which were to be supplied by
Bartlett, the English artist, who was then in America for the purpose. The
work was to come out in monthly numbers, each containing four plates and
eight pages of letterpress, and Willis was to receive fifteen guineas a
number. The first installment, containing descriptions of twenty drawings,
was to be ready November 1st. It was in pursuance of this agreement that
Willis went to Niagara in the autumn of 1836, retracing ground which he
had visited eight years before. A part of the winter of 1836-37 and the
early spring of 1837 he passed in Washington, whence he contributed to the
“Mirror” the four letters afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.” He
found Washington society agreeable, and Mrs. Willis was greatly admired
and became an especial favorite with Henry Clay. But the national capital
was then a raw, straggling town, built, said Willis, “to please nobody on
earth but a hackney coachman.” It had not begun to grow up to the
ambitious plan on which it was projected, and there was a ludicrous
contrast between the wide, radiating avenues, with their imposing public
buildings scattered here and there, and the wastes between, dotted at
intervals with naked brick houses or mean negro cabins. The large shifting
population, which fled as soon as Congress rose, lodged uncomfortably in
hotels and boarding-houses. In short, Washington was a dismal place to
live in. Willis set his practiced observation at work to describe the
picturesque and humorous social aspects of this unfinished city. He never
took more than the most casual interest in politics, but he lounged about
the rotunda and lobbies of the Capitol, climbed up into the stifling
galleries of the old House and Senate chambers, whence the ladies’ toilets
could be observed, though the voices of speakers on the floor, owing to
the acoustic defects in the building, reached the ear “as articulate as
water from a narrow-necked bottle.” He was present at Van Buren’s
inauguration, went to a levee at the White House, and to a dinner with
Power the comedian, at which several Indian chiefs were present who
behaved in an extraordinary manner. In the summer of 1837 he traveled
about with Bartlett, who was making his sketches for “American Scenery.”
In the course of these peregrinations he found a lovely spot on the banks
of Owego Creek near its junction with the Susquehanna, which so took his
fancy that he decided to pitch his tent there. He bought from his college
friend Pumpelly, who lived near by, a domain of some two hundred acres,
which he named Glenmary, in honor of his wife, and there in the fall of
1837 he set up his household gods. In his paper on “The Four Rivers,”
contributed to one of the September “Mirrors” of that year, he thus
announces his discovery:--

“Owego Creek should have a prettier name, for its small vale is the
soul and essence of loveliness. A meadow of a mile in breadth,
fertile, soft, and sprinkled with stately trees, furnishes a bed for
its swift windings; and from the edge of this new Tempé, on the
southern side, rise three steppes or natural terraces, over the
highest of which the forest rears its head, and looks in upon the
meeting of the rivers; while down the sides, terrace by terrace,
leap the small streamlets from the mountain springs, forming each
again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of Nature.… Here
would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of these shining
streamlets, upon one of these terraces that seem steps to Olympus,
and let me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are
growing and my head silvering in tranquil happiness.”

In this secluded Arcadia his Penates had rest for five years, and hence he
wrote his “À l’Abri, or the Tent Pitched,” contributed to the “Mirror” as
“Letters from under a Bridge,” the first one appearing July 7, 1838. This
is Willis’s happiest book, and reflects the happiest part of his life.
There was a side of him which turned gladly to rural repose and simple
household pleasures. He imagined it to be “the kind of life best suited to
his disposition as well as to his better nature,” and it had at the time
the zest of novelty. For the last five years he had been a vagabond “in
the gayest circles of the gayest cities in the world.”

“There is a curious fact,” he writes, “I have learned for the first
time in this wild country; that, as the forest is cleared, new
springs rise to the surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the
sunshine.… You have yourself been in your day, dear doctor, ‘a
warped slip of wilderness,’ and will see at once that there lies in
this ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain moral
changes that come in upon the heels of more cultivated and
thoughtful manhood. There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us
at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.… You can scarce
understand with what pleasure I find this new spring in my path, the
content with which I admit the conviction that, without effort or
self-denial, the mind will slake its thirst and the heart be
satisfied with but the waste of what lies so near us.”

The “dear doctor” to whom these letters were addressed was Dr. T. O.
Porter, with whom their author afterwards formed a literary partnership.
The little bridge under which they were written, with its stone seat, its
“floor of running water,” its nest of swallows, and its diminutive
fresh-water lobster--which reminded Willis of Talleyrand--deserves
remembering with Pope’s famous grotto at Twickenham. Like Cowley, Willis
acknowledged himself fond of little things. He disliked the ocean and
great rivers,--though he finally came to live on the banks of one. He
loved small streams and narrow valleys. The lawny, homelike scenery of the
Owego was just suited to his taste. Above all things in nature, he
delighted in running water, which had an affinity with his own lively and
sparkling temper. “À l’Abri” was, and remains, a thoroughly enjoyable
book, chatty, pleasantly digressive, and filled with sunshine and the air
of out-doors. It must be confessed that Willis was something of a cockney
in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape
gardener than as a naturalist. He had not the intense passion for her, the
rapt communion with her, of elect spirits like Wordsworth and Thoreau. She
furnished him rather with a hundred pretty and playful analogies, a
hundred texts for little sermons on cheerfulness and content, in which he
rode his fancy sometimes too far and let his sentiment answer too quickly
to trifling provocations. He must have been but an amateurish farmer, too,
ordering his breakfast served under a balsam fir, and selling his crops
“for the oddity of the sensation.” Naturally, except in literary harvests,
his farm did not pay, though he was always exclaiming with grateful
surprise at the bounty of nature in yielding him actual buckwheat, in
addition to the health, amusement, and moral lessons derived in the
process of cultivating that interesting grain. One suspects that he grew
more flowers of speech than any grosser product from his two hundred
acres. If the crows ate his corn in the blade, he merely philosophized,
“Think what times we live in, when even the crows are obliged to
anticipate their income!” If the red heifer chewed up a lace cape
bleaching on the lawn, he humorously excused the heifer on account of the
drought. If the boys reported that the deer were browsing in troops on his
buckwheat, by the light of the moon, he answered, “Let them!” One is
reminded by this last discouragement to agriculture that Owego was still
in the backwoods. Some of the most interesting passages in the letters
describe the wild life of the lumbermen, whose rafts glided past the
Glenmary meadows “like a singing and swearing phantom of an unfinished
barn,” and whose fires by night lit up the bends of the Susquehanna,
where their huge flotillas lay moored. Willis once descended the river on
the top of a freshet in a steamboat of light draught, but his usual way of
coming and going was by stage over very rough roads, the Erie railway
having not as yet penetrated those solitudes. Another picturesque feature
of the neighborhood were the forest fires, the “blazing and innumerable
pillars swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness,
while the eye could see far into their depths.” This phenomenon furnished
a vivid description for his story, “The Picker and Piler,” contributed to
the “Corsair” of March 16, 1839, and to the April number of the “New
Monthly” for the same year, the plot of which seems to have been furnished
him by Rand, the portrait painter, to whom Willis sat in London in 1835,
and who regaled him during the sittings with stories of wild adventure.
Willis kept up communication with the great world by frequent trips to New
York, and by frequent visits from his metropolitan friends to Glenmary.
Neither was he by any means cut off from civilization at home. He explains
to the doctor in one of his letters that Owego, two miles away, and even
the village of Canewana, a mile nearer, are within the latitude of silver
forks and their accompanying vanities, morning calls, cards, dinner
giving, champagne, and French bonnets. R. H. Stoddard, the poet, who
visited Glenmary in the fall of 1841, with Mr. Mackay, a congressman from
New York, has given a pleasant reminiscence of his pilgrimage, from which
I quote the following interior:--

“The cottage,” he says, “had within it and about it the evidences of
a subtle, nice, clear refinement; of a thought that, even out of the
solitude of a rural life, could frame the pleasant things that make
the four and twenty hours turn to soft and kindly ways.… Mr. Willis
opened the door, received us cordially; and we found, in his
conversation and in such observation of all around us as a guest
might in propriety make, the hours of the evening as brilliant
in-doors as without. That thoroughly well-bred lady, so unpretending
and gentle, was at the table; at her feet, a large greyhound. On the
side table stood a large tulip-shaped vase of stained glass, whose
burden was, of course, bright flowers. There was everywhere copious
evidence that it was a home for literature. The books were abundant
and were gayly set.… And there was a miniature of lovely Mrs.
Willis. It was painted by Saunders, who had been a pet of the King
of Hanover. His exquisite work deserved the smile of royalty and,
what is better, of beauty. Amidst such scenes and the conversation
which came of such associations, our night went on. We left the lawn
of Glenmary with the memories of a night of romance.… Mr. Willis
belonged to a past school of men. He had the ways and tastes of a
more isolated and restricted society than belongs to our day, when
fortunes are fusing men and manners into one great glittering ball
that rolls through the year, before us and over us; but Mr.
Willis--whether in his early days, when the prince regent ruled, or
in our day, when we all rule, monarchs of ephemera--was an author
whose writings have added to what Doctor Johnson calls ‘the gayety
of mankind.’ He believed them better and higher and more
philosophical than this; and I believe there was truth and right in
his thought.”

The “Letters from Under a Bridge” are so heartsome in feeling and so much
mellower and more leisurely in style than Willis’s later work, that one
naturally speculates, in reading them, as to what might have been the
effect upon his literary product had fortune granted his wish, to be
allowed to end his days at Glenmary. Would study and the quiet of nature
have ripened it to something deeper and richer than anything that he has
left? Or would he have grown rusty with absence from the stir of cities
and the gay society that had hitherto seemed his congenial element? It is
impossible to answer this question with confidence. Undoubtedly his later
work would have been other and better than it was if he had had the time
to select and condense. He would have written more and scribbled less.
But whether he would ever have excelled the best parts of his earlier
writings is doubtful. His talent was of the kind which discipline does not
always improve. It was the expression of his temperament, fresh, facile,
spontaneous, but impatient of continuance. He was best at a dash--a
sketch, or a short tale. His gift was of the sort that shows more
gracefully in youth than age. _Idem manebat neque idem decebat._ It is not
improbable that, even under the most favoring conditions, he would have
kept on writing Jottings, Loiterings, Hurrygraphs, etc., lacking, as he
evidently did, the power of construction required for a large and serious
work. But this speculation is perhaps an idle one. Whether or not it lay
in his nature to sing or to say that “something” of which Ben Jonson
tells, “that must and shall be sung high and aloof,” fate denied him the
proof. His necessities drove him back to the city and the editor’s chair,
to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. Possibly the finer work
might have shaped itself in silence, but “not in these noises.” Meanwhile
his present content found utterance in his “Reverie at Glenmary,”--a
single breath of gratitude to God,--the most sincerely devout of all his
religious poems, and pathetic when one reflects how soon the sheltered
happiness for which it gives thanks was to pass away.

Not long after his return to America, he had begun to try his hand at play
writing. The “Mirror” of August 19, 1837, gave passages from a five act
tragedy that he had lately completed, “Bianca Visconti, or the Heart
Overtasked,” with the announcement that it was to be acted at the Park
Theatre on the 24th instant. It was founded upon the life of Francesco
Sforza, a soldier of fortune in the fourteenth century, who obtained the
hand of Bianca, daughter to the Duke of Milan, and thereby succeeded to
the duchy. The play was composed expressly for Josephine Clifton, a
popular actress of some talent, and of great physical force and beauty of
the large, queenly type, who took the part of the heroine. The _rôle_ of
Pasquali, “a whimsical poet,” was written for Harry Placide, a favorite
player in his generation, whose “Grandfather Whitehead” and other
impersonations, humorous or pathetic, are still affectionately remembered
by old play-goers. When this tragedy was published in the spring of 1839,
with some changes in the fifth act, the “Mirror” declared that its success
upon the stage had been complete. This was an overstatement, but whatever
partial success or qualified failure it may have met with on its first
representation, Willis felt sufficiently encouraged to persevere in his
dramatic experiments. In a private letter from New York, December 15,
1838, he said that Colman had just given him $300 for an edition of
“Bianca,” which he considered a good price, as Epes Sargent had sold his
“Velasco” for $60. Wallack, he continues, who managed the National, the
rival theatre to the Park, was full of admiration of it, and was coming to
see the whole play rehearsed. Willis was going to charge him $1,000 for
the use of it, and a benefit which, he calculated, would be equal to from
$500 to $700 more. On the 1st of September, 1837, just after the first
representation of “Bianca” at the Park, Willis entered into an agreement
with its manager, Turner Merritt, by which the latter agreed to pay him
$1,000, one year from date, provided he should write a comedy for Miss
Clifton, pronounced successful by her after three months’ acting. In
pursuance of this agreement, he had ready in two months “The Betrothal,” a
comedy, which was announced in the “Mirror” of November 25th as to be
acted at the Park on the Monday following. The notice added that the play
would probably take with the public, as it had pleased the actors,--a good
criterion. “The Betrothal,” however, was unequivocally damned, much to
Willis’s mortification, though not to his permanent discouragement. The
text of this play was never published, nor was that of another comedy,
“Imei, the Jew,” with which he was busy in January, 1839, and of which he
seems to have finished only a few scenes. Rumors were in circulation that
Willis had sued Miss Clifton for failing to complete the engagement in the
matter of “The Betrothal,” but these were officially contradicted in the
“Mirror.” He had better luck with another comedy, successively entitled
“Dying for Him,” “The Usurer Matched,” and “Tortesa the Usurer,” based on
the Florentine story of Genevra d’Amori and written with more care than
his two previous attempts. He prepared the way for its representation by
printing four installments of it in the “Mirror;” and about a year after
the first of these appeared it was put on at the National, April 8, 1839,
with Wallack cast for Tortesa, the principal character. It ran four times
the first week, and kept the stage to the 20th, “being received,” said the
“Mirror,” “with acclamations by one of the most crowded and fashionable
audiences ever assembled within the walls of a theatre.” In spite of this
glowing language, “Tortesa” seems to have had a _succès d’estime_ merely.
Wallack had agreed to pay the author one half the proceeds of the fourth,
ninth, thirteenth, and eighteenth nights, after deducting $300 each night
for expenses. If it was produced in England, Willis was to have one third
of the proceeds of the fourth, eighth, and twelfth performances there.
Wallack did bring it out at the Surrey Theatre in London, in August of
this same year. Willis was in England at the time and wrote to Dr. Porter
that it had had “a splendid run--crammed houses every night.” It shared
the honors of the “first night” with Willis’s old adversary, Captain
Marryat, whose “Phantom Ship” was the afterpiece. All this brought the
author nothing but empty glory, as Wallack was distressed for money and
could not afford to pay him his one third share of the profits. “So I gave
it up,” wrote Willis, “and he pocketed the whole. By the way,” he adds, “I
have two more nights at the National which I authorize you to look after
and receive for me. The thirteenth and eighteenth representations remain
for me. Will you see if you can get Kean or Vandenhoff in for Angelo on
those nights? I have seen a great deal of Kean since I have been here, and
he is truly a good fellow and a great actor. He breakfasted with us a day
or two ago and Mary was very much interested that he should do well in
America. I have given Vandenhoff ‘Bianca’ for himself and daughter to
play in America. She is a fine, handsome girl, but I have not seen her
play.”

These two plays of Willis did not add many leaves to his laurels. His
genius was undramatic; in his stories the dramatic element is not the most
pronounced. Both “Bianca” and “Tortesa” have passages which are good as
poetry or declamation, and here and there occur bits of spirited dialogue;
but in general the characters are only half vitalized, the situations are
not firmly grasped and presented, and the language is stilted. In short,
they are book plays merely, with nothing to distinguish them from the
numerous experiments of other American literary gentlemen who have essayed
to feed the stage with manuscripts from their library tables. In “Bianca
Visconti” the main situation--the heroine’s connivance at her brother’s
murder, in order that her husband might become Duke of Milan--is strongly
imagined but feebly carried out. One cannot help thinking how Victor Hugo,
for instance, would have dealt with this motive. “Tortesa the Usurer”
seems to be made up of hints from Shakespeare. The hero has some slight
resemblance to Shylock; the heroine drinks a sleeping potion, like Juliet,
to escape an odious marriage; and in the last act, which is constructed
with some skill, she stands in the frame of a picture, like Hermione in
“Winter’s Tale,” though with a different purpose.

Willis’s official connection with the “New York Mirror” had stopped with
the termination of his “Pencillings,” and after January 16, 1836, his name
ceased to appear at the head of the editorial column. His contributions,
however, as we have seen, went on, and included not only “Letters from
Under a Bridge,” but poems and miscellaneous correspondence, besides a
half dozen of stories, afterwards collected in “Romance of Travel.” The
verse contributions were added to the American edition of “Melanie,” 1837,
which contained a number of things written since the appearance of the
English edition two years previous. Notable among these were “Lines on
Leaving Europe,” “To a Face Beloved,”--both of which have been
mentioned,--“To Ermengarde,” and a song-like little piece entitled
“Spring,” the opening lines of which are especially Willisy:--

“The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May,
With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers;
And with it comes a thirst to be away,
Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours.”

There are evidences in Willis’s private correspondence, about this time,
of some coolness between himself and General Morris, which appears to have
originated, or perhaps to have found expression in a series of three
letters signed “Veritas,” written from London and printed in the “Mirror,”
in the fall of 1838. These letters, after taking the “Mirror” to task for
misleading the American public by the false pictures of London society
given in the “Pencillings,” proceeded to set its readers right, in a
series of the coarsest and most slanderous little biographies of English
men and women of letters, retailing with unction all the gossip of the
clubs about Lady Blessington, Count d’Orsay, the Bulwers, Disraeli, Mrs.
Norton, Miss Landon, Fraser, and many others. Some of these had been
Willis’s friends; others he had never met; but he wrote an indignant
rejoinder to the “Mirror” of November 10th, denying, out and out, many of
the lies in “Veritas’s” communication, and explaining away some of the
misrepresentations and exaggerations. This letter Morris prefaced with an
editorial note in which he said that he had been much censured on account
of the “Pencillings,” and, therefore, “the object of these letters was to
disabuse the public mind in this country of what seemed to the author a
wrong and injurious impression with regard to the position in English
society of certain distinguished but unworthy characters, whose example
and many of whose writings are of a pernicious tendency. With one or two
exceptions, we believe that our correspondent has merely stated well
attested facts.” One of these exceptions was the slander upon Miss Landon,
for printing which Morris apologized. This partial indorsement of
“Veritas” by the editor naturally displeased Willis; and naturally, too,
he was pleased by an answer to it by Dr. Porter, in the “Spirit of the
Times,” which was then edited by his brother, William T. Porter, “the tall
son of York,” and with which Dr. Porter himself was editorially connected.
“The Skylight letter,” Willis writes to the latter, “was capitally done,
and the ‘Mirror’ was touched on all its sore places to a charm. My brother
was in New York just after and called at the office, and the fury the
General was in will amuse him for the next six months. Morris called you a
gallipot, said it was a poor article, and will hurt your paper, and all
that; but sits down and writes _me_ a most affectionate letter of four
foolscap pages, denying all possible thought of me in the London matter,
and swearing he was my defender and best friend.” Elsewhere in his
correspondence with Dr. Porter, Willis expresses some doubts as to the
sincerity of Morris’s friendship, and seems to suspect that it was more
than half policy and a desire to exploit him. It does not appear that this
little misunderstanding ever came to a breach. The “Mirror” continued
most courteous in its tone towards Willis, and its editor became and
remained, till his death, one of his closest friends. But for a time
Willis felt inclined to draw off, and to find some other avenue through
which to address his public. This feeling took shape in December, 1838, in
his acceptance of a proposal from Dr. Porter to join him in establishing a
weekly paper. The “Corsair,” which was the outcome of this arrangement,
was, like “Brother Jonathan” and the “New World,” one of the crop of
weeklies which sprang up in the wake of the first transatlantic steamers.
On May 19, 1838, the Great Western, the first steam vessel that had
crossed the ocean, weighed anchor in New York harbor for her return trip.
A company of gentlemen, among whom were Chevalier Wikoff and General
Morris, were on board by invitation and accompanied the ship as far as
Sandy Hook, where they were taken off by a pilot. It may perhaps have
occurred to the general at the time, that here was what would work a
change in the conditions of American journalism. It was now possible to
get the freshest supply from the London literary market within a
fortnight, and the news of Europe before it was cold. Willis and Porter
proposed frankly to live on the plunder of this foreign harvest; and since
there was no international copyright, to raise the black flag, and take
reprisals wherever they could find them. In a letter to his intending
partner, dated at Owego, Christmas eve, 1838, he proposed to call their
venture the “Pirate,” and sent the following draft of a prospectus:--

THE PIRATE,

A GAZETTE OF LITERATURE, FASHION, AND NOVELTY.

T. O. Porter and N. P. Willis propose to issue weekly, in the city
of New York, a paper of the above designation and character. It is
their design, as editors, to present as amusing a paper as can be
made from the current wit, humor, and literature of the world; to
give dramatic criticisms without fear or favor; to hold up the age
in its fashions, its eccentricities, and its amusements; to take
advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical
law of copyright; and in the name of American authors (for our own
benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers,
the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in France,
England, and Germany. As to original American productions, we shall,
as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing (that is
good), holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and
Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for
Halleck and Irving.

“If anybody says the name is undignified,” writes Willis,
“tell them there are very few dignified people in the world,
and still _fewer lovers_ of dignity, and by the Lord, we
must live by the _many_. Then again we want a root, a
reason, a rail, a runner to start upon, and this bloody
copyright will answer the purpose. People will say, ‘Why,
damme, Willis can’t get paid for his books because the law
won’t protect him, so he has hauled his wind, and joined the
people that robbed him.’”

Willis felt very bitterly the absence of an international copyright. By
the act of 1838, the English Parliament, acting in self-defense, had
refused to protect any longer the literary property of American authors,
until America should have the decency to reciprocate. This cut double upon
the American author. It deprived him of any gain from the circulation of
his writings in England, and it discouraged native literature by flooding
this country with cheap reprints of English books, for the copy of which
the American publisher paid nothing. The former loss would not have been
serious to many American writers at that date, possibly not to so very
many even now. But England had been Willis’s best market, literary work in
America was wretchedly paid, and he saw starvation staring him in the
face.

The “Pirate” was finally toned down into the “Corsair,” and a prospectus
which was a modification of the one drafted by Willis in the above letter
was printed and circulated in January, 1839. He sent one to Henry Clay,
and begged him to mention the “Corsair” in his argument on the copyright,
as a good comment on the state of the law. Mr. Clay replied in a very
polite letter, giving his views upon the copyright question, and inclosing
his subscription. The office of the “Corsair” was in the Astor House, No.
8 Barclay Street. The first number was published March 15, 1839, and the
last (No. 52) March 7, 1840. At the head of the sheet was a rakish looking
craft under full sail, and Willis led off with a truculent editorial, “The
Quarter Deck” proclaiming the policy of the new paper. To the earlier
numbers he contributed art notes and miscellaneous chat, “The Pencil,”
“The Gallery,” “The Divan,” etc.; two papers on autographs; a “Letter from
Under a Bridge,” a generic name that he gave to much correspondence about
this time, not comprised in the original “Letters”; some reminiscences of
Miss Landon as “The Departed Improvisatrice,” and a very harsh review,
“Paulding the Author Disinterred.” This last was unlike Willis, who was
almost always kind in his notices of brother authors, and it provoked much
unfavorable comment, particularly a rejoinder in the “Courier and
Enquirer,” by Colonel James Watson Webb, a gentleman who afterwards fell
foul of Willis in various ways. In this article he held him up to scorn
as a writer “who revels on the cut of a coat or the ottomans of a lady’s
boudoir, and delights in the soft shades of a glen;” and whose works were
only fit to “make the papillotes of ladies’ chambermaids.” Willis had an
unaffected disrelish for Paulding’s writings, which he thought coarse and
pointless. But the Secretary of the Navy was an old man, whose books
belonged already to the past, and it was ungracious to disturb his age
with taunts about their obsoleteness. One suspects, in reading this
review, that its writer had some personal grudge against the author of
“The Dutchman’s Fireside.”

Willis also contributed to the “Corsair” “A Story Writ for the Beautiful,”
which he described as a “gay, off-hand tale,” and never reprinted. It is a
rather nonsensical yarn, but has one pretty passage in it descriptive of
the end of a ball,--perhaps at Devonshire House?--where the servants raise
the balcony awnings to let in the dawn, and the ladies walk in the garden,
“sprinkling their gloves with picking wet roses.”

On May 20, 1839, Willis sailed for England on the packet ship Gladiator.
His wife accompanied him, and, on landing, they were met by the news that
her father, General Stace, had died a week before their arrival. This
made their stay in England, which was protracted to April, 1840, a sad
one in many respects, and of course a quiet one. They passed most of the
time with relatives of Mrs. Willis at Old Charlton, Kent, after a short
visit to her sister Anne, who was married to the Rev. William Vincent, son
of the vicar of Bolney Priory, in Sussex. Willis had his hands full of
literary business which required his presence frequently in London,
Ireland, and elsewhere. Among other things, he had contracted with Virtue
to furnish the letterpress for an illustrated work on Canada, and another
on Ireland, uniform with the “American Scenery.” He was to write 240 pages
for each, and to be paid in all £950. By some five or six weeks of hard
work he finished the Canadian book in August, and then started for a tour
in Ireland preparatory to writing up its scenery. He left Mrs. Willis at
Dublin, while he recrossed to Scotland, and took in the famous tournament
at Eglintoun Castle, which filled the land for months with its noise of
preparation, and ended in fizzle and rain-water. Of this he gave a capital
description in his letter to the “Corsair,” “My Adventures at the
Tournament.” Mrs. Willis remained with some kinsfolk of her mother, at
Borrmount Lodge, near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while her husband spent
a fortnight in doing the Lakes of Killarney and other show places in the
south of the island. He wrote to her there from Tarbert-on-the-Shannon,
September 13th:--

“The poverty on this side Ireland makes me sick at the stomach. Such
a God-and-man-abandoned collection of disease and misery I never
believed possible. Death and disease seem clutching their victims
away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through
their last agony in the streets--unpitied. How people can ride in
carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this
great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak
pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their
skinny hands,--poor devils!”

Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of
Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know
anything about it? Fourteen days! All the knowledge he possesses of
Ireland might have been acquired in fourteen hours.” Willis might have
retorted by asking what a Scotchman could know about the Valley of
Wyoming. Or he might have pointed out that, even as early as 1839,
Americans had fuller sources of information about Ireland than they found
altogether comfortable. After three weeks more of touring in that ragged
commonwealth, he returned with his wife to England.

Bolney was but twelve miles from Brighton, where the Wallacks were
staying, and while visiting at the former place Willis had run across
country and taken dinner with them. In November he spent a few days at
Brighton, where he lodged at the Ship Hotel, found several old
acquaintances,--Lady Stepney and Lady Georgiana Fane among them,--and made
some new ones. At a dinner at Lady Macdonald’s he met Charles Kemble, the
actor, and Horace Smith, of the “Rejected Addresses,” whose brother James
he had known at Lady Blessington’s four years ago. One of Willis’s
cherished plans had been to spend the winter in Spain, a country rich in
matter for future pencillings, but this scheme he had to forego, Ireland
proving a longer job than he had anticipated. The last day of 1839 found
him still at Charlton, working four hours a day on the book, and in
January and February he had to make another trip to Ireland, visiting the
Giant’s Causeway and other celebrated bits of scenery in the north. Lady
Georgiana Fane had procured him a letter from her father, the old Earl of
Westmoreland, to Lord Ebrington, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which
Willis was described as “a gentleman of fortune, likely to attain to the
presidency”! He dined with Lord Ebrington at Dublin, and, happening to be
there at the time of the ball given in honor of the queen’s wedding, he
made a letter of it for the “Corsair,” afterwards included in “Sketches of
Travel.”

The three books on American, Canadian, and Irish scenery were hack work,
and there is, of course, little of personal or purely literary interest in
them. They were written, however, with more taste and animation than the
run of subscription books of the kind. Willis was a natural traveler, with
a good eye for landscape effects, and the best chapters are those
descriptive of spots with which he was already familiar, Niagara, the
Hudson, Trenton Falls, Saratoga, and the like. Here he occasionally drew
on his “Inklings.” For places that he had not visited he trusted to the
narratives of former travelers, such as President Dwight, John Bartram,
and Peter Kalm. The description of the White Mountains was taken mainly
from a friend’s manuscript diary; and for statistics and local legends he
went to the authorities. The American book contained, among its two
hundred and forty-two engravings, a view from Glenmary lawn and another of
Undercliff, General Morris’s place on the Hudson. The last gave Willis
opportunity for a eulogy on his former partner, and quotations from his
songs. “Canadian Scenery” was “lifted,” almost entire, from the narratives
of Charlevoix, Adair, Heriot, Hodgson, Murray, Talbot, Cockburn, and
other travelers and historians--of course with ample acknowledgments. It
was not so purely descriptive as the American book, but contained chapters
on the native Indians, the history of the settlement of the country, the
present condition of the inhabitants, sporting, immigration, etc. In fact,
there is very little of Willis in the book. In “The Scenery and
Antiquities of Ireland” he had the assistance of Mr. J. Sterling Coyne,
who prepared the whole of the second volume and a part of the first,
Willis’s share consisting only of descriptions of the North of Ireland, a
portion of Connemara, the Shannon, Limerick, and Waterford.

Before leaving America he had arranged with Colman for the publication of
“The Tent Pitched” (“À l’Abri”), “Tales of Five Lands” (“Romance of
Travel”), and “The Usurer Matched.” He was to have twenty per cent. on
sales, and received $2,000 on account in advance. Meanwhile the Longmans
offered him £200 for “Romance of Travel,” if published in advance of the
American edition. Willis wrote to Dr. Porter, July 26, 1839, to delay the
Colman publication. “If it is printed in America before I get the sheets
here, I lose exactly $1,000. I trust in Heaven you have not forgotten my
earnest injunctions on this subject. A London publisher will buy it if a
published copy has not come over, else he may have it for nothing.” The
book was accordingly published first in London, in January, 1840, in three
volumes, with the title “Loiterings of Travel,” and, later in the same
year, in America, as “Romance of Travel,” in a single volume, very
shabbily printed. Virtue also paid him £50 for an English edition of “À
l’Abri,” with illustrations by Bartlett. A fourth London edition of
“Pencillings,” with four illustrations, was coming out, and, finally,
Cunningham, Macrone’s successor, printed an English edition of “Bianca
Visconti” and “Tortesa” as “Two Ways of Dying for a Husband.” This was
published on half profits, and Willis expected to make about £50 from it.
Serjeant Talfourd, the author of “Ion,” wrote him a complimentary letter
on its appearance. “My literary receipts in England this year,” wrote
Willis to Dr. Porter, on the last day of 1839, “will amount to $7,500, all
gone for expenses, back debts, etc.”

“Romance of Travel” was a collection of seven stories contributed to the
“Mirror,” the “New Monthly,” and the “Corsair.” They were crowded with
duels, intrigues, disguises, escapades, assassinations, masked balls, lost
heirs, and all the stock properties of the romancer’s art. The view of
life which they presented was unreal to the verge of the fantastic, but
they abounded in descriptions of great elegance and even beauty, and the
narrative went trippingly along. Willis had many of the gifts of the born
_raconteur_. He lacked a large constructiveness, but in the minor graces
of the story-teller he was always happy. He was skillful in managing the
_callida junctura_, good at a start, a transition, or a finish. One must
not look in these artificial fictions for truthful delineation of
character, or expect to have his emotions deeply stirred. The tragic
incidents, especially, fail in the time-honored Aristotelian requirement.
They are exciting enough, in a way, but move neither pity nor terror. The
high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the
bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness.
Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the
extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air of
_vraisemblance_. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta
Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have
been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by
digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a
portrait of the author.” From this defect and from the author’s light way
of telling his stories, it followed that the more serious of these carried
no conviction of reality to the reader’s mind. “Violanta Cesarini” is the
history of a humpbacked artist, who turns out to be the heir to the
estates of a Roman noble, thereby supplanting his sister, but enabling her
to marry his chum, a poor artist, with whom she was secretly in love. The
outlines of the plot were from a true story told him by Lady Blessington,
but he added the love passages and, of course, all the particulars in the
development of the tale. “Paletto’s Bride” was the legend of a Venetian
gondolier, who made--and as suddenly lost--a fortune in a single night’s
play, figured as a mysterious unknown in the high society of Florence, and
carried off a titled beauty to share his home among the lagoons. “The
Bandit of Austria” was a modification of a story related to Willis by
D’Orsay. The heroine was a Hungarian countess, who had run off with a
famous outlaw. The latter having been killed by the Austrian police, the
lady, without wasting much time in unavailing regrets, falls in love with
the narrator’s handsome English page (a glorified William Michell?), and
is wedded to him after a series of extraordinary adventures. Willis worked
in here a striking description of the grotto of Adelsberg, in which the
most effective scene of the story takes place. “Lady Ravelgold” is a tale
of English high life. The hero is a young London banker, who proves in the
end to be a count of the Russian Empire, and the inheritor of vast
possessions in that conveniently indefinite country. Three high-born
beauties are desperately enamored of him, among them a mother and
daughter, the latter of whom ultimately gets him. As in “Ernest Clay,”
and, in fact, in nearly all Willis’s stories of high life, it is the women
who make love to the men. The scene of the garden party at “Rose Eden” was
suggested by a _fête champêtre_ at Gore House, and the delicious picture
of Lady Ravelgold’s boudoir was doubtless borrowed from the same mansion.
The high-piled luxuriance of the upholstery in these “Romances of Travel,”
their _nonchalant_ young heroes, their jeweled and embroidered heroines,
with Aladdin-like resources in the way of palaces, gardens, retainers, and
stalactite caverns, point to “Vivian Grey” and the other expensive
fictions of the youthful Disraeli as Willis’s nearest models. Upon the
whole, the best story in the book is “Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice,”
which was more within the natural compass of Willis’s talent. It has a
malicious irony that reminds one of “Beppo” and the “Decameron,” and it is
not without an undercurrent of pathos.

In spite of his other literary preoccupations he found time to write a
series of weekly or fortnightly letters to the “Corsair,”--“Jottings down
in London,”--a portion of which stand in his collected writings as
“Passages from an Epistolary Journal.” They are naturally not as fresh as
the earlier “Pencillings,” though very good foreign correspondence of an
ephemeral sort. In search of matter for these letters, Willis went about a
good deal in London. He visited the theatres and the House of Commons,
looked up his old acquaintances of 1835, was present at a reception to the
Persian ambassadors at Lady Morgan’s,--where he saw Mrs. Norton
again,--dined with the Nawaub of Oude, went to a public dinner given to
Macready at the Freemasons’ Tavern,--where he sat next Samuel Lover,--to a
ball at Almack’s, and a tournament in St. John’s Wood. Disraeli walked
home with him from a ball and said he was going to Niagara on his wedding
trip. Willis noted some changes in England since his first visit. Among
other things William IV. was dead and Victoria on the throne, and the
London shops had increased greatly in splendor.

One of the most interesting results of this second stay in England was his
meeting with Thackeray--then a young and comparatively unknown writer--and
his engaging him as a contributor to the “Corsair,” a stroke of
journalistic enterprise which ought to have prolonged the life of that
piratical journal, but did not. In a private letter to Dr. Porter, dated
July 26th, Willis wrote:--

“I have engaged a contributor to the ‘Corsair.’ Who do you think?
The author of ‘Yellowplush’ and ‘Major Gahagan.’ I have mentioned it
in my jottings, that our readers may know all about it. He has gone
to Paris, and will write letters from there, and afterwards from
London, for a guinea a _close column_ of the ‘Corsair’--cheaper than
I ever did anything in my life. I will see that he is paid for a
while to see how you like him. For myself, I think him the very best
periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature, too.
I take the responsibility of it. You will hear from him soon.”

The mention in the jottings here referred to appeared in the “Corsair” of
August 24th.

“One of my first inquiries in London was touching the authorship of
‘The Yellowplush Papers’ and the ‘Reminiscences of Major
Gahagan,’--the only things in periodical literature, except the
‘Pickwick Papers,’ for which I looked with any interest or
eagerness. The author, Mr. Thackeray, breakfasted with me yesterday,
and the ‘Corsair’ will be delighted, I am sure, to hear that I have
engaged this cleverest and most gifted of the magazine-writers of
London to become _a regular correspondent of the ‘Corsair.’_ He
left London for Paris the day after, and having resided in that city
for many years, his letters thence will be pictures of life in
France, done with a bolder and more trenchant pen than has yet
attempted the subject. He will present a long letter every week, and
you will agree with me that he is no common acquisition. Thackeray
is a tall, athletic man of about thirty-five, with a look of talent
that could never be mistaken. He has taken to literature after
having spent a very large inheritance; but in throwing away the
gifts of fortune, he has cultivated his natural talents very highly,
and is one of the most accomplished draftsmen in England, as well as
the cleverest and most brilliant of periodical writers. He has been
the principal critic for the ‘Times,’ and writes for ‘Fraser’ and
‘Blackwood.’ You will hear from him by the first steamer after his
arrival in Paris, and thenceforward regularly.”

The same number contained Thackeray’s first letter, dated at Paris, Hôtel
Mirabeau, July 25, 1839, and concluding with a characteristic little
address to the editor, in which he speaks of his feelings “in finding good
friends and listeners among strangers far, far away--in receiving from
beyond seas kind crumbs of comfort for our hungry vanities.” These letters
were signed T. T. (Timothy Titcomb), and eight of them in all were
published in the “Corsair.” A few appear in Thackeray’s collected works in
a volume entitled “The Paris Sketch Book,” and all of them, with a few
changes, in “The Student’s Quarter; or Paris Five and Thirty Years since,”
published by Hotten after Thackeray’s death. Thackeray humorously alludes
to this episode in his early literary struggles in his novel of “Philip,”
the hero of which contributes a weekly letter, signed “Philalethes,” to a
fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten
Thousand.” “Political treatises,” writes the excellent Dr. Firmin to his
son, “are not so much wanted as personal news, regarding the notabilities
of London.” This description of the “Mirror” pointed, of course, at
Willis’s authorship of the phrase, “The Upper Ten Thousand.”

It may be not uninteresting to compare Thackeray’s opinion of Willis with
Willis’s impressions of Thackeray. The author of the “Book of Snobs” paid
his respects twice, at least, in print to the author of “Pencillings by
the Way:” once in a review of “Dashes at Life” in the “Edinburgh” for
October, 1845, and again in an article “On an American Traveler,” being
the sixth number of “The Proser,” contributed to the nineteenth volume of
“Punch” (1850), and occasioned by Willis’s “People I have Met.” In both of
these papers he quizzes Willis, though not unkindly. He laughs especially
at his fashion in “Ernest Clay,” of representing the aristocratic English
dames as all throwing themselves at the head of the conquering young
genius who writes for the magazines.

“The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis
assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of
free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces
with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a
man by being a famous _Free Pencil_ may achieve a similar
distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost
every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”

“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose
reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one
is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes
it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant
descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes
it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own
expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of
us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the
duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the
strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the
odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other,
a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have
whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn
memories of England’s fairest daughters. When the female English
aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the
whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the
melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the
heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and
asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster
going to show up _me_?’”

Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the
Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove
with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt
British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian
person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and
by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for
Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and
her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the
cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest
mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”--

“There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by
the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not
content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne--not
for a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it
and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom
Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger
and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but
isn’t this _un peu fort_, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described
as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M.
for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her
husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your
part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little
prejudices?”

In April, 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Willis sailed for America, taking with them
Miss Bessie Stace, a younger sister of Mrs. Willis, who was to make them a
visit at Owego. The “Corsair” had not been a success financially, and Dr.
Porter had become discouraged and discontinued publication in March,
transferring his subscription list to the “Albion.” Since the
establishment of the paper, a year before, Willis had ceased his
contributions to the New York “Mirror,” and he did not resume them until
the end of 1842. But meanwhile he was not left without a market for his
literary wares. Just before leaving England he had received a letter from
Mr. J. Gregg Wilson, the publisher of “Brother Jonathan,” a new weekly
printed in New York, with a circulation of some twenty thousand,
informing him of the “Corsair’s” suspension, expressing a warm admiration
for his talents, and inviting him to write the “Brother Jonathan” a weekly
letter, a column in length, for which he promised to pay him at the
highest current rates. To this paper Willis contributed about a year and a
half, or up to September, 1841. His humorous poem, “Lady Jane,” was
published in installments in the “Dollar,” the monthly edition of “Brother
Jonathan.” With both of these periodicals he had a _quasi_ editorial
connection, though the real editor was Mr. H. Hastings Weld. He received
similar invitations from the two monthlies, “Graham’s Magazine” and
“Godey’s Lady’s Book,” which were paying their contributors--among whom
were nearly all the principal writers in the country--prices hitherto
unknown to American periodicals. Willis was paid at the rate of $50 for an
article of four printed pages of the “Lady’s Book,”--less, no doubt, than
a writer of equal reputation could command now, but regarded as wildly
munificent in 1841. Twelve dollars a page were the regular rates of both
these magazines. “The burst on author-land of Graham’s and Godey’s liberal
prices,” said Willis, “was like a sunrise without a dawn.” Mr. Charles T.
Congdon, in his interesting “Reminiscences of a Journalist,” says that
“Mr. Willis was the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid. At
one time, about 1842, he was writing four articles monthly for four
magazines, and receiving $100 each.” This means an income of $4,800 a
year, but the strain required to keep up such a rate of production must
tax the powers of the readiest writer, and it was no wonder if the product
was of very uneven excellence. The four magazines here referred to were
undoubtedly the “Mirror,” “Graham’s,” “Godey’s,” and “The Ladies’
Companion,” of which Mrs. Sigourney was for a time the editor, and to
which Willis contributed in 1842 and 1843 a half dozen stories and a few
“Passages from Correspondence” and “Leaves from a Table Book.” Two of
these stories are not found among his collected writings: “Poyntz’s Aunt,”
a Saratoga tale, which has been mentioned before, and “Fitz Powys and the
Nun, or Diplomacy in High Life,” a very impossible fiction, and not worth
describing. Such of the “Leaves” and “Scraps” as deserved preserving found
their way into “Ephemera.” His contributions to “Godey’s” began with the
January number for 1842, and continued, though with greatly diminished
frequency, till January, 1850. During the first year he had an article in
nearly every number, most of them stories. For “Graham’s” he began to
write in January, 1843, and contributed occasionally as late as 1851.
“The Marquis in Petticoats” and “Broadway; A Sketch” were published in
1843 in Epes Sargent’s short-lived magazine; “The Power of an Injured
Look” in the “Gift” for 1845, an annual issued in Philadelphia. He edited
another annual, the “Opal” for 1844, and wrote articles of various kinds
for other periodicals. During the two years and a half from January, 1842,
to June, 1844, he published, all in all, some forty stories, collected,
with two or three exceptions, in “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.”
Willis was at this time, beyond a doubt, the most popular, best paid, and
in every way most successful magazinist that America had yet seen. He
commanded the sympathy of his readers more than any other periodical
writer of his day, and his reputation almost amounted to fame. Colonel
Higginson tells a story, illustrating his vogue, about a solid commercial
gentleman in Boston, who, finding himself by chance at some literary
dinner or tea, is reported to have entered into the spirit of the occasion
by saying that “he guessed Gō-ēthe was the N. P. Willis of Germany.”

Willis lived at Owego till 1842, and continued to date his letters to
“Brother Jonathan,” “Graham’s,” etc., “from under a bridge.” He had
expected something like £1,000 from General Stace’s estate, but it yielded
him nothing. His publisher failed about this time, and his arrangement
with “Brother Jonathan” coming to an end, he engaged with a Washington
paper, the “National Intelligencer,” to send it fortnightly correspondence
from New York. All these causes combined made it necessary for him to take
up his residence in the city and to offer Glenmary for sale; which he did
with a heavy heart, taking the public into his confidence, as usual, in
his affecting “Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of
Glenmary,” first printed in “Godey’s” for December, 1842, and included in
all subsequent editions of “Letters from under a Bridge.”

“I thought to have shuffled off my mortal coil tranquilly here;
flitting at last in some company of my autumn leaves, or some bevy
of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw.… In the shady depths
of the small glen above you, among the wild flowers and music, the
music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to
love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of
Glenmary as we can leave behind stay with you for recompense!”

This sacred nook--reserved from purchase--was the spot where his own hands
had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first
child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and
disappointment found a voice in one of the most naturally and simply
written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born
Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only
surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up
his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his
uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a
time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836,
Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then
“a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at
Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and
Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description,
hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs.
Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present
at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an
afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had
danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets
“slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and
broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from
Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842, regretting that he should not
have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.

A _rapprochement_ now took place between Willis and his former associate
General Morris. The “New York Mirror” of December 31, 1842, announced
that, expenditures having largely exceeded receipts, the paper would
henceforth be discontinued, but that a new series would begin in a few
weeks. The issue of the 17th of the same month had contained two short
sketches, “Imogen and Cymbeline” and “A Charming Widow of Sixty,” which
were afterwards joined into one and worked up into “Poyntz’s Aunt.” These
were of no importance except as being his first direct contributions to
the “Mirror” since the establishment of the “Corsair,” over two years and
a half before. On Saturday, April 8, 1843, the first number of the “New
Mirror” was issued under the joint editorship of Morris and Willis. The
latter had now entered upon an active career of journalism which lasted,
with a single brief interruption, for nearly a quarter of a century, till
his death in 1867. With the “New Mirror” he resumed the duties of an
editor, which he had laid down when he sold out the “American Monthly” in
1831. He had been, it is true, a nominal editor of the old “New York
Mirror” and of the “Corsair,” but virtually he was merely a contributor
and foreign correspondent of both these papers, and had felt no real
responsibility for their conduct. In the three periodicals which Morris
and Willis now edited successively, the “New Mirror,” the “Evening
Mirror,” and the “Home Journal,” the business management remained in the
hands of the former, but the literary policy was largely shaped by Willis,
and almost the entire time and energies of both partners were given to
their enterprises. The office of the new journal was at No. 4 Ann Street,
and its title in full ran as follows:--

“The New Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction:
Containing Original Papers, Tales of Romance, Sketches of Society,
Manners, and Everyday Life; Domestic and Foreign Correspondence; Wit
and Humor; Fashion and Gossip; the Fine Arts and Literary, Musical,
and Dramatic Criticism; extracts from New Works; Poetry, Original
and Selected; the Spirit of the Public Journals, etc., etc., etc.”

Willis could not afford to give up all the other strings to his bow until
he saw how the new venture was going to succeed. He retained his position
as New York correspondent to the “National Intelligencer,” and his
“Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” published in that paper, were
regularly reprinted in the “New Mirror.” His stories in “Graham’s” and
“Godey’s” went on up to January, 1844, after which time he announced that
he should write in future exclusively for his own paper. His contributions
to the “Mirror,” while editor, included tales, poems, sketches,
reminiscences, letters, book notices, besides editorial papers of a
miscellaneous sort, such as “Jottings,” “Slipshoddities,” “Diary of Town
Trifles,” “More Particularly,” “Just You and I,” “While We hold You by the
Button,” and what not, in which he set himself to catch and reflect the
passing humors and picturesque surfaces of town life. He might have said
of his muse at this time, as the psalmist of his soul, _Adhæsit
pavimento_. He wrote a number of “City Lyrics,” signed “Down Town Bard,”
celebrating beauties in white chip hats, whom he had helped into
omnibuses: Broadway odes, inviting his sweetheart to a moonlight walk up
to Thompson’s for an ice; or mock heroic lamentations in blank verse, that
the lady in the chemisette with black buttons, whose sixpence he had
passed up to the driver, might be doomed to pass him forever without
meeting,--

“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and I
Lone in the Waverley.”

It might have been expected that Willis, with his peculiarly dainty
instinct, would excel in this carving of cherry stones. But his society
verses in this kind were too hurriedly done and fell short of that
perfect workmanship and fineness of taste which float many a trifle of
Praed or Dobson. Willis’s city poems are flimsy and sometimes a little
vulgar, and their place is mid-way between really artistic society verse
and such metropolitan ballads as “Walking Down Broadway” and “Tassels on
the Boots,” which Lingard used to sing. The best of them, perhaps, is
“Love in a Cottage,” a charmingly frank expression of a preference for the
artificial, a quatrain from which has got into common quotation:--

“But give me a sly flirtation
By the light of a chandelier,
With music to play in the pauses,
And nobody very near.”

These “City Lyrics” were not all humorous, however. The bitter contrasts
which forced themselves upon Bryant walking “slowly through the crowded
street” appealed also to the “Down Town Bard,” who expressed them in “The
Pity of the Park Fountain,” and more successfully in “Unseen Spirits,”
first printed in the “New Mirror” of July 29, 1843. This little
poem--suggested, perhaps, in some mood of abstraction when the poet was
strolling listlessly up Broadway, his spirits low and his eternal
watchfulness for effects asleep--has, for that very reason doubtless, the
sudden touch of genius, the unconsciousness and careless felicity which
seem likely to keep it alive and to make it, possibly, the only work of
Willis destined to reach posterity. It was a favorite with Edgar Poe, who
used to recite it at reading clubs and the like, and who said that, in his
opinion and that of nearly all his friends, it was “the truest poem ever
written by Mr. Willis. There is about this little poem,” he continues,
“(evidently written in haste and through impulse) a true imagination. Its
grace, dignity, and pathos are impressive, and there is more in it of
earnestness of soul than in anything I have seen from the pen of its
author.”[6]

Willis took advantage of his new facilities to become his own publisher,
issuing successively, as shilling extras in the “Mirror Library,” his
“Sacred Poems,” “Poems of Passion,” and “Lady Jane and Humorous Poems;”
following these up with the first complete editions, from the “Mirror”
press, of “Letters from Under a Bridge,” and “Pencillings by the Way.”
The poems contained few notable additions to “Melanie” and earlier
volumes, except those just mentioned as printed in the “New Mirror,” and
the lines on the death of President Harrison, which were much admired at
the time. They were in anapestics, an unusual metre with him, but one
which he handled not without fire in this excellent elegy. “Lady Jane” was
a society poem in some two hundred “Don Juan” stanzas and was by no means
the worst of the many imitations of Byron’s inimitable masterpiece--if the
bull may be pardoned. The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,--this time
he was twenty-two,--and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly
affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a
decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the
boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes
enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who,
“having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may.
This is all, but the poet has caught, as successfully as was possible for
him, the alternate irony and sentiment, the rattling digressiveness, and
the eccentric rhyming and audacious punning of his original. There is a
delicate suggestion of Lady Blessington in the heroine; but Willis’s
English acquaintances could hardly have felt pleased at being served up
by name in the picture of a London _soirée_, as “Savage Landor, wanting
soap and sand,” as “frisky Bowring, London’s wisest bore,” or even as
“calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie.” Willis was now in considerable
request for lectures and occasional poems. On August 17, 1841, he
delivered a poem before the Linonian Society of Yale College, extracts
from which appear in his collected poems as “The Elms of New Haven.” This
address was not without touches of fancy and tender reminders to the
assembled scholars of

“The green tent where your harness was put on,”

and of summer nights in Academus, when the bird

“Sang a half carol as the moon wore on
And looked into his nest.”

But the blank verse carried him along into that smooth diffuseness which
was his besetting sin, and the poem, as a whole, did not rise above
commonplace. It compares but poorly with Dr. Holmes’s noble “Astræa,”
delivered in 1850 before the Phi Beta Kappa society at New Haven by a poet
who, though the son of another Alma Mater, gracefully acknowledged himself
the grandson of Yale. At another time, in response to an invitation from
James T. Fields to recite a poem in Boston, Willis wrote: “I took the
time to consider whether there _could be_ such a thing as an effective
_spoken_ poem. I am satisfied now, that my style depends so much on those
light shades which would be lost on more ears than two at a time, that I
should make an utter failure.” In 1843 he lectured on the formation of
character before the Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore, and the
audience--a large one--was disappointed by the serious nature of the
address. A “Lecture on Fashion” given before the New York Lyceum and
published in 1844 was more characteristic, at least in subject. He
lectured also in Boston and Albany, perhaps in other places, but without
marked success, being an indifferent orator and not at home on the
platform. “The calling on a hen for an egg, while she stands on the fence,
would seem to me reasonable,” said he, “in comparison with asking for my
sentiments, to be delivered on my legs.”

In the issue of the “New Mirror” for September 28, 1844, the editors
announced that they had been driven out of the field of weekly journalism
by the United States Post Office. The “Mirror,” being stitched, could not
go at newspaper rates, but was taxed, at the caprice of postmasters, from
two to fifteen cents a copy. This more than doubled the price to country
readers and killed the mail subscription. Remonstrances addressed to the
authorities at Washington only brought, in reply, a letter of
“sesquipedalian flummery.” Accordingly the editors decided to change the
shape of the paper and publish it as a daily. The first number of the
“Evening Mirror” came out October 7, 1844. It was published every day in
the week but Sunday, and ran till the close of the following year, under
the joint conduct of Morris, Willis, and Hiram Fuller. The last was a
young man, and a far-away cousin of Margaret Fuller. He continued the
paper, under the same name, for years after his partners had left him. It
was of Fuller that Bennett said, “We saw the editor of the ‘Evening
Mirror,’ the other day, treating his subscribers to an excursion; he drove
them all down Broadway to the Battery in an omnibus.” Edgar Poe was
engaged upon the “Evening Mirror” as critic and sub-editor in the autumn
of 1844, and remained upon it about six months. His relations with Willis
were of the pleasantest. The latter tried to befriend him in various ways
and lent him the hearty support of his paper. His recollections of his
former associate were given in the “Home Journal” for October 13, 1849,
shortly after Poe’s death, in an article bearing generous testimony to his
perfect regularity, reasonableness, and courtesy, while engaged upon the
“Mirror.” Poe’s own estimate of Willis is given at some length in his
series of papers on “The Literati of New York.”[7] It is friendly in tone,
but quite impartial and discriminating. Its literary criticism need not be
here repeated, but Poe’s personal impressions of Willis are worth
giving:--

“Mr. Willis’s career,” he writes, “has naturally made him enemies
among the envious host of dunces whom he has outstripped in the race
for fame; and these his personal manner (a little tinctured with
reserve, _brusquerie_, or even haughtiness) is by no means adapted
to conciliate. He has innumerable warm friends, however, and is
himself a warm friend. He is impulsive, generous, bold, impetuous,
vacillating, irregularly energetic, apt to be hurried into error,
but incapable of deliberate wrong. He is yet young and, without
being handsome in the ordinary sense, is a remarkably well-looking
man. In height he is perhaps five feet eleven and justly
proportioned. His figure is put in the best light by the ease and
assured grace of his carriage. His whole person and personal
demeanor bear about them the traces of ‘good society.’ His face is
somewhat too full or rather heavy in its lower proportions. Neither
his nose nor his forehead can be defended. The latter would puzzle
phrenology. His eyes are a dull bluish gray and small. His hair is
of a rich brown, curling naturally and luxuriantly. His mouth is
well cut, the teeth fine, the expression of the smile intellectual
and winning. He converses little, _well_ rather than fluently, and
in a subdued tone.”

It was after Morris and Willis had dissolved their connection with the
“Evening Mirror” that that journal published the article, by Thomas Dunn
English, reflecting severely on Poe’s character, for which he sued Fuller
and recovered $225 damages. His “Raven” was written while he was on the
paper, and first published anonymously in the “American Review.” Willis
reprinted it in the “Mirror” over Poe’s name, with a send-off, in which he
said, “We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive
poetry ever published in this country.”[8]

The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of
Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing
that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our
frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever
sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity--and calamity as
yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother
whose love had been to him both a stay and an inspiration. His youngest
sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25,
1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without
fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote
against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for
whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of
editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the
grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of
breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed
on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter
Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the
child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England
he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and
published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of
Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.”
This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American
Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part,
“Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840,
and which now appeared for the first time in book form, exhibited more
range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a
decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in
some of the earlier stories--such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and
Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”--of a capacity for stronger and graver
work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without
clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life”
stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the
hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the
Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.”
Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing
villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very
great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in the _dénouement_ and
confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French
adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend--like the Goddesses
on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer,
sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in
particular. But in each and all of these protean shapes, he is equally
fascinating and invincible. In “Beware of Dogs and Waltzing,” the author
entered the confessional with even less precaution than usual. It is
quite plain to one reading between the lines, that the hero, Mr. Lindsay
Maud, with his _retroussé_ nose, sanguineous tint, curly hair, and dimpled
chin, is no other than Willis himself; that the Surrey manor where the
scene is laid is Shirley Park; that its hospitable occupants, the
Becktons, are in truth the Skinner family; that Mabel Brown, the heroine,
is identical with Miss Mary Stace; and, lastly, that Miss Blakeney, the
dazzling but heartless heiress, whose hand Mr. Maud’s hostess kindly
destines for her young _protégé_, but whom, yielding to his better angel,
he flings overboard in favor of the gentler and sweeter Mabel, is a
certain belle of fortune, who figures in Willis’s private correspondence
as “trotted out” by Mrs. Skinner for his inspection with a view to his
making a rich marriage.

In “A Revelation of a Previous Life” and “The Phantom Head upon the
Table,” the supernatural is introduced, but not with success. Willis had
not the weird, haunting imagination of Hawthorne or Poe. He does not
prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required
for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are
set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have no
_vraisemblance_. Nor was he more at home in broad comedy. His humor--and
he had humor--was delicate rather than robust; was made out of irony,
pleasantry, and gay spirits, and depended more upon situation than
character. If the situation was droll, the humor was good; otherwise not.
“Miss Jones’s Son,” “The Spirit Love of Ione S----,” “Nora Mehidy,” “Meena
Dimity,” and “Born to love Pigs and Chickens” were all _manqué_. The best
of the humorous tales is “The Female Ward,” which tells of the
embarrassments of a rather fast young gentleman in Boston, who receives an
unexpected consignment, in the shape of a raw heiress, from a Southern
plantation; her confiding parents intrusting her to his guardianship, with
a request that he place her at school in some high-toned seminary. His
difficulties in trying to perform this commission, ending with his lodging
her temporarily in a private lunatic asylum, are very happily imagined.
“The Female Ward” would lend itself nicely to the dramatizer, and make up
into a most amusing little farce. “Those Ungrateful Blidginses” was funny,
but wicked. It was Willis’s way of avenging himself upon two maiden ladies
with whom he had fallen in, and subsequently fallen out, during his
travels in Italy, and who, on returning to America, had circulated reports
not to his credit. He had another hit at them in “Ernest Clay,” as “two
abominable old maids by the name of Buggins or Blidgins, representing the
_scan. mag._ of Florence.” The story caused a good deal of scandal. The
victims (whose names were thinly disguised) were high in Knickerbocker
social circles, and the doors of many of the best houses in Albany and New
York were closed forever against Willis, as a consequence of this
indiscretion. There was even some rumor in the Albany newspapers to the
effect that he had been challenged by a friend of the injured ladies, and
had declined the challenge, but this he denied. “Kate Crediford” is a
clever specimen of anti-climax. The writer sees an old love at the theatre
and, fancying that she looks unhappy, his flame revives, and he goes home
and writes her an impassioned declaration. His letter is answered by the
lady’s husband, who informs him of her recent marriage, and explains her
pensiveness by the fact that she had eaten too heartily of unripe fruit
before going to the play. In “The Poet and the Mandarin” and “The Inlet of
Peach Blossoms,” the descriptions are richly fanciful. But the most truly
imaginative of all these tales is “The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall.” The
theme is one that would have delighted Hawthorne, and though he might have
treated it more meaningly, he could not have improved upon its wild,
half-eerie gayety, with its undercurrent of regret--the old Horatian
regret for the shortness of life and vanished youth. A superannuated beau,
lingering in the empty colonnade of Congress Hall after the close of the
Saratoga season, sees a spectral procession of coaches drive up to the
door and deposit, one after another, their loads of ladies with escorts
and baggage. Later in the evening, peering in through the ball-room
windows, his brain reels as he beholds the well-remembered belles and
dandies--apparently grown no older--of the golden age of the springs, the
days of “the Albany regency.” They dance to the same old waltz music,
played by the same old negro fiddlers, by the light of spermaceti tapers
that floods the dusty evergreens “with a weird mysteriousness, an
atmosphere of magic, even in the burning of the candles,” and drink
champagne of “the exploded color, rosy wine suited to the bright days when
all things were tinted rose.”

It is needless to say that there is an abundance of pretty and clever
things scattered through these tales of Willis. “Flirtation”--as an
instance of his epigrams--“is a circulating library in which we seldom ask
twice for the same volume.” “His politeness,” he says of one of his
characters, “had superseded his character altogether.” He tells of “a
person of excellent family, after the fashion of a hill of potatoes, the
best part of it under ground;” and of the Frenchman who could trace his
lineage back to “the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel.” “Mr.
Potts’s income was a net answer to his morning prayer: it provided his
daily bread.” “Wigwam _vs._ Almacks,” which follows out the suggestions of
a true story told in “À l’Abri,” is not very satisfactory as a fiction,
but is worth noticing for the lovely description, with which it opens, of
a wayside spring in the valley of the Chemung.

CHAPTER VII.

1845-1852.

THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND--THE HOME JOURNAL.

On his arrival in London, Willis was attacked with a brain fever, which
confined him to his bed for a fortnight. As soon as he could get about he
brought his little daughter to see Lady Blessington, and then took her and
her nurse to Steventon Vicarage, near Abingdon, in Berkshire, to stay with
her aunt, the wife of Rev. William Vincent, formerly of Bolney Priory. He
took lodgings for himself in the village near by, and, after a short trip
to Bath, returned to London and spent some time in visiting, dining out,
sight-seeing, and making new acquaintances. He met a Mr. Stiles of
Georgia, an old schoolmate, who was passing through England on his way to
Vienna, where he had lately been appointed _chargé d’affaires_, and who
gave him a complimentary appointment as _attaché_ to his legation, an
addition to his passport of the kind that had proved so serviceable in the
days of his “Pencillings.” This determined him to shape his course for
the capital of Austria, taking in Germany, which was new to him, on the
way. Leaving his daughter at Steventon, he crossed the Channel, went up
the Rhine, and joined his brother Richard, who was studying music at
Leipsic. Here he passed a month, and then, accompanied by his brother,
went on to Dresden. There the two parted, and Willis traveled alone to
Berlin, where he was again seriously ill, and was kindly ministered to by
his old friend and associate on the “New York Mirror,” T. S. Fay, at that
time secretary of legation at Berlin. Mr. Henry Wheaton, the American
minister, attached Willis also to the Prussian mission. But of these
appointments and the opportunities they promised he was unable to avail
himself. Continued ill health forced him to abandon his journey to Vienna,
and to make his way back to England, whence he sailed for home in the
spring of 1846. He had meant to leave Imogen with her mother’s family for
a time, to be put to school in England. But his heart failed him at the
last, and he brought her back with him to America, sending her, still in
charge of her nurse, to live with his sister, Mrs. Louis Dwight, in
Boston. He himself took rooms in New York until other arrangements could
be made. His child’s nurse, Harriet Jacobs, who was in his employ from
1842 to 1861, was a remarkable woman, whose career, if fully told, would
form an interesting chapter in the history of American slavery. She was an
escaped slave from a plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. She had run
away from her master when a young woman, and taken refuge with a family of
free negroes, her kinsfolk. They kept her hidden for five years in a cubby
under the roof, during which time she supported herself by fine needlework
which her friends sold for her in town. At last she escaped to the North,
and was engaged by Willis as a house servant when he went to Glenmary. Her
attachment to the interests of the family during the whole period of her
service was a beautiful instance of the fidelity and affection which
sometimes, but not often, distinguish the relation of master and servant
even in this land of change. Mrs. Jacobs’s former owners, having got wind
in some way of her whereabouts, came North in quest of her, and spared no
pains to reclaim the runaway. Several times she had to leave the Willises
and go into hiding at Boston and elsewhere. At last, tired of these
alarms, Willis sacrificed whatever scruples he might have had against such
a step, and bought her freedom out and out. When the civil war began she
went to Washington, and employed her practical abilities, which were of a
high order, in the post of matron to a soldiers’ hospital. In that city
she is still living, at an advanced age.

Though ill nearly all the time of this his third trip abroad, Willis
managed to write a number of “Invalid Letters” to the “Evening Mirror,”
which were collected in “Famous Persons and Places” and in “Rural
Letters.” They were scarcely worth preserving. England was now a
twice-told tale, and in Germany, which was a pasture new, he was too tired
and sick and borne down by his recent bereavement to take much interest in
anything. His articles about the great fair at Leipsic--“What I saw at the
Fair,” in “Godey’s” for October, 1847; and “On Dress,” in “The Opal” for
1848, and “Godey’s” for June, 1849--were the most considerable literary
results of the journey. He also superintended the publication of an
English edition of “Dashes at Life,” in three volumes, and came home under
engagement to write for the London “Morning Chronicle.”

Meanwhile the editorial corps of the “Evening Mirror” had tapered down to
Hiram Fuller. Willis had practically retired from any active share in its
management when he left the country in the spring of 1845. He was still
abroad when Morris withdrew from it and started a new paper, the “National
Press,” toward the close of the same year. Willis joined him in this
enterprise as soon as he got back from England. During the spring and
summer of 1846 he was often in Washington, as correspondent of the
“National Press” and the “Morning Chronicle,” and while there he met Miss
Cornelia Grinnell, the niece and adopted daughter of the Hon. Joseph
Grinnell, who was then representative in Congress from New Bedford,
Massachusetts. To this lady he was married on October 1, 1846, the
eleventh anniversary of his first marriage. She was his junior by nearly
twenty years, but she united to her graces of person and character a
penetrating mind and an uncommon energy and firmness of will, which made
her an invaluable helpmate through the years of trial that were in store
for both. On the 21st of November following, the name of the “National
Press” was changed to the “Home Journal,” under which title the paper has
ever since been published. This was Morris’s and Willis’s final and most
prosperous experiment in journalism. They both remained connected with it
till death: in Willis’s case a service of twenty-one years, during which
his literary toil was devoted almost exclusively to building up the paper.
“For the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive, and the
beautiful,” ran the legend upon its title-page, followed by a sentence
from Goethe, which still stands as the motto of the paper, and would have
served well enough as the motto of Willis’s own career: “We should do our
utmost to encourage the beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It
was not a very solid type of literature which was fostered by the “Home
Journal,” but it made for itself a peculiar constituency, and a place in
the world of letters which it still successfully occupies, under the
editorship of Morris Phillips, General Morris’s adopted son, who has
carried out the traditions of the paper as established by his
predecessors. It was and is the organ of “japonicadom,” the journal of
society and gazette of fashionable news and fashionable literature,
addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to “the ladies.”

Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home
Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator,
and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the
notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and
theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses,
the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the
Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafés, the
hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes in equipages, customs,
dress. He grew to be a recognized _arbiter elegantiarum_, and his
correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of
etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always
marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in
“Ephemera,” and some little wholes,--like the letter from Saratoga, “To
the Julia of Some Years Ago,”--which deserve to be rescued from the
oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher;
he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently
human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of
their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air
into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares,
and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a
clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;”
and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear
brook--a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not
going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found
in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the
waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through
the hot summer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of
Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a
private yacht.”

When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued
residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by
no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume
already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which
distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and
swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a
liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more
earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast
of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade,
Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and
William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters.
The old Park Theatre was--after the burning of the National--the only
respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the
outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a
literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented
to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in
some sort, to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there
was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name
of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose
birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include
Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when
Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New
England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the
“Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was
devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob
Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford,
Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting
them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the
starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when
Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He
came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was
living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed
the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the
summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an
attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay too was abroad, filling diplomatic
posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America,
he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and
saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous
sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all
dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by
publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been
a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the
Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a
month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just
the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still
popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular
“Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by
school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His
“Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous
Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and
his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with
enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and
cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the
mental disease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing
up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which
confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s
eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in
them,--to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were
Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the
“Cyclopædia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose
names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of
New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at
the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the
poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose
hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for
interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis
formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace
Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and
wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged
him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from
his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so
that, should I live to see him sixteen, I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on
him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it
appeared.”

During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his
wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at
No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28,
1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth
Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was
born April 27, 1850.

For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar
sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public
assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a
general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant
conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu,
many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his
contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a
young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was
rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting
opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirable _parti_, slipped her a
note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.” This
being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,--

“Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel:
I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.”

When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb
asylum which had an inscription over the gate, _Stiftung_, etc.
“Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.”

Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private
correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that
he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford
to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar
Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary
man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to
ask him to write a letter after his day’s work was like asking a penny
postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. His letters
to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they
contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss
mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another
he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of
Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit on the stage, at the
Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and
‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but
have my doubts as to success.”

The easy _dégagé_ air of his writing was, as is usually the case with
seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the
testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on
the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that
his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an
average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and
legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his
erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular
about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copy _must_
be followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in
the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a
slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s
manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends,
“probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips,
“which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business
association.” “I would not stay one week a partner with a man who
ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my
knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr.
Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not
replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have
received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it
appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper,
never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation.
He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of
receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and
himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of
account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,--not to
say reckless,--and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof
and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string
was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an
honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting
his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which
is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was
perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first
to praise them, and to give circulation to their good things by copying
them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many
reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the
last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich--who succeeded James Parton as assistant
editor of the “Home Journal”--and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in
Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the
“Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when
he came to New York to seek the means for foreign travel he applied at
once to the author whose brilliant pictures of European life had roused
his young enthusiasm. Willis befriended him in every way; gave him letters
to wealthy gentlemen in New York, and bestirred himself to interest people
in his adventure and raise the sum necessary to start him on his journey.
On his departure he gave him a letter to his brother Richard, in
Frankfort, with whom the young _handwerksbursch_ tarried for a time, while
he was picking up the German language. His “Views Afoot”--the fruits of
this venture--were dedicated to Willis, who contributed the preface. This
patronage was unkindly referred to in Duganne’s “Parnassus in Pillory,” a
little Dunciad of the old downright “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”
variety, which made some noise in New York in the year 1851:--

“What time Nat Willis, in the daily papers,
Published receipts of shoemakers and drapers;
What time, in sooth, his ‘Mirror’ flashed its rays,
Like Barnum’s ‘drummond’ on the Broadway gaze,
When lisping misses, fresh from seminaries,
Worshiped ‘mi-boy’ and ‘brigadier’[9] as _lares;_
Then Bayard Taylor--_protégé_ of Natty,
Dixon-like walked into the ‘literati;’
And first to proper use his genius put,
Like ballet-girls, by showing ‘Views Afoot.’”

In another part of his squib the lampooner returns to the charge against
Willis as follows:--

“I almost passed by Willis--‘ah, _mi-boy!_
Foine morning! da-da!’ Faith I wish him joy--
He’s forty-three years old--in good condition--
And, positively, he has gained ‘position.’
Gad! what a polish ‘upper-ten-dom’ gives
This executioner of adjectives;
This man who strangles English worse than Thuggists,
And turns ‘the trade’ to trunk-makers or druggists;
Labors on tragic plays that draw no tiers--
Writes under bridges, and tells tales of peers;
His subjects whey--his language sugared curds;
Gods! What a dose!--had he to ‘eat his words!’
His ‘Sacred Poems,’ like a rogue’s confessions,
Gain him indulgence for his worst transgressions:
His ‘Fugitive Attempts’ will doubtless live--
Oh! that more works of his were fugitive!
Fate to his fame a ticklish place has given,
Like Mahomet’s coffin, ’twixt the earth and heaven;
But be it as it will--let come what may--
Nat is a star, his works--the Milky Way!

“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries
(Who reads _De Trobriand_ in an English guise).
Why so severe? Because my muse must make
Example stern for injured Poesy’s sake.
Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair--
Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air--
Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn,
For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn.
But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart,
He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part;
Trifled with all he might have been to be
The _blasé_ editor--at forty-three;
Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,
To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’
I lash not Willis even for this his crime--
Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;
The race o’er whom, in his own native power,
Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”

Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R.
Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44,
the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him
his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but
remonstrating with him upon his declared intention--in a very appreciative
review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”--to omit the _James_ from his
“musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:--

“Suppose I, dropping the ‘N.,’ should call you by that mysterious
middle letter--whose signification, without reference to the Parish
Register (or perhaps Griswold’s equally entertaining bead-roll) no
man can fathom--and call you ‘P. Willis.’ Under such painful
circumstances you could imagine how I feel, when you amputate one
sound limb of my name.

“However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left
unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle,
and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the
warmer atmosphere of New York--as I shall before long.”[10]

In point of fact--if the item is not below the dignity of biography--this
threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the
latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural
and baptismal _prænomen_, and used to figure on the title-pages of his
later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel;
respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as
his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis.
“Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s
smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains
not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a
passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,--in spite of
its familiarity to many readers,--because its spirit is kindly and it is
one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:--

“There’s Willis so _natty_ and jaunty and gay,
Who says his best things in so foppish a way,
With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,
That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.…
His prose had a natural grace of its own,
And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone,
But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired,
And is forced to forgive where he might have admired.
Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced
It runs like a stream with a musical waste,
And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep.
’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?…
No volume I know to read under a tree
More truly delicious than his À l’Abri,
With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,
Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;
With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,
Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,
And Nature to criticise still as you read--
The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.…
His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,
As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;
So his best things are done in the flush of the moment:
If he wait, all is spoiled: he may stir it and shake it,
But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.…
He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,
Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid,
His wit running up as canary ran down,--
The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.”

One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar
to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs no label, and
until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits
the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself
as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are
by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is
attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of
them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors:
his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the
newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected
together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.

“My dear Sir:” he is made to write in response to an imaginary
request for a contribution, “to be obliged to penetrate with the
pump-buckets of necessity, prompted by the piston of a fifty-dollar
compensation, with a publisher as the pump-handle, in search of a
poem, is, of itself, annoying enough. To draw one up with the rope
and bucket of gratuity, is a labor which qualifies one for a long
residence in fatiguedom. Your letter found me fagging away over my
work-desk--chasing a brilliant idea in and out of the myriads of
convolutions of my brain. All the while that I was aping Prometheus
(the window being half-opened), I could sniff the delightful odors
of a rose which a fair neighbor will insist on keeping,” etc., etc.

The requested poem is annexed--a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”--

“Night on the market. Through the colonnade
Of red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,
Save of some whistling urchin as he strode
With stamping footfalls, listening to the noise
Which wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;
Or the low mutter of the drunken man,
As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolve
Not to go home till morning, sank to low
And nearly inarticulate murmurs.”

The fishwoman’s son sings a song, whose first stanza runs:--

“I will not go,
Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,
To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,
While Mexico
Invites me on to glory and to fame,--
Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”

Willis was forty when the “Home Journal” was begun--an age at which
writers who have thought and studied deeply are often no more than ripe,
and have their most productive years before them. But his best work was
already done. After 1846 he wrote hardly any more stories or poems--none
at all of any value. His pen was devoted more and more steadily to
editorial duties, to ephemeræ and paragraphs and fragments of all kinds,
and his well-wishers lamented that wit and fancy which, if properly
directed, might have produced something that would live and delight
future generations, were wasted in dissertations upon the cut of a beard
or the fashion of a coat. To all remonstrances of his friends over his
literary trifling and their exhortations to write for posterity, his
invariable answer, in and out of print, was that the public liked trifles,
and that posterity would not pay his bills--that he must go on “buttering
curiosity with the ooze of his brains.” That this answer satisfied
himself, or that he was without those aspirations after a more enduring
fame which are natural to all, cannot be believed. It is probable that he
sadly acknowledged in his inner consciousness that the best part of his
career was over. His talent, as has been said before, was the result of,
or was closely dependent upon, his physical temperament. When health began
to decay, and youth was over, and his animal spirits had effervesced, life
commenced to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writing, too, as we
have seen, was always closely related to his personal experiences; and as
these grew tamer, he had less and less to report, and his writing grew
tame in proportion. With some, mere study and contemplation supply, to a
degree, the ravages which time makes upon the freshness of young
impressions. But it had been Willis’s misfortune in youth that a premature
success had deprived him of the discipline of early rebuffs, and had made
a painful self-culture needless. He never drew much inspiration from
books, and in later life he read very little. He said that he could not
afford to read, partly for want of time, partly from a notion that much
reading would be fatal to originality. Neither was it his privilege to
command, at this or at any time, the stimulating and bracing association
with men of high serious intellects and strenuous aims, such as he might,
perhaps, have had if he had remained in Boston. The occasional hasty
meetings with men of brains and literary tastes in general society did not
at all take the place of that intimate communion with a circle of gifted
spirits which has been so stimulating to others. Moreover it should be
borne in mind, as accounting largely for the mediocrity of his later work,
that for the last fifteen years of his life Willis was a chronic invalid.
Indeed, he was never really a well man after his illness of 1845.

Next to Cooper, Willis was the best abused man of letters in America. It
is easy to understand how the former, who was pugnacious and struck hard,
should have been always in hot water. But why a man of Willis’s urbanity
should have been a target for the newspaper critics is more difficult of
explanation. “Colonel” William L. Stone of the “Commercial Advertiser,”
and “Colonel” James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer,”
distinguished themselves especially by their stern condemnation of
Willis’s literary affectations, and of what they were pleased to consider
the weaknesses of his private character and life. It is suggestive, by the
way, of the militant disposition of the New York press at that time, that
so many editors were generals and colonels--or at least were breveted such
by public consent, and graced with titular embellishments of a warlike
character. Henry J. Raymond, who joined the “Courier and Enquirer” in
1842, proved his zealous adhesion to the traditions of the paper by an
onslaught upon Willis, in which he asserted that the latter had snobbishly
represented himself as received in the best circles abroad, “when in truth
’twas no such matter.” Willis replied to this in an editorial which Poe
mentions as a clever specimen of skill at fence. An effort was afterwards
made by friends of both to bring them together, at a time when Willis was
living at Idlewild and Raymond was visiting in the neighborhood. The plan
miscarried for some reason or other, though Willis, who seldom cherished a
resentment, was quite ready for a reconciliation.

In 1850 Willis became unpleasantly involved in the famous divorce suit
between Edwin Forrest and his wife. He had known Forrest as early as
1836, admired his acting, and praised it constantly in the “Mirror” and
“Home Journal,” preferring it to the more studied performances of his
English rival, Macready. He had seen little of Forrest for a number of
years; but after his return to New York, in 1846, the two families grew
quite intimate, exchanging visits and dinners. Mrs. Willis and Mrs.
Forrest especially became fast friends, and on one occasion, when the
former was seriously ill, she sent for Mrs. Forrest to come and stay with
her. Mrs. Forrest was the daughter of Sinclair, the great English singer.
She was a lady of refinement, beauty, and social accomplishments. Her
sister Mrs. Voorhies, who lived with her for a time, had inherited her
father’s musical talents, and Mrs. Forrest soon got about her a pleasant
circle of friends, which included many persons of literary and artistic
tastes, editors, authors, professors, clergymen, and their wives. The
Bryants, the Godwins, Dr. Dewey, Henry Wikoff, and Samuel Raymond, the
actor, were among the frequenters of the house. When Richard Willis
returned from his musical studies in Germany in 1848, his brother
introduced him there, and he found so much enthusiasm for his art, that he
called repeatedly, to practice his compositions with Mrs. Voorhies.

Edwin Forrest was a tragedian of great natural force and genius, endowed
with a wonderful voice and a magnificent physique. But he was a man of
passionate and overbearing temper; his education was defective, his
language and manners sometimes offensively coarse, and he had little
relish for intellectual society. He does not appear, however, to have felt
any objection to his wife’s hospitalities, or to have suspected any
impropriety in her receiving her friends, during his frequent absences
from home on professional engagements, until long after other causes of
estrangement had arisen between them. At Cincinnati, in the spring of
1848, he thought that he had discovered evidence of a guilty intimacy
between Mrs. Forrest and an actor named Jamieson; and although she
solemnly protested her innocence and her husband agreed to accept her
oath, his jealousy smouldered and occasionally broke out in scenes of
violence. At length, in April, 1849, they agreed to separate. Mrs. Forrest
made her home for a time with Mr. and Mrs. Parke Godwin, and Forrest took
up his residence in Philadelphia, where in February, 1850, he made an
application for divorce to the Pennsylvania legislature, based upon
affidavits, charging his wife with adultery. This application was
ultimately denied, but meanwhile the lady’s friends in New York had taken
the matter up. She had the sympathy and moral support of such men as
William C. Bryant and his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and Dr. Orville
Dewey, the eminent Unitarian divine. Up to this time Forrest had not
implicated Willis in his charges, but hearing that he was among those who
were taking sides with Mrs. Forrest, he had stopped him in the street one
day in January, 1850, and warned him against intermeddling between him and
his wife, denouncing her unfaithfulness in the strongest terms. Willis
replied that he did not believe a word of the slanders against her. The
next day Mrs. Willis received an anonymous letter, accusing her husband of
criminal relations with Mrs. Forrest. On March 28th the “Herald” published
extracts from the evidence on which Forrest had based his application to
the Pennsylvania legislature, which compromised, among others, Mr. Richard
Willis. This drew from his brother a letter of explanation, printed in the
“Herald” of the following day.

“It was not my intention,” wrote Willis, “to say a word in this
letter upon the merits of the case to which this evidence belongs.
To rescue the good name of an absent brother, who, in moral conduct
is irreproachably correct, was my only object. A court of justice
will soon sift the testimony, and better inform the public as to its
credibility on other points. But the mention of my wife’s name, as
a friend and visitor of Mrs. Forrest, makes it incumbent on me to
add that the description of Mrs. Forrest’s manners and style of
hospitality which is given in that evidence is totally at variance
with all we have ever seen and known of that dignified, well-bred,
and delicate mannered lady.”

And in the “Home Journal” for April 6th he published a severe review of
the “Forrest testimony,” warmly defending Mrs. Forrest, expressing the
belief that her husband’s chief motive in the late proceedings had been to
rid himself of the expense of her support; that the real cause of their
separation had been his jealousy of her intellectual superiority; and
condemning indignantly his attempt to “enlist kitchen and brothel against
her, and so sully her fair name by cheap and easy falsehood that he can
throw her off like a mistress paid up to parting.” The article concluded
as follows:--

“We have written the above under the editorial plural, but the facts
being mostly of personal knowledge, and wishing to evade no manner
of responsibility, we close with the writer’s individual signature,

“N. P. WILLIS.”

These two articles, coupled with testimony elicited from Forrest’s
household servants, decided him to drag Willis into the case. His bill
filed in Philadelphia contained the names of nine co-respondents, among
them a clergyman, Mrs. Forrest’s family doctor, and Forrest’s old friend
and traveling companion, Chevalier Wikoff. The last three were afterwards
dropped from the case. Mrs. Forrest, having been served with a copy of the
application and the process issued by the Pennsylvania legislature, filed
a bill in the New York Supreme Court in September, 1850, and obtained an
injunction to restrain her husband from proceeding with his suit in
Philadelphia. She then began suit against him in New York for a divorce on
the ground of adultery, which he defended with cross-accusations; and in
New York the case was finally tried and decided. Meanwhile Forrest was
prowling about his wife’s lodgings in New York, threatening people who
went in or out, and stopping others in the street to warn them against
interference.

On the 17th of June, while Willis was walking in Washington Square, near
his own residence in Fourth Street, Forrest came up to him quickly and
knocked him down with a blow from his fist. He then stood over him, and,
holding him down by the coat collar with one hand, beat him with a
gutta-percha whip till the police came up and interfered. To the group of
spectators which had rapidly assembled, he said, “That is the seducer of
my wife.” Willis would at no time have been physically the equal of his
antagonist, who was a man of powerful frame; but when this assault was
made it was doubly safe from the fact that the victim of it had been ill
for months with a rheumatic fever, and was in an unusually feeble
condition of body. Two days after this heroic action, Forrest met Bryant
and Godwin walking down Broadway and furiously demanded who had put the
account of it into the “Evening Post,” in which he was represented as
having struck Willis from behind.

“I told him,” said Mr. Godwin, in his testimony, “I was responsible
for the article. He then turned round to me in a very ferocious way,
and said there were several things that he was going to hold me
responsible for; he said the article was a damned lie from beginning
to end; he said he meant to attack Mr. Willis, and he believed that
he had told me so formerly. I replied that these were not just the
terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to
cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in
reply--I don’t know what it was distinctly; I think he said
something about what he would have done if they had not taken him
off.”

Willis brought an action against Forrest for this assault, in the superior
court of the city of New York, and secured a verdict in March, 1852, for
$2,500 and costs. The case was appealed on exceptions, and, upon the new
trial which was ordered, the damages were reduced to one dollar. Forrest
sued Willis for libel in the “Home Journal” article, and got $500 damages.
But in the mean time the suit for divorce had come to trial, in December,
1851, and had been decided in Mrs. Forrest’s favor. The jury found the
defendant guilty of adultery, found the plaintiff innocent, and granted
her the decree prayed for with $3,000 a year alimony. This was one of the
_causes célèbres_ of the last generation. The trial occupied the then
extraordinarily long period of six weeks, and the printed testimony fills
two large volumes. Charles O’Conor, who was Mrs. Forrest’s counsel, dated
his great reputation as an advocate from his conduct of this case. For
eighteen years he fought the battle for his fair client relentlessly and
triumphantly. The case was appealed five times, and judgment affirmed
every time with an increase of alimony. It was not till 1868 that the
defendant tired of resistance, and paid over to the plaintiff the sum of
$64,000. His costs and expenses of litigation, additional to this, were of
course enormous. It is unnecessary to review the evidence given at the
trial, by which it was sought to incriminate Willis in this affair,
further than to say that it consisted almost solely of the testimony of
servants, who were thoroughly discredited in their cross-examination. One
of these witnesses was a man who had been discharged from Willis’s employ.
Another was an ex-chambermaid in the Forrest household, who was brought
all the way from Texas to testify, and who was shown to be a thief, and
the mother of an illegitimate child by a friend of the defendant. Public
opinion, it is needless to say, was divided about the verdict. Forrest was
the idol of the Bowery, and the asserter of the American stage against the
“dudes” and “Anglo-maniacs” of that day. “The boys,” who had stuck by him
in his quarrel with Macready till its upshot in the bloody Astor Place
riot of May 10, 1849, stuck by him now in his domestic tribulations, and
gave him a rousing ovation on his first appearance at the Broadway
Theatre, following the close of the trial. A number of people in society,
too, of those who “demen gladly to the badder end,” made up their minds to
Mrs. Forrest’s guilt. But it is not unfair to say that the great majority
of the decent people and respectable newspapers greeted the verdict with
acclamation. A large party maintained that Forrest was a selfish and
licentious brute, who was tired of his wife and wanted to be rid of her;
that, knowing he had no valid cause of action against her, he trumped up
charges and suborned witnesses. It is not necessary to go so far as this
in order to assert the innocence of Mrs. Forrest and of those who were
made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of
Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is
publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by
her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a
jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and
blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly
believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and
unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both
among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course,
denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance
which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the
constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs.
Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in
her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined
lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put
herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s
innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her
a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren, who was Forrest’s lawyer
in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly
abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the
trial of the assault and battery case, “Willis _v._ Forrest,” his
personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed
insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was
about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the
“Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding
an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter
proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in
the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully
making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and
scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other
hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be
owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him.
However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him
at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a
coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose
attorneyship constitutes your career.”

This challenge was something of a flourish on Willis’s part, and his
experience with Marryat might have taught him the folly of such attempts
to get “the satisfaction of a gentleman” from railing editors and
attorneys. He took little by his motion, which simply gave Van Buren an
opportunity to publish the correspondence in a New York morning paper with
comments of his own, characteristically ugly and characteristically smart.
The fact remained, however, that Van Buren had been challenged to fight
and had declined, and the general note made upon the affair by a venal
press was to the effect that “Prince John had shown the white feather.” Of
the many letters of sympathy and congratulation received by Mr. and Mrs.
Willis after the Forrest verdict, the following, from Mr. J. P. Kennedy,
the author of “Swallow Barn,” will serve as an example:--

BALTIMORE, _February 2, 1852_.

MY DEAR WILLIS,--I have often resolved during the war--the _late_
war, I hope I may call it--to assume the privilege of a friend and
send you the only succor I could supply, a word of comfort and a
cheer or two, to let you see that there was some sympathy abroad for
your sufferings, which I know were pungent enough to make a very
respectable saint, if your ambition lay in that way. Now that you
have got through certainly the worst part of your Iliad in the
termination of that horrible trial, I think it a good time to
redeem my promise to myself, and to say to you that I have felt a
friend’s part in the whole progress of your troubles, and the
confidence of a friend that the end would bring you a bright sky and
a pleasant outlook for the future. I particularly congratulate Mrs.
Willis on this result, as I know, or can imagine, the full measure
of her griefs. We _all here_--I mean our household, with whom Mrs.
Willis is associated in so many affectionate remembrances--unite
very sincerely in this message to her. Your defense in the “Home
Journal” of an injured woman, which I noted and applauded from the
first, was, at its least, a manly and generous act, and it became
the more worthy of your manhood as it grew to be perilous. I use
this word much more in reference to the social clamor than to the
ruffian assault it brought you. I trust you are now to triumph very
signally over both. Present Mrs. Kennedy and her sister very kindly
to your wife, as also Dr. Gray, and believe me

Very truly yours,

J. P. KENNEDY.

The result of the Forrest trial was, in a sense, a triumph for Willis. Yet
in all affairs of the kind, although the charges are disproved, the very
fact that they have been made leaves, illogically and unfairly, perhaps,
but still inevitably, a sediment of prejudice in the public mind. It is in
the nature of such cases that the inmost truth about them can seldom be
known to more than two persons. To all others there remains nothing
beyond inference and suspicion. Hence the uncertainty which survives the
judicial decision of the cause and works injustice to the innocent who
have been unlucky enough to be drawn into compromising situations. An
impression has always obtained in many quarters that Willis was profligate
in his relations with women. Rumors to this effect were industriously
circulated by his ill-wishers, and, in one instance, they got into print
in the shape of an accusation publicly brought against him by his ancient
foe, Colonel James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer.” It is
needless to revive this venerable scandal or any of the less tangible,
miscellaneous gossip once afloat on the current of New York society. It is
no part of a biographer’s duty to “vindicate” his subject from any and all
charges of the kind. I have read the published documents in the
Webb-Willis affair with a sincere effort to be impartial, and they left
upon my mind no impression of anything worse on Willis’s part than vanity
and indiscretion in permitting himself to be drawn into a half literary,
half sentimental correspondence with a very romantic young woman, without
her parents’ knowledge. He was easily flattered by attentions from female
worshipers of genius. He maintained in print and in person a constant
attitude of gallantry toward the sex, which doubtless stimulated the
rumor of his immoralities, and led the reader to identify him with the
Lotharios of his tales. Moreover, it is not to be denied that when a young
man in Italy, and in the fast set of his London acquaintances, he was
exposed to temptations which he did not always resist, and probably had
his share of those adventures which the French indulgently call _bonnes
fortunes_, but less liberal shepherds of Anglo-Saxon race give a grosser
name; and which always turn out the reverse of good fortunes for everybody
concerned. As to his later life, one who knew him well but had quarreled
with him and had small cause to like him, writes: “My belief is that N. P.
Willis was, as he said, perfectly free from fault in that business [the
Forrest affair], and had _no_ intrigues with women after his marriage.”

The spring of 1852 found him much broken in health. He had a wearing
cough, and it was thought that his lungs were diseased. He waited only the
termination of his assault and battery case in March, to start on a
journey to the South with his father-in-law, Mr. Grinnell. The trip
included a cruise to Bermuda and the West Indies, a short stay in
Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, a visit to the Mammoth Cave, and a
sojourn at the neighboring watering-place of Harrodsburg Springs. His
letters to the “Home Journal” from these and other points in the South
were reissued in book form as “A Health Trip to the Tropics.” During the
years covered by this chapter he published a number of volumes similarly
made up of periodical correspondence and miscellaneous contributions to
his paper. “Rural Letters” contained his “Invalid Letters from Germany;” a
reprint of “Letters from under a Bridge,” with two additional to those in
the earlier editions; “Open Air Musings in the City;” letters from Sharon
Springs and Trenton Falls in the summer of 1848; and one story, “A Plain
Man’s Love.” “Hurrygraphs” comprised a series of letters from Plymouth,
New Bedford, Cape Cod, and places on the Delaware and Hudson rivers;
besides sketches--often very acute pieces of mental portraiture--of public
men, authors, and other celebrities, and a good deal of chit-chat about
society, the opera, etc., from the columns of the “Home Journal.”

All that can be said of these traveler’s letters is that they are fairly
good reporting. They hardly attain the rank of literature, and were as a
whole not worth putting between covers. But Willis sold well and,
therefore, found his account in continued book-making, bringing out,
usually, simultaneous editions in London and New York. It is instructive
to compare his letters from Cape Cod--a journey on which Mr. Grinnell was
again his companion--with Thoreau’s book on the same piece of geography.
Both men had quick eyes, and had taught themselves the art of observation.
But Willis’s letters were the notes of an “amateur casual,” or
“here-and-thereian,” on a flying trip over a sand-spit inhabited by queer
people, who was always on the lookout for points which would interest the
lady readers of a metropolitan journal. Thoreau, on the contrary, was like
a palmer on a solemn pilgrimage to one of nature’s peculiar shrines, with
loins girt up and staff in hand, tramping along the heavy sands, with the
eternal thunder of “The Reverend Poluphloisboio Thalasses” in his ear; in
serious and vigilant mood, watching every least token of the ways of the
sea, but careless of men and reading publics.

Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of
Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the
absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon,
it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might
try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun
goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton
Falls--which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith
Linsey”--occurs a startling anticipation of the most admired figure in
Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”--

“As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight,
the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of
the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the
delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still
as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall,
drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed
and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam,
spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock
that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to
make famous--a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle
amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind--there is
your similitude: _Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a
cataract_.”

Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a
small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to
which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from
“Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first
settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same
year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had
an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meet often and
familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a
formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about
her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the
English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under
new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which
were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new,
and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a
part of “Pencillings by the Way.”

CHAPTER VIII.

1853-1867.

IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS.

Mr. and Mrs. Willis, with their children, had passed the summer of 1850 at
Cornwall, in the highlands of the Hudson, boarding at the farmhouse of a
Mrs. Sutherland. They grew so attached to the beautiful neighborhood that
they resolved to make it their home some day, and with this in view, in
the fall of the same year, they had bought the fifty acres of land which
afterwards became widely known as Idlewild. This little domain lay upon a
shelf or terrace on the western bank of the Hudson, lifted some two
hundred feet above the level of the river, at the point where its waters
received the slender tribute of Moodna Creek. Behind the site chosen for
the house was a wild ravine, shaded by hemlocks, at the bottom of which a
brook, swollen to sizable rapids and cascades by the spring freshets, but
a mere trickle in midsummer, ran down to join the creek. The location
seemed destined by nature for a gentleman’s country seat, from its
variety of surface, its contrasting prospects, and its noble timber. The
outlook in front was upon a wide bend of the river and the opposite
heights and distant mountain perspectives of the eastern shore. Behind the
house was a private landscape of glen and forest, sunk away quite out of
sight of the sails and steamers that passed continually up and down the
watery highway before the front door. To the south, a mile away, was the
imposing shape of Storm King, a mountain which owes its baptism to Willis,
having previously figured in geography as Butter Hill. Four miles below
this were West Point and the gate of the highlands, and on the other bank
General Morris’s summer home of Undercliff. Four miles above Idlewild was
the considerable town of Newburg, for a market; and only a mile from his
door, the post office village of Moodna.

Willis’s trip to the tropics had been of small benefit to his health, and,
on his return in the summer of 1852, he joined his family at their
boarding place at Cornwall. His doctor warned him that a return to New
York would be at the risk of his life. He had grown tired, himself, of the
city and of gay society, and longed for the repose of the hills. _Levavit
oculos ad arces._ In the hope that rural quiet and the drier air of the
highlands might restore his health, he decided that autumn to begin
building at once, and to take up his permanent abode in the country.
During the winter and spring he remained with his family at the
Sutherlands’, and busied himself in superintending the erection of his
house, laying out roads and paths, cutting vistas through his trees,
building stone walls, constructing a dam for his brook, and reporting
progress in gossipy letters to the “Home Journal.” In the spring of 1853
the New York house was sold, and on the 26th of July Idlewild received its
tenants.

Willis had a happy knack at inventing names, and if everything that he
wrote should become obsolete, he will still have left his sign manual on
the American landscape and the English tongue. “Idlewild” was an apt and
beautiful name, and like Sunnyside, the place became and remains one of
the historic points of the scenery of the Hudson. The story that Willis
tells of the origin of the word is this: The old farmer and fisherman who
owned the land--uncle of the “Ward boys,” of aquatic fame--was showing him
over the property, and Willis, inquiring the price of this particular
piece, was answered that it had little value, being “an idle wild of which
nothing could ever be made.” I fancy that this little anecdote is in part
a myth, invented after the fact to give the name a history and a
justification. Willis was particular, not to say fussy, in such matters,
and the title finally chosen was obtained by a process of elimination from
a list that I have seen, of several hundred “pretty, fond, adoptious
christendoms,” such as Everwild, Mieux-ici, Lodore, Loudwater, Idle-brook,
Wanderwild, Up-the-brook, Shadywild, Loiterwild, Demijour-brook, etc.

Thus ten years after the break-up of his home at Glenmary, he had again
pitched his pavilion--this time for good--by green pastures and running
waters. Henceforth he abjured fashionable life and devoted himself to the
domesticities; to the care of his health and his grounds, the
entertainment of his guests, and the preparation of his weekly letter to
the “Home Journal.” There was little left in him of that dandyism which
had distressed his critics. But the old coats and hats which he loved to
wear were worn with a certain grace peculiar to the man. He could not put
on the seediest garment without straightway imparting to it an air of
jauntiness. He was fond of pets and was a most playful and affectionate
companion to his children, the number of whom gradually increased to five
by the birth of a third daughter, Edith, on September 28, 1853, and a
second son, Bailey, on May 31, 1857. All of these survive, but his last
child, a daughter, born October 31, 1860, lived only a few minutes.

From early spring till after Christmas the family at Idlewild kept open
house, having almost always company staying with them, and in summer
constantly receiving transient guests. The place had become celebrated
through Willis’s descriptions in the “Home Journal.” Cornwall was growing
to be a summer resort, and there were daily visits to the glen and to the
house from all manner of people. Willis’s habit was to breakfast in his
own room and write till noon. Sometimes he would take a stroll to the post
office or the glen before dinner. After dinner he would write letters or
do “scissors work” before the afternoon drive or ride. The evening was
spent with his guests, or, if the family were alone, he would write again
and come down to a nine o’clock supper.

From the trivial incidents of this daily life he wove his correspondence;
enough of it, at last, to fill two volumes, “Out Doors at Idlewild” and
“The Convalescent;” the former dedicated to Mr. Grinnell, the latter to
Doctors William Beattie and John F. Gray, his physicians, and both books
addressed more particularly to the author’s “parish of invalids.” These
letters have by no means the literary merit of the “Letters from under a
Bridge,” and it was, perhaps, presuming too far on their claim to even
contemporary respect to bind them up at all after they had once done duty
in the newspaper column. They were eagerly read, nevertheless, as they
appeared from week to week, and a sympathetic public was interested in
Willis’s kindly prattle about his landscape gardening, his tree planting,
the deluges in his brook, his children, his horses and dogs, the
eccentricities of his country neighbors, the humors of his poultry, the
daily voyage of the family wagon to Newburg, the sleighing on the frozen
Hudson, and the occasional picnics and excursions to Storm King, West
Point, Poughkeepsie, or remoter points. Willis found himself not without
amusement, becoming something of a country gentleman and public-spirited
bulwark of society, taking part in local interests. There was a
picturesque little Episcopal church a mile from Idlewild, in which he
became a vestryman and used to pass the plate. Once he even made a speech
at a public meeting, in favor of dividing the county. Letters XXXIX. and
XL. in “Out Doors at Idlewild,” giving a graphic description of the ascent
of Storm King, are perhaps the best thing in the volume.

Among the many guests attracted to Idlewild by the hospitalities of its
owner and his inviting pictures of his highland retreat were numbers of
literary men and artists.[11] Bayard Taylor, Charles A. Dana, De
Trobriand, of the “Courrier des États-Unis;” Hicks and Kensett, the
painters, came up from New York at various times, and rambled, bathed, or
otherwise disported themselves in the glen. Whipple and Fields ran across
from Boston and made a pleasant visit of two or three days, of which both
afterwards gave reminiscences. Fields loved to recall an anecdote that
Willis told him, “of his watching a little ragged girl, one day in London,
who was peering through an area railing. A window of a comfortable
eating-house gave upon this area, and a man sat at the window taking a
good dinner. The child watched his every movement, saw him take a
beefsteak and get all things in readiness to begin; then he stopped and
looked round. ‘Now a pertaty,’ murmured the child.”

In the summer of 1854, Willis had a call from his down-river neighbor,
Washington Irving, and repaid it at Sunnyside in 1859, in company with J.
P. Kennedy and Lieutenant Wise, the author of “Los Gringos,” who had both
been passing a day or two with him at Idlewild. Irving drove them through
Sleepy Hollow, as recounted in “The Convalescent,” in which this visit
fills an agreeable chapter; and Willis characteristically begged his host
to give him his blotting-sheet for memorabilia, as being “the door-mat on
which the thoughts of Irving’s last book had wiped their sandals as they
went in.” “The Convalescent” (1859) was the last book which Willis
published, if we except some late editions of his poems, but there are
gleams in it, here and there, of the wit and fancy that never quite
forsook him. There was, for instance, a long and very dark covered bridge
over Moodna Creek, which he always entered with dread, when on horseback,
and which he described as giving “a promise of emergence to light on the
other side, which required the faith of a gimlet.” Upon the whole, it
would be a very difficult reader who should refuse to admit the plea which
the author urges in behalf of books of “The Convalescent” kind. “I learned
also, to my comfort, that Nature publishes some volumes with many leaves,
which are not intended to be of any posthumous value--the white poplar not
lasting three moonlight nights after it is cut down. Even with such speedy
decay, however, it throws a pleasant shade while it flourishes; and so,
white poplar literature, recognized as a class in literature, should have
its brief summer of indulgence.”

Willis found that his best medicine was horseback riding, and spent as
many hours as he could in the saddle. His horses and dogs were a great
source of amusement to him. One of his special pets was Cæsar, a superb
Newfoundland, that had been with Dr. Kane on one of his Arctic voyages,
and was afterwards presented to Willis. When it died its grave at Idlewild
was marked by a marble slab, the gift of Brown, the famous Grace Church
sexton, with an epitaph of his own composition. The slab was on exhibition
for a time, in July, 1862, at Barnum’s museum, and the inscription on it
ran as follows:--

CÆSAR,
WHO MADE THE VOYAGE TO THE ARCTIC
REGIONS WITH DR. KANE,
AND WAS AFTERWARDS THE FAVORITE DOG OF THE CHILDREN
OF IDLEWILD,
LIES BURIED BENEATH THIS STONE.

Died December 7, 1861, aged thirteen years.

Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,
And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.

In 1854 a book was published which became the occasion of many
heart-burnings, and of accusations against Willis that have not yet ceased
to go the rounds of the newspapers. This was “Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale
of the Present Time,” by Fanny Fern. The lady who wrote under this pen
name was his younger sister, Sarah, the author of much cleverish
literature--“Fern Leaves,” and the like--which once enjoyed a prodigious
circulation. She was the _enfant terrible_ of the family, a warm-hearted,
impulsive woman, but not always discreet. By the death of her husband,
Charles Eldridge of Boston, she had been suddenly reduced from comfort to
poverty. She afterwards contracted an unfortunate marriage with a Mr.
Farrington, from whom she was finally divorced. To support herself and her
children, she turned instinctively to literature, in which she at last
made a decided hit. Among other things she offered some contributions to
the “Home Journal;” but Willis, whose literary taste, though certainly not
severe, was fastidious in its way, could not see merit enough in his
sister’s writing, and disliked what he regarded as its noisy, rattling
style. He felt obliged to decline her articles, but that there was any
literary jealousy in this, as is intimated in “Ruth Hall,” will hardly be
believed, when his eagerness to welcome and patronize young writers is
remembered. It seems to have sprung from an original opposition in
character and taste between the two. But it naturally made hard feeling
and led to recriminations. Mr. James Parton, who was then sub-editor of
the “Home Journal,” took Fanny Fern’s part, and the acquaintance thus
begun soon ripened into an engagement of marriage. There was a scene, in
consequence, in the office of the “Home Journal,” and Mr. Parton retired
from the paper, his place being supplied by Mr. T. B. Aldrich. Smarting
under a sense of neglect by her kinsfolk, Fanny Fern wrote and printed
this novel of “Ruth Hall,” in which, under a very thin mask of fiction,
she washed a deal of family linen in public. Willis figures therein as
Hyacinth, a “heartless puppy,” who worships social position, has married
an heiress, inhabits a villa on the Hudson, and is the prosperous editor
of the “Irving Magazine.” When Ruth asks him to help her by printing her
pieces in this periodical, he coldly assures her that she has no talent,
and advises her to seek “some unobtrusive employment.” But when she
becomes famous and begins to get letters from college presidents, begging
her for her autograph, and from grateful readers, saying, “I am a better
son, a better brother, a better husband, and a better father than I was
before I commenced reading your articles. God bless you!” then, under
these triumphant circumstances, Hyacinth, who had given $100 for a vase
when Ruth was starving, is proud to point out to a friend, as they sit
together in the porch of his country seat, a beautiful schooner tacking up
stream with “Floy,” his sister’s _nom-de-plume_, painted on the bows.

Against this caricature of himself Willis made no public protest. When a
man is wounded in the house of his friends, his only refuge is silence.
But in private and to his intimates he asserted that the attack upon him
in “Ruth Hall” was most unfair; that he _had_ helped his sister in the
early days of her widowhood, but that after her second marriage and
divorce he had ceased to have any communication with her, and felt
justified in letting her alone. Willis was doubtless a man who took his
responsibilities lightly. But had he felt called upon to do his utmost for
Fanny Fern, even to the end, it is easy to see how his hands were tied in
various ways. He had an expensive family of his own, whose support
depended upon his pen. His home on the Hudson had been purchased with his
wife’s inheritance. As to paying his sister for articles in the “Home
Journal,” supposing them to have been otherwise acceptable, the editors
were constantly reiterating that the paper did not, as a rule, pay its
contributors anything, and could not afford to do so. It paid its own
editorial staff, and that was all. Contributors were glad to write for it
for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print.

Willis continued to put forth permutations and combinations of old matter
under new titles, as long as his books would sell. “Fun Jottings,”
“Ephemera,” “Famous Persons and Places,” and “The Rag-Bag” were all made
up from the contents of previous volumes, or the teeming sheets of the
“Mirror” and “Home Journal.” But in 1857 he published something new, “Paul
Fane,” his only novel, and the only book which he wrote as a book, and not
as one or more contributions to periodicals. So exclusively a
_feuilletoniste_ had he made himself, that any talent for construction on
a larger scale which he may once have had was quite frittered away.

“It has been with difficult submission to marketableness,” he had
written in his preface to “Dashes at Life,” “that the author has
broken up his statues at the joints and furnished each fragment with
head and legs to walk alone. Continually accumulating material, with
the desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as continually
tempted by extravagant prices to shape these separate forms of
society and character into tales for periodicals; and between two
persuaders--the law of copyright, on the one hand, providing that
American books at fair prices should compete with books to be had
for nothing; and necessity, on the other hand, pleading much more
potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame--he
has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing off for a magazine any
chance view of life that turned up to him, and selling in
fragmentary chapters what should have been kept together, and
moulded into a proportionate work of imagination.”

If “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” was a response to this
artistic craving for unity in a sustained work, its author had waited too
late. It was, in effect, a poor novel; and--what was unusual with Willis,
even at his thinnest--it was dull. The story is told in the first person,
and the hero is a young American artist, who, feeling his social equality
challenged by a look in the eyes of a cold English girl of high birth, is
driven abroad by a restless determination to put himself on a level with
any nobility that hereditary rank can bestow. He brings the haughtiest
daughters of Albion to his feet. Three or four women fall in love with
him, including the original offender and her aunt, but he will none of
them. It is Willis’s old theme of nature’s nobleman versus caste. The
novel was an experiment, before the times were ripe, in that field of
international manners which has since been so cleverly occupied by Henry
James. It tries to deal with the perplexities and real miseries, which
arise not so much from the deeper conflicts of character as from the
attempt to adjust hostile social standards. Mr. James has made a very
interesting story out of the simple episode of a young English lady
marrying an American, coming to America to live, and then, not finding
American ways to her taste, taking her husband back to England with her.
But Willis was not well equipped for success in this field. He could not
keep his fancy in check; there must be a dash of romance, of exaggeration
in his tale. And he was a quick observer rather than a patient student of
manners, as of other things. He lacked the sober, truthful vigilance of
James and Howells. Miss Firkin, in this book, an overdone Daisy Miller,
and Blivins, an American type once rumored to have existed, but
inconceivable at this distance of time, show how far his execution fell
below the fine and solid work of our contemporary realists. There are
passages of vulgarity in “Paul Fane” which are a surprise in any book of
Willis’s, but which came rather from the weakness and failure of his hand
in its attempt to execute scenes of broad humor, than from any crudity of
feeling. This kind of violent and assumed indelicacy on the part of
naturally refined writers, when they are trying to put on the healthy
coarseness of a Hogarth or Teniers, is a not uncommon phenomenon;
daintiness mistaking coarseness for the strength of which it is often a
sign or an accompaniment.

In “The Convalescent” were included narratives of a trip to the
Rappahannock, to Nantucket, and to the horse fair at Springfield,
Massachusetts. In July, 1860, Willis accompanied Mr. Grinnell on a journey
to the West,--reported for the “Home Journal” as a “Three Weeks’ Trip to
the West,”--going to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Chicago, and as far as
Madison, Wisconsin; then descending the Mississippi in a steamboat to St.
Louis, and returning East by way of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

In Willis’s later writings his verbal affectations gained upon him to an
intolerable extent. “Mr. N. P. Willis,” says Bartlett in his “Dictionary
of Americanisms,” “has the reputation of inventing many new words, some of
which, though not yet embodied in our dictionaries, are much used in
familiar language.” One of the phrases which Bartlett accredits to him is,
“the upper ten,”--originally and in full, “the upper ten thousand of New
York city.” This seems likely to keep its place in the language.
“Japonicadom” took at the time, but has now gone out. He had a fondness
for agglutinations. “Come-at-able” is a convenient word which is traced to
his mint; and Professor George P. Marsh, in his “Origin and History of the
English Language,” lends the weight of his authority to Willis’s
“Stay-at-home-itiveness,” as a synonym for the Greek οἰκουρία, and the
early English _studestapelvestnesse_. But such philological monsters as
re-June-venescence, worthwhile-ativeness, fifty-per-centity, with which
some of his books are strewn, have a painfully forced effect, and the
trick became, from repetition, a tedious mannerism. Punning, likewise,
was a habit which grew upon him, though both of these offenses are
commoner in his private correspondence than in his published work.

At the outbreak of the civil war in the spring of 1861, there was a rush
of newspaper men to Washington. It was decided that the “Home Journal,”
too, should have its war correspondent, and accordingly Willis, bidding
good-by to Idlewild, flung himself into the tide of journalists, soldiers,
politicians, office-seekers, contractors, and speculators of all sorts,
setting toward the seat of government. At Baltimore he stayed over a day
with his friend Kennedy, who was prominently mentioned for the
secretaryship of the navy, and who went on to Washington with Willis,
where the latter introduced him and Reverdy Johnson to Mrs. Lincoln. The
feeding of the “Home Journal” press with “Lookings-on at the War” proved a
longer job than Willis had anticipated. It kept him in Washington for over
a year, with occasional furloughs for a hurried visit home. He had always
been curiously indifferent to politics. His opinions had been Whiggish,
and he was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with
the South, and a liking for “those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners,
incapable of a short word or a mean action,” whom he had known at
Saratoga years before. Nevertheless, he dropped his light plummet of
observation into the boiling sea of the civil war, where it was tossed
about at no great depth below the surface. It is interesting to compare
his letters from the capital with the patriotic fervor and swing of such
martial sketches as Theodore Winthrop’s “Washington as a Camp.” The war,
indeed, may be said to have made Willis and the kind of literature which
he cultivated obsolete for a time. A more earnest generation of writers
had come to the fore, who struck their roots deeper down into the life of
the nation. Mr. Derby, the publisher, proposed in 1863 to make a book out
of Willis’s “Lookings-on at the War,” but the project hung fire for some
reason, and “The Convalescent” remained, as has been said, his last
publication in book form.

Willis found all the world at Washington; among the rest, Lady Georgiana
Fane, whom he presented to Mrs. Lincoln. “Fancy anticipating this at
Almack’s twenty-five years ago!” he wrote of this conjunction, in a letter
to Mrs. Willis. He met Charles Sumner, whom he had known in Boston, and
had a long talk with him about the political situation; found Pierpont,
the poet, employed as a clerk in one of the departments, and got rooms for
him and Mrs. Pierpont in the house where he lodged himself; was
introduced to General McClellan and to the cabinet officers, and the
numerous congressmen and brigadiers who swarmed Pennsylvania Avenue and
crowded the lobbies at Willard’s. He went out to all manner of receptions
and dinner parties, and became quite a favorite with Mrs. Lincoln, who
drove him out frequently in her barouche, had him to dine _en famille_ at
the White House, sent him flowers, and promised him a vase presented to
the President by the Emperor of China. In one of his letters to the “Home
Journal,” he had described her as having a “motherly expression,”
whereupon she addressed him the following note:--

EXECUTIVE MANSION, _July 24th_.

MR. N. P. WILLIS:

_Dear Sir_,--It will afford me much pleasure to receive yourself and
ladies[12] this evening. Of course anything Mr. Willis writes is
interesting, yet, pardon my weakness, I object to the “motherly
expression.” If you value my friendship, hasten to have it corrected
before the public is assured that I am an old lady with
_spectacles_. When I am _forty_, four years hence, I will willingly
yield to the decrees of _time_ and fate.

Rather an indication, is it not, that years have not passed _us_
lightly by? I rely on you for changing that expression before my age
is _publicly_ proclaimed. Quite a morning lecture, yet you
certainly deserve it. Be kind enough to accept this modest bouquet
from

Your sincere friend,

MARY LINCOLN.

A sudden fit of sickness had hindered Willis’s plan to follow the army to
Bull Run--fortunately, no doubt, as the correspondent who took his place
was made prisoner. He afterwards took horseback rides into the enemy’s
country, once narrowly escaping capture near Mount Vernon, and made
excursions to Fortress Monroe, Manassas, Old Point Comfort, etc. On March
15, 1862, he was of the party which visited Harper’s Ferry at the
invitation of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Hawthorne,
too, was of the party and reported the occasion in his article, “Chiefly
about War Matters,” in the July “Atlantic” of that year. “Hawthorne is shy
and reserved,” wrote Willis in one of his letters to his wife, “but I
found he was a lover of mine, and we enjoyed our acquaintance very much.”
Emerson and Curtis lectured in Washington while Willis was there, and
Greeley dined with him in January, 1862. The novelty and excitement of
life at the capital were agreeable at first, but he soon grew homesick and
pined for his beloved Idlewild.

In consequence of the war, the circulation of the “Home Journal,” a large
proportion of whose subscribers were in the South, had fallen off
seriously. Willis found himself greatly straitened, and was obliged to
close his country house for a time. Mrs. Willis and the children had spent
the winter and spring of 1861-62 at New Bedford, with her father. In April
she rented Idlewild and went with her family to pass the summer at
Campton, near Plymouth, New Hampshire. In June Willis left Washington and
joined her at Campton for a few days, and then returned to New York and
took lodgings for himself. Morris’s health had grown so feeble that it
became necessary for his partner to apply himself more closely to the
management of the paper and do double work. He had been much opposed to
the renting of Idlewild, and it troubled him to think of the place in the
hands of strangers. He paid it a visit in August, by invitation of his
tenant, a Mr. Dennis, and was very hospitably treated. In the autumn of
the following year (1863) Mrs. Willis opened at Idlewild a little school
for girls, in the hope of persuading her husband to leave New York and
come home for life. He appreciated her energy and devotion,--shown through
long years of failing health and fortune,--but he doomed himself to
homeless exile, and refused to abandon his post. He was opposed to the
school project, as he had been to the renting of Idlewild, unreasonably,
no doubt, since something of the kind had to be done. But it touched his
pride, and with increasing illness there grew upon him a morbid horror of
dependence on any one. He fancied that he could work better in his New
York lodgings. By 1864, moreover, Morris had become quite imbecile, and
the responsibilities of editorship weighed more and more heavily on
Willis. He remained at New York, therefore, running up to Idlewild for an
occasional visit of a day or two, over Sunday, or sometimes for a week at
a time. In July, 1864, General Morris died. Willis was deeply moved as he
stood by his coffin. “My beloved old friend,” he wrote, “looked
wonderfully tranquil, and so sweetly noble that I could not forbear giving
him a parting kiss, though William sobbed as he looked on. So passes from
earth one who loved me devotedly.” After Morris’s death Willis took into
partnership a young man named Hollister, who had capital and enthusiasm;
but the business management of the “Home Journal” began to fall more and
more upon the shoulders of its present editor, Mr. Morris Phillips.

The story of the last few years of Willis’s life is a melancholy chronicle
of failing powers, and of persistent struggle with disease and narrowing
fates. He had long borne up against ill health with the gay courage of a
cavalier. His pen faltered, but nothing that it wrote gave signs of
bitterness or discouragement. Toward the last his temper, which had been
uniformly sweet, sometimes grew irritable and morbid, though nothing of
this appeared in his writing. As early as 1852 he had fancied that he had
consumption, but his cough turned out to be merely “sympathetic,” and his
lungs were pronounced sound. His disease finally declared itself as
epilepsy, and resulted at the last in paralysis and softening of the
brain. He was subject for years to epileptic fits, occurring periodically,
usually on the tenth day. During these attacks, so long as his strength
lasted, he was extremely violent, but as he grew weaker, they simply made
him unconscious, leaving him greatly prostrated when the fit was over. The
true nature of his malady was, for some years, known only to his wife and
his physician, Dr. Gray, who feared that it might injure Willis’s business
and literary interests if it were publicly understood that his brain was
affected, or in danger of being affected. Willis was himself very
sensitive on this point, and begged that no stranger might see him during
his attacks. Accordingly, the matter was kept secret as long as possible.
After Willis’s death, one of his physicians, Dr. J. B. F. Walker, printed
some “Medical Reminiscences of N. P. Willis,” in the course of which he
said: “Not only was he a martyr to the agonies of sharp and sudden
attacks, but he suffered all the languors of chronic disease. With the
exception of Henry Heine, there has hardly been a man of letters doomed to
such protracted torments from bodily disease.”

Under these trying circumstances he exhibited a persistence in his work
which astonished his friends. They had not thought that such endurance was
in the man. But from some underlying stratum of character, some strain of
toughness inherent in his Puritan stock, he brought up resources of will
and stubbornness which resisted all appeals. Though complaining sometimes
in his letters that he was “pitilessly overworked,” he declared his
intention of dying in harness, and clung to his desk and his lonely
lodgings till the doctors pronounced him a dying man. A part of the
summers of 1865 and 1866 he spent at Idlewild, but the autumn of the
latter year found him still at work in the city. He was now so weak that
he often fainted in the street and had to be carried to his rooms. His
partner, Morris Phillips, was untiring in his attentions; and finally,
early in November, he brought him home to Idlewild, Willis yielding at
last to the united entreaties of his wife, his father, and his sisters,
and the imperative command of his doctor, to stop work. But he had come
home only to die. He kept his room and seldom went down-stairs. During the
first month he had some enjoyment of the home associations, taking
pleasure in the daily visit of his children, and listening to the reading
of poetry, more for its soothing effect than for any intellectual
apprehension of it. He soon became helpless and slept much of the time,
and when waking lived in continual visions and hallucinations. His
recognition of his family was fitful during the last six or eight weeks of
his life. He was watched and cared for by his wife and faithful Harriet,
and no strange hand ministered to him or marked his failing consciousness.
He died on the afternoon of the 20th of January, 1867,--his sixty-first
birthday,--so quietly that the single watcher could not say when. He was
taken to Boston, and buried in Mount Auburn. The funeral service of the
Episcopal Church was read over his body in St. Paul’s Church, by the Rev.
P. D. Huntington, the bookstores of the city being closed, in token of
respect, while the service lasted. His pall was borne by Longfellow, Dana,
Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Dr. Howe, Merritt Trimble,
and Aldrich. “I took the flower which lies before me at this moment, as I
write,” says Dr. Holmes, in a recent number of the “Atlantic,” “from his
coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad,
overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867.”

The obituary notices which were published after Willis’s death made it
evident that he had, in a sense, survived his own fame. They were
reminiscent in tone, as though addressed to a generation that knew not
Joseph. It was forty years since he had come before the public with his
maiden book. It was twenty since he had put forth anything entitled to
live; and meanwhile a new literature had grown up in America. The bells of
morning tinkled faintly and far off, lost in the noise of fife and drum,
and the war opened its chasm between the present and the past. For a time
even Irving seemed sentimental and Cooper melodramatic. Yet these survive,
but whether Willis, whose name has so often been joined with theirs, is
destined to find still a hearing, it is for the future alone to say. “He
will be remembered,” wrote his kinsman, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, “as a man
eminently human, with almost unique endowments, devoting rare powers to
insignificant purposes, and curiously illustrating the ‘fine irony of
Nature,’ with which she often lavishes one of her choice productions on
comparatively inferior ends.”

But, laying aside all question of appeal to that formidable tribunal,
posterity, the many contemporaries who have owed hours of refined
enjoyment to his graceful talent will join heartily with Thackeray in his
assertion: “It is comfortable that there should have been a Willis.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] This statement needs, however, some qualification. Mr. Clark, of Clark
& Maynard, who publish Willis’s poems, tells me that there is a steady
sale for these of about two hundred copies annually. Fifty years after
date this is not bad. How many copies of _Something and Other Poems_,
issued in 1884, will be asked for at the booksellers’ in the year of grace
1934? The copyright of most of Willis’s poems having lately expired, a
cheap reprint of them has just been put forth, bearing date 1884 and
forming No. 352 of “Lovell’s Library.” This seems to point to a continued
popular demand. His prose writings are at present out of print. The fourth
volume of _Stories by American Authors_ contains his “Two Buckets in a
Well,” and it is understood that the publishers of that series have in
mind the publication of a volume of selections from Willis’s prose.

[2] The book here mentioned was her compilation, _Stories of American Life
by American Authors_, printed in 1830, to which reference was made in
chapter III. A number of Willis’s letters to Miss Mitford are published in
_The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford_, from one of which the above
passage is taken.

[3] It was doubtless this article which encouraged Bates in the _Maclise
Portrait Gallery_ to describe Willis as a “sumph” and “N(amby) P(amby)
Willis.”

[4] Mrs. Child.

[5] Not written by Willis.

[6] In a late anthology, this poem of Willis is included under the
melodramatic title _Two Women_. An author’s choice of a title is almost as
much to be respected as his text. In this instance, Willis’s own selection
was not only much the better, but it is interesting as probably suggested
to him by lines that were favorites of his in Longfellow’s translation
from Uhland:--

“For, invisibly to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.”

[7] See also his paper on _The American Drama_, for an elaborate review of
_Tortesa_, which, with all its defects, he thought the best American play.

[8] See Gill’s _Life of Poe_ for a fac-simile letter of Willis to Poe.

[9] An allusion to the interlocutors in Willis’s _Cloister_ and _Cabinet_,
dialogues between the editors of the _Mirror_ in not very successful
imitation of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_.

[10] Cambridge, January 13, 1844.

[11] J. Addison Richards visited Idlewild to make sketches for his
illustrated article in _Harper’s Magazine_ for January, 1858, _q. v._ for
a full description of the place.

[12] Lady G. Fane and Mrs. Clifford.

APPENDIX.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The following is a list of the first editions of Willis’s books. In a few
instances these were published first in England. In such cases the London
edition only is given. Most of his later works were published
simultaneously, or nearly so, in England and America. In such cases only
the first American edition is given. Of the various collective editions of
his verse, published since 1844, only the final and most complete is
mentioned, viz., the Clark & Maynard edition of 1868 (No. 29). No really
complete edition of Willis’s writings has ever been printed. The first
collective edition which laid claim to being complete was entitled: The
Complete Works of N. P. Willis. 1 vol., 895 pp. New York: J. S. Redfield,
1846. The thirteen volumes in uniform style, issued by Charles Scribner
from 1849 to 1859, form as nearly a complete edition of Willis’s prose
since 1846 as is ever likely to be made.

1. Sketches. 96 pp. Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827.

2. Fugitive Poetry. 91 pp. Boston: Peirce & Williams, 1829.

3. Poem delivered before the Society of United Brothers, at Brown
University, on the Day preceding Commencement, September 6, 1831,
with other poems. 76 pp. New York: J. & J. Harper, 1831.

4. Melanie and Other Poems. Edited by Barry Cornwall. 231 pp.
London: Saunders & Otley, 1835. The first American edition was
published by Saunders & Otley, at New York, in 1837, and contained
some additional pieces. 242 pp.

5. Pencillings by the Way. 3 vols. London: Macrone, 1835.

This was an imperfect edition. The first complete edition was
published by Morris & Willis, in the “Mirror Library,” New York,
1844.

6. Inklings of Adventure. 3 vols. London: Saunders & Otley, 1836.

7. Bianca Visconti; or, The Heart Overtasked. A Tragedy in Five
Acts. New York: Samuel Colman, 1839.

8. Tortesa; or, The Usurer Matched. A Play by N. P. Willis. New
York: Samuel Colman, 1839. Nos. 7 and 8 were published in one volume
in England. Two Ways of Dying for a Husband. 1. Dying to keep Him;
or, Tortesa the Usurer. 2. Dying to lose Him; or, Bianca Visconti.
245 pp. London: Hugh Cunningham, 1839.

9. À l’Abri; or, The Tent Pitched. New York: Samuel Colman, 1839.

This was published as Letters from under a Bridge, together with
poems, by George Virtue, in London, 1840; and under the same title,
with the addition of the “Letter to the Purchaser of Glenmary,” by
Morris & Willis in the “Mirror Library,” New York, 1844.

10. Loiterings of Travel. 3 vols. London: Longman, 1840. Published
in America as Romance of Travel; comprising Tales of Five Lands. 1
vol. New-York: S. Colman, 1840.

11. The Sacred Poems of N. P. Willis [Mirror Library]. New York,
1843.

12. Poems of Passion, by N. P. Willis [Mirror Library]. New York,
1843.

13. Lady Jane and Humorous Poems [Mirror Library]. New York, 1844.

14. Lecture on Fashion before the New York Lyceum. New York, 1844.

15. Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil. New York: Burgess, Stringer &
Co., 1845.

16. Rural Letters and Other Records of Thought at Leisure. New York:
Baker & Scribner, 1849.

17. People I Have Met. New York: Baker & Scribner, 1850.

18. Life Here and There. New York: Baker & Scribner, 1850.

19. Hurrygraphs. New York: Charles Scribner, 1851.

20. Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean. New York: Charles Scribner,
1853.

21. Fun Jottings; or, Laughs I have taken a Pen to. New York:
Charles Scribner, 1853.

22. Health Trip to the Tropics. New York: Charles Scribner, 1854.

23. Ephemera. New York: G. W. Simmons, 1854.

24. Famous Persons and Places. New York: Charles Scribner, 1854.

25. Out Doors at Idlewild; or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of
the Hudson. New York: Charles Scribner, 1855.

26. The Rag Bag. A Collection of Ephemera. New York: Charles
Scribner, 1855.

27. Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life Else Untold. A Novel. New York:
Charles Scribner, 1857.

28. The Convalescent. New York: Charles Scribner, 1859.

29. The Poems, Sacred, Passionate, and Humorous of N. P. Willis.
Complete edition. 380 pp. New York: Clark & Maynard, 1868.

The following list includes the works, edited, compiled, and partly
written by Willis, but not the various journals and magazines of which he
was editor.

1. The Legendary. Edited by N. P. Willis. 2 vols. Boston: Samuel G.
Goodrich, 1828.

2. The Token. A Christmas and New Year’s Present. Edited by N. P.
Willis. Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1829.

3. American Scenery. From Drawings by W. H. Bartlett. The Literary
Department by N. P. Willis, Esq. 2 vols. London: George Virtue,
1840.

4. Canadian Scenery. From Drawings by W. H. Bartlett. The Literary
Department by N. P. Willis, Esq. 2 vols. London: George Virtue,
1842.

5. The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland. Illustrated by Drawings
from W. H. Bartlett. The Literary Portion of the Work by N. P.
Willis and J. Sterling Coyne, Esqs. London: George Virtue, 1842.

6. The Opal. New York: J. C. Riker, 1844.

7. Trenton Falls. Edited by N. Parker Willis. 90 pp. New York:
George P. Putnam, 1851.

8. Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind. By N. Parker Willis. 238 pp.
Philadelphia: Robert E. Peterson, 1851.

9. The Thought Blossom. A Memento. New York: Leavitt & Allen, 1854.

INDEX.

Aberdeen, Lord, 151, 186, 189.

Adams, John, principal of Phillips Academy, 18, 27.

Adams, William, 27, 28.

Album, The, 49.

Aldrich, T. B., 298, 336, 350.

Alger’s Life of Forrest, 316.

Allston, Washington, 91.

Amaranth, The, 101.

Amateur, The, travesties Willis, 90.

American Monthly Magazine, The, 20, 21, 51;
established by Willis, 82;
contributors to, 83, 84;
Willis’s contributions to, 84-88;
discontinuance of, 98, 99; 206, 207, 265.

American Review, The, 275.

Andover, school life at, 18-20.

Annuals, The, 77-80.

Antrobus’s, Lady, a Supper at, 159.

Appleton, T. G., 82.

Apthorp, Mrs., her seminary at New Haven, 57.

Athenæum, The, Willis’s contributions to, 164, 216, 217.

Atlantic Monthly, The, 345;
reminiscences of Willis in, 351.

Atlantic Souvenir, The, 49, 77.

Aytoun, W. E., his parody of Melanie, 181.

Bailey, John, an ancestor of Willis, 4.

Baillie, Joanna, Willis’s acquaintance with, 160, 163-165, 167; 271.

Barry Cornwall. See _Procter_.

Bartlett, W. H., 128, 221, 222, 249.

Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms quotes Willis, 341.

Beattie, Dr. Wm., 97, 149, 166, 330.

Beecher, Edward, 35, 94, 95.

Belknap, Abigail, 5.

Benjamin, Mary, Willis’s engagement to, 96, 97, 140;
poem to, 97, 183.

Benjamin, Park, 83, 96.

Berkeley, Grantley, his duel with Maginn, 196, 197.

Bermuda, visit to, 321.

Blackwood’s Magazine, 180, 195.

Blessington, Margaret, Countess of, Willis’s introduction to, 131,
134, 135;
her receptions at Seamore Place, 137-139;
her position in literature and society, 137, 138, 158, 159;
her kindness to Willis, 141, 148, 156, 165, 168;
letter to Willis, from, 173, 174; 151, 186, 192, 193, 237, 246,
251, 270, 283.

Bolney Priory, 283.

Bonaparte, Jerome, entertains Willis at Florence, 120.

Bonaparte, Lucien, 159.

Boston, Willis’s residence in, 10, 16, 17, 71-99;
literature and society in, 83, 92, 93;
Willis’s feelings toward, 99.

Boston Courier, 86, 87.

Boston Latin School, 16, 17.

Boston Recorder, established by Willis’s father, 9;
his contributions to, 48, 49, 52, 71.

Boston Statesman, 89, 91.

Boston Traveller, 90.

Botta, Mrs. Vincenzo, 293.

Bowring, Sir John, 111, 119, 141, 194, 271.

Bristol Reporter, 49.

Brother Jonathan, The, Willis a contributor to, 259, 260, 262,
263; 239.

Brown, Sexton, his epitaph on Cæsar, 332.

Brown University, Willis’s poem before, 100, 104.

Bryant, W. C., 49, 217, 220, 291, 308, 310, 313.

Buckingham, J. T., 86-88.

Bulwer, E. L., 138, 141, 237.

Bushnell, Horace, 32, 33, 47.

Byron, Ada, 164, 168.

Byron, Lady, 164, 168, 216.

Cæsar, Dr. Kane’s dog, 334.

Campbell, Thomas, a dinner with, 166, 167; 149, 245.

Cape Cod, letters from, 322, 323.

Carr, Mr., offers Willis Secretaryship at Tangiers, 112.

Censor, The, 90.

Channing, W. E., 144, 216;
Willis’s Sketch of, 164.

Charleville, Lady, 156, 157.

Cheney, J., 80, 81.

Child, Mrs. L. M., 80, 90, 199.

Cholera in Paris, the, 114, 115.

Christian Examiner, The, 48.

Christian Watchman, The, 49.

Christopher North. See _Wilson_.

Cincinnati Monthly Review, 216.

Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare, MS. of given to
Willis, 131.

Class Day poem, 59.

Clay, Henry, 221, 242.

Clifton, Josephine, plays in Bianca Visconti, 231-233.

Colvin, Sidney, on Willis, 133.

Concord, N. H., school life at, 16.

Congdon, C. T., his Reminiscences of a Journalist quoted, 260.

Conic Sections Rebellion, 47.

Connecticut Journal, 49.

Constantinople, visit to, 126-128.

Cooper, J. F., entertains Willis in Paris, 110, 111;
Willis’s defense of, 216; 136, 210, 291, 306, 351.

Cork, Dowager Countess of, 166.

Corsair, The, 227;
established by Porter and Willis, 239-242;
Willis’s contributions to, 243, 244, 247, 249, 253;
Thackeray’s letters to, 253-256;
suspends publication, 259, 260; 265.

Coughton Court, visit at, 172.

Court Magazine, The, Willis’s contributions to, 140, 154, 206.

Cox, William, 103.

Culprit Fay, The, 217.

Dalhousie, Earl of, Willis’s visit to, 149, 150, 152;
letters from, 174, 190; 189.

Dalhousie, Lady, 149, 190;
letter from, 191.

Dana, C. A., 63, 332.

Dana, R. H., 350.

Dawes, Rufus, 84, 91, 92.

Day, Jeremiah, 35.

De Forest, Mrs., 58.

Dewey, Dr. O. P., 308, 310.

Diary, Passages from Willis’s, 165-169.

Dickens, Charles, Willis’s acquaintance with, 264.

Disraeli, Benjamin, 138, 237, 252, 253.

Doane, G. W., 81.

Dollar Magazine, The, Willis’s editorship of, 260.

D’Orsay, Count Alfred, 75, 138, 158, 166, 237, 251.

Douglas, Francis, 8.

Douglas, Lucy, 6, 55.

Down Town Bard, lyrics by, 267.

Drake, J. R., 217, 292.

Duganne, A. J. H., his Parnassus in Pillory, 298.

Durant, Henry, Willis’s room-mate at Yale, 31, 40.

Duyckinck, Evert A., 293.

Dwight, Louis, 27, 28.

Dwight, Louisa. See _Louisa Willis_.

Eastern Argus, The, 8.

Edinburgh, visit to, 150.

Edinburgh Review, The, 118, 194.

Eglintoun Tournament, 244.

Emerson, R. W., 16, 345.

England, Willis’s arrival in, 130;
residence in, 135-179;
liking for, 135-137;
second visit to, 243-259;
third visit to, 276, 283-286.

English, T. D., 275.

Erie Canal, the trip along, 60, 61.

Europe, Willis’s life in, 107-179;
influence of, on his character and writings, 107-110.

Everett, Edward, 16, 18, 167;
Inklings dedicated to, 206.

Fable for Critics, A, passage from, 302.

Fane, Lady Georgiana, 246, 343, 344.

“Fanny Fern.” See _Sarah P. Willis_.

Fay, T. S., edits the Mirror, 100;
his writings, 102, 103; 132, 284, 291.

Felton, C. C., 206.

Fields, J. T., 271, 332, 350.

Fishwoman’s Son, The, a parody of Willis, 304.

Flint, Rev. Timothy, 216, 217.

Florence, Willis’s residence at, 119-125.

Fonblanque, A. W., 138;
offended by Pencillings, 192, 193.

Forget-Me-Not, The, 77.

Forrest, Edwin, Willis involved in his divorce suit, 307-321;
assaults Willis, 312-314.

Forrest, Mrs. Edwin, _vide supra_.

Forster, John, his Life of Landor quoted, 133, 264.

Franklin, Benjamin, 6.

Franklin, Lady, 163.

Franklin, Sir John, 160.

Fraser, James, 197, 237.

Fraser’s Magazine, reviews Pencillings, 194-197.

Fuller, Hiram, 273, 276, 286.

Germany, visit to, 284, 286.

Gibson, John, teaches Willis to Sculp, 121.

Gift, the, 82, 262.

Glenmary, 32, 163, 220;
description of, 223;
Willis’s life at, 223-231;
sale of, 263; 264, 285, 329.

Godey’s Lady’s Book, Willis a contributor to, 260-263, 266, 286;
parodied in, 303, 304.

Godwin, Parke, 308-310, 313.

Goodrich, S. G., 49, 72;
his impressions of Willis, 73-75, 77, 81, 89, 90.

Gordon, Duke of, visit to the, 151, 152; 186;
his opinion of Pencillings, 190.

Gore House, Lady Blessington at, 156, 158, 193, 194, 252.

Graham’s Magazine, Willis a contributor to, 260-262, 266.

Gray, Dr. J. F., 330, 348.

Greeley, Horace, 293, 345.

Greene, Nathaniel, 91.

Greenough, Horatio, his friendship with Willis abroad, 110, 120, 121.

Grigsby, H. B., his reminiscences of Willis at college, 47, 48.

Grinnell, Cornelia. See _Cornelia Grinnell Willis_.

Grinnell, Hon. Joseph, 121, 287, 321, 323, 330, 340.

Grisi, Julia, a supper with, 159.

Guiccioli, Countess, 112, 119, 165, 168.

Halleck, Fitz Greene, 56, 102, 220, 264, 291.

Harding, Chester, 63, 92.

Harper’s Ferry, excursion to, 345.

Harper’s Monthly Magazine, description of Idlewild in, 332.

Harvard College, 17.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 72, 74, 80, 345.

Hildreth, Richard, 83.

Hillhouse, James, his influence on Willis, 70.

Hoffman. C. F., 292, 293.

Holmes, Dr. O. W., his recollections of Willis, 75; 271, 350, 351.

Home Journal, The, 15, 163, 215, 266;
established by Morris and Willis, 287;
character of, 288;
Willis’s contributions to, 273, 288-290, 293, 322, 325, 328, 330,
338, 340, 342, 344;
associate editors of, 296, 298, 335, 336; 304;
on Edwin Forrest, 308, 311, 314, 319; 337;
its circulation, 346; 347.

Howe, Dr. S. G., with Willis in Paris, 110, 111; 350.

Idlewild, 93, 307;
Willis’s country seat, 326-350;
description of, 326, 327, 332 _note_;
naming of, 328, 329; 345-347, 349.

Imaginary Conversations, Landor’s intrusted to Willis, 131.

Independent Chronicle, The, 6, 7.

Ireland, tour of, 244-246.

Irving, Washington, 136, 140, 291;
exchanges visits with Willis, 332, 333; 351.

Italy, residence in, 119-125.

Jackson, Andrew, 135, 196.

Jacobs, Harriet, 276, 350;
story of her escape from slavery, 284, 285.

Jeffrey, Lord, a dinner with, 150; 194.

Jenkins, Joseph, 28, 93;
marries Mary Willis, 30.

Johnson family, The, of Stratford, Conn., 55.

Kemble, Charles, 246.

Kennedy, J. P., letter from, 318; 332, 342.

Killinger, Freiherr Von, letter from, 217, 218.

Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 292.

Knickerbocker School, The, 290-293.

Ladies’ Companion, The, 157, 261.

Lafayette, Marquis of, 110.

Lamb, Charles and Mary, a breakfast with, 141.

Landon, Miss L. E., 80, 86, 184, 197, 237, 238.

Landor, W. S., Willis’s relations with, 131-135;
letter from, 134; 141, 271.

Langdon, Octavus, entertains Willis at Smyrna, 128, 129.

Ledger, The, 66.

Leech, John, 165.

Legendary, The, edited by Willis, 72, 75, 80, 81.

Leigh, Augusta, 164.

Leipsic, The great fair at, 286.

Lennox, Lady Sophia, 151.

Lincoln, Mrs. Abraham, 342, 343;
letter from, 344.

Linonian Society, The, 37, 41, 51;
poem before 271.

Literati of New York, The, 274, 293.

Livingston, Miss Adele, visit to at Skaneateles, 62.

Lockhart, J. G., 77;
his attack on Pencillings, 185-190, 193, 196, 199.

London, residence in, 137-149, 154-169.

London Literary Souvenir, 77.

London Morning Herald, 129.

London Morning Chronicle, 286, 287.

London Times, on the Willis and Marryat affair, 202, 203, 205.

Longfellow, H. W., a fellow townsman of Willis, 1-3; 10, 117, 220,
269 _note_, 350.

Lover, Samuel, 253.

Lowell, J. R., correspondence with Willis, 300, 301;
his estimate of Willis, 66, 302; 350.

Lucca, Baths of, 122.

Lunt, George, 75, 83, 91.

Lyceum, The, 49.

Lynch, Miss Anne. See _Mrs. Vincenzo Botta_.

McLellan, Isaac, 20, 83.

Maclise Portrait Gallery, 196 _note_.

Macready, W. C., 253, 308.

Madden, R. R., his Life of Lady Blessington quoted, 151, 192, 245;
impressions of Willis, 156, 157.

Maginn, Dr. William, reviews Pencillings, 195, 196, 199;
his duel with Berkeley, 196, 197.

Malta, sojourn at, 130.

Marryat, Frederick, 89, 154, 193;
his quarrel with Willis, 197-206; 234.

Marseilles, letter from, 109; adventure at, 124.

Marsh, G. P., 341.

Marshall, Emily, 62; acrostic to, 98.

Martineau, Harriet, her impressions of Willis, 142-148.

Mediterranean, Cruise up the, 125-129.

Memorial, The, 49.

Metropolitan Magazine, The, Willis’s contributions to, 140, 154, 206;
its review of Pencillings, 89, 197-201.

Michell, William, 178, 179, 251.

Millingen, Dr., 128.

Mirror Library, The, 269.

Mitford, Mary R., 76, 142, 152.

Moncrieff, Lady, 150, 159.

Moore, Thomas, 141, 160, 171;
his remarks about O’Connell, 186, 188, 192, 193.

Morgan, Lady Sydney, 163, 253.

Morris, G. P., editor of the Mirror, 100;
his character and talents, 100-102; 110, 112, 155, 197, 206;
coolness between, and Willis, 236-239;
establishes The New Mirror, 265;
Evening Mirror, 273;
National Press and Home Journal, 286-88;
Willis’s affection for, 296, 297, 347; 303, 327.

Morse, S. F. B., 110.

Motley, J. L., 82, 96.

Musical World, The, 15.

Mustapha, the perfumer, 127, 128, 213.

Nahant, 88, 92, 209, 212.

National Press, The, started by Morris, 286, 287.

Neal, John, 1, 81, 303.

New England Galaxy, The, 88.

New Haven in 1827, 37-39.

New Mirror, The, established, 265, 266;
Willis’s contributions to, 266-269, 288, 308, 338;
suspends publication, 272; 296, 299, 300.

New Monthly Magazine, The, Willis’s contributions to, 140, 154, 155,
161, 206, 227, 249.

New World, The, 239.

New York Albion, 259.

New York Commercial Advertiser, 306.

New York Courrier and Enquirer, 242, 307, 320.

New York Courier des États Unis, 332.

New York Evening Mirror, edited by Morris and Willis, 266, 273, 275,
286.

New York Evening Post, 291, 313.

New York Herald, on the Forrest testimony, 310, 311.

New York Mirror;
Willis becomes editor of, 99;
described 102, 103;
Willis’s foreign correspondence in, 103, 104, 114, 115-119, 129,
130, 153, 172, 184, 185, 188, 189, 197, 201, 206, 237;
Willis ceases to edit, 236;
discontinuance of, 265;
miscellaneous contributions to, 48, 141, 155, 193, 215, 221, 223,
231, 233, 236, 249, 261; 145, 282, 238, 256, 284, 292.

New York, literature and society in, 290-294;
Willis’s residence in, 288-290, 294.

New York Spirit of the Times, 238.

Niagara, 62, 219, 221.

Norfolk Beacon, 47.

Norton, Caroline, 141, 184, 237, 253.

North American Review, The, 2, 206.

O’Connell, Daniel, 186, 188, 192.

O’Conor, Charles, 314.

Opal, The, 82, 262, 286.

Otis, Mrs. H. G., 93.

Owego, N. Y., 32, 222, 223, 225-227, 262.

Pardoe, Miss, 160, 163.

Paris, residence in, 110-115;
wedding trip to, 178.

Park Street Church, 4, 11, 35, 93, 94;
excommunicates Willis, 95.

Parnassus in Pillory, passages from, 298-300.

Parton, James, 296-298, 335, 336.

Parton, Mrs. James. See _Sarah P. Willis_.

Patterson, Commodore, 125, 129.

Paulding, J. K., 102, 243, 292.

Payson, Rev. Edward, 9.

Percival, J. G., 70, 80, 184, 217.

“Peter Parley.” See _S. G. Goodrich_.

Phillips, Morris, 288, 296, 297, 347, 349.

Pierpont, Rev. John, 343.

Pike, Albert, 83, 84.

Pirate, The, prospectus of, 240.

Placide, Harry, 231.

Poe, Edgar A., his relations with Willis, 273;
impressions of Willis, 274, 275; 206, 217, 269, 293, 295, 296, 303.

Poniatowski, Prince, 120.

Porter, Admiral Ker, 164.

Porter, Jane, Willis’s friendship with, 160, 163-166, 170, 172, 176,
177.

Porter, Dr. T. O., letters to, 225, 234, 238, 248, 249;
associated with Willis on the Corsair, 239, 240, 254, 259.

Portland, Maine, Willis’s birthplace, 1, 8, 10.

Potomac Guardian, 6, 7.

Praed, W. M., 163.

Procter, Bryan Waller, 138;
edits Melanie, 180.

Pumpelly, Geo. J., 32, 223.

Quarterly Review, The, abuses Pencillings, 133, 185-191, 194, 197.

Quincy, Edmund, 350.

Ramsay, Lord, 150, 190;
letter from, 174, 175.

Rand, the portrait painter, 166, 227.

Raymond, H. J., 307.

Remember Me, 82.

Republic, The, 33.

Rives, Mr., appoints Willis _attaché_, 113.

Robinson, H. C., a breakfast with, 141.

Rogers, Samuel, 149, 165.

“Roy,” Willis’s _nom de plume_, 48.

Ruth Hall, caricature of Willis in, 334-337.

Saratoga, letters from, 100;
described in Inklings, 209-211; 281.

Sargent’s Magazine, 262.

Scioto Gazette, 6.

Scotland, visit to, 149-152.

Scriptural poems, origin of, 10;
estimate of, 66-69.

Seamore Place, 137, 156.

Sharon Springs, letters from, 322.

Shaw, Mrs. Fanny, her friendship with Willis, 160-162, 165, 166, 170.

Shawsheen River, the, at Andover. 20-22.

Shirley Park, at Croydon, 160, 161, 169, 170, 278.

Sigourney, Mrs. L. H., 75, 80, 81, 84, 184, 261.

Silliman, Benjamin, 35, 36, 49.

Skaneateles, visit to, 62.

Skinner, Mrs Mary, her intimacy with Willis, 160;
letter to, from Willis, 161-163;
letter from, to Jane Porter, 176; 165, 219, 278.

Slingsby Papers, the, 63, 77, 154, 155, 207, 211.

Smith, Forbearance, 76.

Smith, Horace and James, 138, 246.

Smyrna, visit to, 128, 129.

Snelling, W. J., lampoons Willis, 88-90, 198, 199.

Stace, Mary. See _Mary Stace Willis_.

Stace, Gen. Wm., 170, 171, 243, 262.

Stanhope, Sir Leicester and Mrs., 141, 165, 166.

Staunton, Sir Geo., 156.

Stepney, Lady, 156, 246.

Steventon, Vicarage, 283, 284.

Stoddard, R. H., visits Glenmary, 228.

Stone, W. L., 81, 306.

Storm King, named by Willis, 327, 331.

Storrs, Dr. R. S., 351.

Stuart, Isaac, 28, 30.

Stuart, Lady Dudley, 159.

Sumner, Charles, 220, 343.

Susquehanna, rafting on the, 227.

Talfourd, Serjeant, 174, 249.

Taylor, Bayard, 117, 119;
befriended by Willis, 298; 299, 331.

Telegraph, The, 49.

Thackeray, W. M., 215;
writes for the Corsair, 253-256;
his notices of Willis, 256-259; 352.

Thought Blossom, The, 82.

Throckmorton, Sir Chas., visit to, 170, 172.

Token, The, 49;
edited by Willis, 72-74, 77, 80, 81.

Trenton Falls, first visit to, 62;
described, 76;
letters from, 322-324.

Truth: a New Tear’s Gift for Scribblers, lampooning Willis, 89.

Tupper, M. F., 165.

Undercliff, 247.

Unitarians, 11, 16, 17, 18, 32, 93.

United Brothers, Society of, poem before, 104.

United Service Gazette, The, 205.

United States, the, cruise of, 125, 129.

Upper ten thousand, the, 256, 341.

Utica, N. Y., visit to, 61.

Vail, Minister, 156.

Van Buren, John, 33, 34;
engaged in Forrest suit, 34, 316;
challenged by Willis, 317, 318.

Van Buren, Martin, 110, 222.

“Veritas,” letters to the Mirror, 237, 238.

Verplanck, G. C., 293.

Vienna, projected visit to, 284.

Vincent, Wm., 244, 283.

Virtue, Geo., 221, 244.

Voorhies, Mrs., 308.

Walker, Dr. J. B. F., medical reminiscences of Willis, 349.

Wallack, James, plays Tortesa, 232-234, 246.

Washington, correspondence from, 221, 222, 287;
during the war, 342-346.

Washington National Intelligencer, 263, 266.

Watts, Alaric A., 77.

Webb, J. W., his attacks on Willis, 242, 307, 320.

Webster, Daniel, commends Pencillings, 119; 214.

Weld, H. H., 260.

Westminster Review, The, 111, 194.

Wheaton, Henry, 284.

Whipple, E. P., 332, 350.

Wikoff, Henry, recollections of Willis, 33, 34; 35, 37, 58, 239;
his part in the Forrest case, 34, 308, 312.

Willis, Bailey, 5, 329.

Willis, Charles, 5.

Willis, Cornelia Grinnell, 121, 287, 308, 310, 316, 318, 319, 326,
343, 346.

Willis, Edith, 329.

Willis, George, 4.

Willis, Grinnell, 294.

Willis, Hannah Parker, her character and influence, 13, 14;
her death, 275.

Willis, Imogen, 264, 276, 284, 288.

Willis, Julia, 15, 45, 140.

Willis, Lilian, 294.

Willis, Louisa, 28, 284.

Willis, Lucy, 19.

Willis, Mary, 30.

Willis, Mary Stace, her engagement and marriage, 170, 171, 176, 177;
letter to, from Willis, 176, 177; 219-221, 228, 243, 244;
her death, 276; 278.

Willis, Nathaniel, Sr., 5, 6.

Willis, Nathaniel, Jr., his education and character, 5, 7, 8, 11-13;
edits three newspapers, 8-10; 17, 26, 95.

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, born at Portland, 1;
ancestry, 6-10;
home and school life, 11-17;
at Andover, 18-30;
at Yale College, 31-70;
begins his literary career in Boston, 71-82;
edits the American Monthly, 82-100;
goes abroad as foreign correspondent of the New York Mirror, 100-106;
spends five months in Paris, 110-115;
a year in Italy, 119-125;
half a year in a cruise up the Mediterranean, 125-130;
four months more in Italy, Switzerland, and France, 130;
two years in England, 130-179;
marries, 177;
returns to America and travels and corresponds for the Mirror,
219-222;
settles at Owego, N. T., 223-238;
starts the Corsair, and makes a second trip to England, 239-259;
returns to America and edits Brother Jonathan, 259-263;
sells his place at Owego and moves to New York, 263;
edits the New Mirror, 265-272;
the Evening Mirror, 273-275;
loses his wife and makes a third visit to England, 276;
taken ill in London, 283;
makes a short visit to Germany and returns to America, 284;
marries again, 287;
edits the Home Journal and makes his residence in New York, 287-307;
becomes involved in the Forrest divorce case, 307-319;
is assaulted by Edwin Forrest, 312-314;
goes on a health trip to Bermuda, the West Indies, and the Southern
States, 321;
buys a country home on the Hudson, 326;
life at Idlewild, 329-334;
spends the first year of the war at Washington, writing letters to
the Home Journal, 342-346;
takes lodgings in New York, 346, 347;
in failing health, 347-349;
dies at Idlewild, 350.
_Writings_:--
Absalom, 48, 49, 66, 296.
Absent, the, 155.
À L’ABRI. See LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE.
Albina M’Lush, 85, 90.
American Literature, 216.
AMERICAN SCENERY, 128, 221, 222, 244.
Annoyer, the, 75, 90, 97.
Bandit of Austria, the, 251.
Baron von Raffloff, 85.
Belfry Pigeon, the, 183.
Betrothal, the, 232, 233.
Better Moments, 69, 169.
Beware of Dogs and Waltzing, 277.
BIANCA VISCONTI, 231, 232, 234, 235, 249.
Birth-Day Verses, 13, 77, 183.
Born to love Pigs and Chickens, 279.
Broadway, a Sketch, 262.
Brown’s Day with the Mimpsons, 258.
Burial of Arnold, the, 48, 59.
By a Here and Thereian, 154.
Cabinet, the, 299.
CANADIAN SCENERY, 244, 247, 248.
Captain Thompson, 85.
Chamber Scene, 155.
Charming Widow of Sixty, A, 265.
Cherokee’s Threat, the, 39, 57, 63, 155, 207.
City Lyrics, 267, 268.
Cloister, the, 299.
Confessional, the, 183.
Contemplation, 82, 98.
CONVALESCENT, THE, 330-333, 340, 343.
Countess Nyschriem and the Handsome Artist, the, 277.
Daguerreotype Sketches of New York, 266.
DASHES AT LIFE WITH A FREE PENCIL, reviewed by Thackeray, 256;
estimate of, 276-282; 262, 286, 325, 338.
Death of Arnold, the. See the Burial of Arnold.
Death of Harrison, the, 270.
Death of the Gentle Usher, the, 85.
Dedication Hymn, 97.
Departed Improvisatrice, the, 242.
Diary of Town Trifles, 267.
Dilemma, the, 216.
Divan, the, 242.
Dying Alchemist, the, 105.
Dying for Him. See TORTESA THE USURER.
Edith Linsey, 39, 62, 63, 65, 76, 85, 88, 155, 161, 183, 212, 213,
277, 323, 324.
Elms of New Haven, the, 271.
Elopement, the, 84.
EPHEMERA, 216, 261, 264, 276, 288, 289, 337.
FAMOUS PERSONS AND PLACES, 286, 337.
Fancy Ball, the, 84.
Female Ward, the, 92, 279.
First Impressions of Europe. See PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY.
Fitz Powys and the Nun, 261.
Flirtation and Fox Chasing, 277.
Florence Gray, 183.
Four Rivers, the, 153, 223.
Fragments of Rambling Impressions, 216.
F. Smith, 63, 85, 88, 92, 155.
FUGITIVE POETRY, 97.
FUN JOTTINGS, 337.
Gallery, the, 242.
Getting to Windward, 277.
Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, the, 280, 281.
Gipsy of Sardis, the, 127, 129, 155, 212, 213.
Hagar in the Wilderness, 296.
HEALTH TRIP TO THE TROPICS, A, 322.
High Life in Europe and American Life, 276.
HURRYGRAPHS, 322.
Idle Man, the, 86.
Imei the Jew, 233.
Imogen and Cymbeline, 265.
Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man, 85.
Incidents on the Hudson, 154, 218.
Inkling of Adventure, An, 85.
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE, 178, 206;
estimate of, 207-215; 217, 247, 276.
Inlet of Peach Blossoms, the, 280.
Invalid Letters from Germany, 286, 322.
Jephthah’s Daughter, 66.
Jottings, 267.
Jottings Down in London, 253.
Just You and I, 267.
Kate Crediford, 280.
LADY JANE, 260, 269-271.
Lady Rachel, 277.
Lady Ravelgold, 86, 167, 252.
Larks in Vacation, 63, 85, 155.
Lazarus and Mary, 68.
Leaves from a Colleger’s Album, 76.
Leaves from a Table-Book, 261.
Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay, 252, 256, 277, 279.
LECTURE ON FASHION, 272.
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE, 127, 132, 207, 223;
estimate of, 224-231; 236, 242, 248, 249, 263, 269, 282, 302,
322, 330.
Letters of Horace Fritz, Esq., 85.
Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of Glenmary, 263.
LIFE HERE AND THERE, 325.
Lines on leaving Europe, 13, 179, 236.
Lines to Laura W----, 58.
Log in the Archipelago, A, 130, 206.
LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL. See ROMANCE OF TRAVEL.
Loiterings of Travel, 153.
Lookings on at the War, 342, 343.
Lord Iron, 181, 182.
Lost Letter Rewritten, A, 130.
Love and Diplomacy, 154, 213, 277.
Love in a Cottage, 268.
Love in the Library. See Edith Linsey.
Lunatic’s Skate, the, 17, 20, 46, 154, 218, 277.
Madhouse of Palermo, the, 154.
Mad Senior, the, 155.
Marquis in Petticoats, the, 262.
Meena Dimity, 279.
MELANIE AND OTHER POEMS, 161, 164, 166, 179-181;
estimate of, 181-184; 236, 270.
MEMORANDA OF THE LIFE OF JENNY LIND, 324.
Minute Philosophies, 88, 206.
Misanthropic Hours, 52.
Miss Jones’s Son, 279.
More Particularly, 267.
Morning in the Library, A, 88.
My Adventures at the Tournament, 244.
My Hobby--Rather, 154.
New Year’s Verses, 71.
Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, 60, 62, 154, 212, 218.
Nora Mehidy, 279.
Notes from a Scrap Book, 215.
Notes upon a Ramble, 85.
On a Picture of a Girl, 81.
On Dress, 82, 286.
On the Death of a Young Lady, 57.
Open Air Musings in the City, 322.
OUT DOORS AT IDLEWILD, 330.
Paletto’s Bride, 251.
Parrhasius, 105.
Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice, 85, 252.
Passages from an Epistolary Journal, 253.
Passages from Correspondence, 261.
Paulding the Author disinterred, 242, 243.
PAUL FANE, 121, 151;
estimate of, 338-340.
P. Calamus, Esq., 84.
Pedlar Karl, 85, 154, 207.
Pencil, the, 242.
PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY, 85, 100, 104;
estimate of, 115-119; 126, 130, 138, 152, 153, 157, 178;
profits from, 184, 185;
reception of, by British press, 185-199; 193, 206, 207, 213;
translation of, 218; 236, 237, 249, 253, 269, 284, 298, 325.
PEOPLE I HAVE MET, 256, 325.
Phantom Head upon the Table, the, 278.
Pharisee and the Barber, the, 17.
Picker and Piler, the, 155, 227, 277.
Pity of the Park Fountain, the, 268.
Plain Man’s Love, A, 322.
POEM DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF UNITED BROTHERS, 104.
POEMS OF PASSION, 269, 275.
Poet and the Mandarin, the, 280.
Portrait, A, 98.
Power of an Injured Look, the, 82, 262.
Poyntz’s Aunt, 157, 261, 265.
Psyche before the Tribunal of Venus, 81.
Quarter Deck, the, 242.
RAG-BAG, THE, 338.
Revelation of a Previous Life, A, 278.
Revenge of the Signor Basil, the, 155, 213, 277.
Reverie at Glenmary, 230.
ROMANCE OF TRAVEL, 236, 248;
estimate of, 249-252; 276.
RURAL LETTERS, 286, 322.
Ruse, the, 81.
SACRED POEMS, 269.
Sacrifice of Abraham, the, 48, 49.
Saturday Afternoon, 81, 98.
SCENERY AND ANTIQUITIES OF IRELAND, 244, 247, 248.
Scenes of Fear, 63, 85, 155.
Scholar of Thebet Ben Chorat, the, 105.
Scrap Book, the, 86.
Scribblings, 86.
She was not There, 169.
SKETCHES, 66, 72, 73, 98.
Sketches of Travel, 153, 172, 221, 247.
Slipshoddities, 267.
Soldier’s Widow, the, 81.
Sparklings of Tenth Waves, 215.
Spirit Love of Ione S----, the, 279.
Spring, 236.
Story writ for the Beautiful, A, 243.
String that tied my Lady’s Shoe, the, 100.
Substance of a Diary of Sickness, the, 88.
SUMMER CRUISE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, A, 325.
Tales of Five Lands. See ROMANCE OF TRAVEL.
Tent Pitched, the. See LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE.
Tête-à-tête Confessions, 86.
Those Ungrateful Blidginses, 279.
Thoughts in a Balcony at Daybreak, 155, 168.
Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born Child, 264.
Three Weeks’ Trip to the West, 341.
To ----, 100.
To ----, 155.
To a City Pigeon, 81, 106.
To a Face Beloved, 193, 236.
To Edith, from the North. See To M----, from Abroad.
To Ermengarde, 216, 236.
To M----, from Abroad, 97, 183.
To my Mother from the Apennines, 13, 183.
To the Julia of Some Years Ago, 289.
Tom Fane and I, 154, 207.
Tom Hat, the, 82.
TORTESA THE USURER, 233-235, 248, 249, 274 _note_.
TRENTON FALLS, 324.
Two Buckets in a Well, 2 _note_.
Two Ways of Dying for a Husband. See BIANCA VISCONTI and TORTESA
THE USURER.
Unseen Spirits, 269.
Unwritten Music, 84, 294.
Unwritten Philosophy, 76, 142.
Unwritten Poetry, 76, 142.
Upon the Portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope, 141.
Usurer Matched, the. See TORTESA THE USURER.
Violanta Cesarini, 250, 251.
What I saw at the Fair, 286.
While We hold You by the Button, 267.
Widow by Brevet, the, 130.
Wife’s Appeal, the, 105.
Wigwam _v._ Almacks, 282.

Willis, Richard Storrs, 7, 14, 284, 298, 308, 310, 316.

Willis, Sarah P., “Fanny Fern,” 14;
writes Ruth Hall, 334-337.

Wilson, John, 52;
breakfast with, 150;
reviews Melanie, 180, 181; 185, 189.

Winthrop, Theodore, 58, 343.

Woodworth, Samuel, 100.

Woolwich, 170, 172.

Woolsey, T. D., 35, 42.

Yale College, 17;
Willis’s career at, 31-70;
condition of, in 1827, 35-37;
poem before, 271.

Youth’s Companion, The, established by Nathaniel Willis, 9; 49.

Youth’s Keepsake, The, 82.

American Men of Letters.

EDITED BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

A series of biographies of distinguished American authors, having all the
special interest of biography, and the larger interest and value of
illustrating the different phases of American literature, the social,
political, and moral influences which have moulded these authors and the
generations to which they belonged.

_Washington Irving._ By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
_Noah Webster._ By HORACE E. SCUDDER.
_Henry D. Thoreau._ By FRANK B. SANBORN.
_George Ripley._ By OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM.
_J. Fenimore Cooper._ By THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
_Margaret Fuller Ossoli._ By T. W. HIGGINSON.
_Ralph Waldo Emerson._ By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
_Edgar Allan Poe._ By GEORGE E. WOODBERRY.
_Nathaniel Parker Willis._ By HENRY A. BEERS.
_Benjamin Franklin._ By JOHN BACH MCMASTER.

_IN PREPARATION._

_Nathaniel Hawthorne._ By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
_William Cullen Bryant._ By JOHN BIGELOW.

Others to be announced hereafter.

Each volume, with Portrait, 16mo, gilt top, $1.25; cloth, uncut edges,
paper label, $1.50; half morocco, $2.50.

“WASHINGTON IRVING.”

Mr. Warner has not only written with sympathy, minute knowledge of his
subject, fine literary taste, and that easy, fascinating style which
always puts him on such good terms with his readers, but he has shown a
tact, critical sagacity, and sense of proportion full of promise for the
rest of the series which is to pass under his supervision.--_New York
Tribune._

It is a very charming piece of literary work, and presents the reader with
an excellent picture of Irving as a man and of his methods as an author,
together with an accurate and discriminating characterization of his
works.--_Boston Journal._

It would hardly be possible to produce a fairer or more candid book of its
kind.--_Literary World_ (London).

“NOAH WEBSTER.”

Mr. Scudder’s biography of Webster is alike honorable to himself and its
subject. Finely discriminating in all that relates to personal and
intellectual character, scholarly and just in its literary criticisms,
analyses, and estimates, it is besides so kindly and manly in its tone,
its narrative is so spirited and enthralling, its descriptions are so
quaintly graphic, so varied and cheerful in their coloring, and its
pictures so teem with the bustle, the movement, and the activities of the
real life of a by-gone but most interesting age, that the attention of the
reader is never tempted to wander, and he lays down the book with a sigh
of regret for its brevity.--_Harper’s Monthly Magazine._

It fills completely its place in the purpose of this series of
volumes.--_The Critic_ (New York).

“HENRY D. THOREAU.”

Mr. Sanborn’s book is thoroughly American and truly fascinating. Its
literary skill is exceptionally good, and there is a racy flavor in its
pages and an amount of exact knowledge of interesting people that one
seldom meets with in current literature. Mr. Sanborn has done Thoreau’s
genius an imperishable service.--_American Church Review_ (New York).

Mr. Sanborn has written a careful book about a curious man, whom he has
studied as impartially as possible; whom he admires warmly but with
discretion; and the story of whose life he has told with commendable
frankness and simplicity.--_New York Mail and Express._

It is undoubtedly the best life of Thoreau extant.--_Christian Advocate_
(New York).

“GEORGE RIPLEY.”

Mr. Frothingham’s memoir is a calm and thoughtful and tender tribute. It
is marked by rare discrimination, and good taste and simplicity. The
biographer keeps himself in the background, and lets his subject speak.
And the result is one of the best examples of personal portraiture that we
have met with in a long time.--_The Churchman_ (New York).

He has fulfilled his responsible task with admirable fidelity, frank
earnestness, justice, fine feeling, balanced moderation, delicate taste,
and finished literary skill. It is a beautiful tribute to the high-bred
scholar and generous-hearted man, whose friend he has so worthily
portrayed.--_Rev. William H. Channing_ (London).

“JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.”

We have here a model biography. The book is charmingly written, with a
felicity and vigor of diction that are notable, and with a humor
sparkling, racy, and never obtrusive. The story of the life will have
something of the fascination of one of the author’s own romances.--_New
York Tribune._

Prof. Lounsbury’s book is an admirable specimen of literary biography.… We
can recall no recent addition to American biography in any department
which is superior to it. It gives the reader not merely a full account of
Cooper’s literary career, but there is mingled with this a sufficient
account of the man himself apart from his books, and of the period in
which he lived, to keep alive the interest from the first word to the
last.--_New York Evening Post._

“MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI.”

Here at last we have a biography of one of the noblest and the most
intellectual of American women, which does full justice to its subject.
The author has had ample material for his work,--all the material now
available, perhaps,--and has shown the skill of a master in his use of
it.… It is a fresh view of the subject, and adds important information to
that already given to the public.--REV. DR. F. H. HEDGE, in _Boston
Advertiser_.

He has filled a gap in our literary history with excellent taste, with
sound judgment, and with that literary skill which is preëminently his
own.--_Christian Union_ (New York).

Mr. Higginson writes with both enthusiasm and sympathy, and makes a volume
of surpassing interest.--_Commercial Advertiser_ (New York).

“RALPH WALDO EMERSON.”

Dr. Holmes has written one of the most delightful biographies that has
ever appeared. Every page sparkles with genius. His criticisms are
trenchant, his analysis clear, his sense of proportion delicate, and his
sympathies broad and deep.--_Philadelphia Press._

A biography of Emerson by Holmes is a real event in American
Literature.--_Standard_ (Chicago).

“EDGAR ALLAN POE.”

Mr. Woodberry has contrived with vast labor to construct what must
hereafter be called the authoritative biography of Poe, a biography which
corrects all others, supplements all others, and supersedes all
others.--_The Critic_ (New York).

The best life of Poe that has yet been written, and no better one is
likely to be written hereafter. This is high praise, but it is deserved.
Mr. Woodberry has spared no pains in exploring sources of information; he
has shown rare judgment and discretion in the interpretation of what he
has found.--_Commercial Advertiser_ (New York).

“NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.”

Prof. Beers has done his work sympathetically yet candidly and fairly and
in a philosophic manner, indicating the status occupied by Willis in the
republic of letters, and sketching graphically his literary environment
and the main springs of his success. It is one of the best books of an
excellent series.--_Buffalo Times._

“BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.”

One of the most interesting and instructive volumes of the series,
overflowing with instructive matter concerning the Bostonian whose name is
so closely identified with the history of Philadelphia, and, indeed, with
that of the whole country as it existed in his day. The pictures which are
given of the momentous period in which he lived are full of vigor, and
betray an astonishing amount of research in many directions. The
simplicity of style and the critical ability so abundantly displayed make
the work very fascinating reading throughout. The estimate of Franklin’s
character, ability, and attainments is a very just one.--_Boston Gazette._

⁂ _For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by
the Publishers_,

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

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