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.”