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founded in 1823 by Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and General George P. Morris, but Woodworth had withdrawn some time before Willis joined it.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:—