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.