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.”