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.”