“The New Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Containing Original Papers, Tales of Romance, Sketches of Society, Manners, and Everyday Life; Domestic and Foreign Correspondence; Wit and Humor; Fashion and Gossip; the Fine Arts and Literary, Musical, and Dramatic Criticism; extracts from New Works; Poetry, Original and Selected; the Spirit of the Public Journals, etc., etc., etc.”
Willis could not afford to give up all the other strings to his bow until he saw how the new venture was going to succeed. He retained his position as New York correspondent to the “National Intelligencer,” and his “Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” published in that paper, were regularly reprinted in the “New Mirror.” His stories in “Graham’s” and “Godey’s” went on up to January, 1844, after which time he announced that he should write in future exclusively for his own paper. His contributions to the “Mirror,” while editor, included tales, poems, sketches, reminiscences, letters, book notices, besides editorial papers of a miscellaneous sort, such as “Jottings,” “Slipshoddities,” “Diary of Town Trifles,” “More Particularly,” “Just You and I,” “While We hold You by the Button,” and what not, in which he set himself to catch and reflect the passing humors and picturesque surfaces of town life. He might have said of his muse at this time, as the psalmist of his soul, Adhæsit pavimento. He wrote a number of “City Lyrics,” signed “Down Town Bard,” celebrating beauties in white chip hats, whom he had helped into omnibuses: Broadway odes, inviting his sweetheart to a moonlight walk up to Thompson’s for an ice; or mock heroic lamentations in blank verse, that the lady in the chemisette with black buttons, whose sixpence he had passed up to the driver, might be doomed to pass him forever without meeting,—
“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and I
Lone in the Waverley.”
It might have been expected that Willis, with his peculiarly dainty instinct, would excel in this carving of cherry stones. But his society verses in this kind were too hurriedly done and fell short of that perfect workmanship and fineness of taste which float many a trifle of Praed or Dobson. Willis’s city poems are flimsy and sometimes a little vulgar, and their place is mid-way between really artistic society verse and such metropolitan ballads as “Walking Down Broadway” and “Tassels on the Boots,” which Lingard used to sing. The best of them, perhaps, is “Love in a Cottage,” a charmingly frank expression of a preference for the artificial, a quatrain from which has got into common quotation:—
“But give me a sly flirtation
By the light of a chandelier,
With music to play in the pauses,
And nobody very near.”
These “City Lyrics” were not all humorous, however. The bitter contrasts which forced themselves upon Bryant walking “slowly through the crowded street” appealed also to the “Down Town Bard,” who expressed them in “The Pity of the Park Fountain,” and more successfully in “Unseen Spirits,” first printed in the “New Mirror” of July 29, 1843. This little poem—suggested, perhaps, in some mood of abstraction when the poet was strolling listlessly up Broadway, his spirits low and his eternal watchfulness for effects asleep—has, for that very reason doubtless, the sudden touch of genius, the unconsciousness and careless felicity which seem likely to keep it alive and to make it, possibly, the only work of Willis destined to reach posterity. It was a favorite with Edgar Poe, who used to recite it at reading clubs and the like, and who said that, in his opinion and that of nearly all his friends, it was “the truest poem ever written by Mr. Willis. There is about this little poem,” he continues, “(evidently written in haste and through impulse) a true imagination. Its grace, dignity, and pathos are impressive, and there is more in it of earnestness of soul than in anything I have seen from the pen of its author.”[6]