Willis took advantage of his new facilities to become his own publisher, issuing successively, as shilling extras in the “Mirror Library,” his “Sacred Poems,” “Poems of Passion,” and “Lady Jane and Humorous Poems;” following these up with the first complete editions, from the “Mirror” press, of “Letters from Under a Bridge,” and “Pencillings by the Way.” The poems contained few notable additions to “Melanie” and earlier volumes, except those just mentioned as printed in the “New Mirror,” and the lines on the death of President Harrison, which were much admired at the time. They were in anapestics, an unusual metre with him, but one which he handled not without fire in this excellent elegy. “Lady Jane” was a society poem in some two hundred “Don Juan” stanzas and was by no means the worst of the many imitations of Byron’s inimitable masterpiece—if the bull may be pardoned. The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,—this time he was twenty-two,—and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who, “having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may. This is all, but the poet has caught, as successfully as was possible for him, the alternate irony and sentiment, the rattling digressiveness, and the eccentric rhyming and audacious punning of his original. There is a delicate suggestion of Lady Blessington in the heroine; but Willis’s English acquaintances could hardly have felt pleased at being served up by name in the picture of a London soirée, as “Savage Landor, wanting soap and sand,” as “frisky Bowring, London’s wisest bore,” or even as “calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie.” Willis was now in considerable request for lectures and occasional poems. On August 17, 1841, he delivered a poem before the Linonian Society of Yale College, extracts from which appear in his collected poems as “The Elms of New Haven.” This address was not without touches of fancy and tender reminders to the assembled scholars of
“The green tent where your harness was put on,”
and of summer nights in Academus, when the bird
“Sang a half carol as the moon wore on
And looked into his nest.”
But the blank verse carried him along into that smooth diffuseness which was his besetting sin, and the poem, as a whole, did not rise above commonplace. It compares but poorly with Dr. Holmes’s noble “Astræa,” delivered in 1850 before the Phi Beta Kappa society at New Haven by a poet who, though the son of another Alma Mater, gracefully acknowledged himself the grandson of Yale. At another time, in response to an invitation from James T. Fields to recite a poem in Boston, Willis wrote: “I took the time to consider whether there could be such a thing as an effective spoken poem. I am satisfied now, that my style depends so much on those light shades which would be lost on more ears than two at a time, that I should make an utter failure.” In 1843 he lectured on the formation of character before the Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore, and the audience—a large one—was disappointed by the serious nature of the address. A “Lecture on Fashion” given before the New York Lyceum and published in 1844 was more characteristic, at least in subject. He lectured also in Boston and Albany, perhaps in other places, but without marked success, being an indifferent orator and not at home on the platform. “The calling on a hen for an egg, while she stands on the fence, would seem to me reasonable,” said he, “in comparison with asking for my sentiments, to be delivered on my legs.”
In the issue of the “New Mirror” for September 28, 1844, the editors announced that they had been driven out of the field of weekly journalism by the United States Post Office. The “Mirror,” being stitched, could not go at newspaper rates, but was taxed, at the caprice of postmasters, from two to fifteen cents a copy. This more than doubled the price to country readers and killed the mail subscription. Remonstrances addressed to the authorities at Washington only brought, in reply, a letter of “sesquipedalian flummery.” Accordingly the editors decided to change the shape of the paper and publish it as a daily. The first number of the “Evening Mirror” came out October 7, 1844. It was published every day in the week but Sunday, and ran till the close of the following year, under the joint conduct of Morris, Willis, and Hiram Fuller. The last was a young man, and a far-away cousin of Margaret Fuller. He continued the paper, under the same name, for years after his partners had left him. It was of Fuller that Bennett said, “We saw the editor of the ‘Evening Mirror,’ the other day, treating his subscribers to an excursion; he drove them all down Broadway to the Battery in an omnibus.” Edgar Poe was engaged upon the “Evening Mirror” as critic and sub-editor in the autumn of 1844, and remained upon it about six months. His relations with Willis were of the pleasantest. The latter tried to befriend him in various ways and lent him the hearty support of his paper. His recollections of his former associate were given in the “Home Journal” for October 13, 1849, shortly after Poe’s death, in an article bearing generous testimony to his perfect regularity, reasonableness, and courtesy, while engaged upon the “Mirror.” Poe’s own estimate of Willis is given at some length in his series of papers on “The Literati of New York.”[7] It is friendly in tone, but quite impartial and discriminating. Its literary criticism need not be here repeated, but Poe’s personal impressions of Willis are worth giving:—
“Mr. Willis’s career,” he writes, “has naturally made him enemies among the envious host of dunces whom he has outstripped in the race for fame; and these his personal manner (a little tinctured with reserve, brusquerie, or even haughtiness) is by no means adapted to conciliate. He has innumerable warm friends, however, and is himself a warm friend. He is impulsive, generous, bold, impetuous, vacillating, irregularly energetic, apt to be hurried into error, but incapable of deliberate wrong. He is yet young and, without being handsome in the ordinary sense, is a remarkably well-looking man. In height he is perhaps five feet eleven and justly proportioned. His figure is put in the best light by the ease and assured grace of his carriage. His whole person and personal demeanor bear about them the traces of ‘good society.’ His face is somewhat too full or rather heavy in its lower proportions. Neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended. The latter would puzzle phrenology. His eyes are a dull bluish gray and small. His hair is of a rich brown, curling naturally and luxuriantly. His mouth is well cut, the teeth fine, the expression of the smile intellectual and winning. He converses little, well rather than fluently, and in a subdued tone.”
It was after Morris and Willis had dissolved their connection with the “Evening Mirror” that that journal published the article, by Thomas Dunn English, reflecting severely on Poe’s character, for which he sued Fuller and recovered $225 damages. His “Raven” was written while he was on the paper, and first published anonymously in the “American Review.” Willis reprinted it in the “Mirror” over Poe’s name, with a send-off, in which he said, “We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.”[8]
The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity—and calamity as yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother whose love had been to him both a stay and an inspiration. His youngest sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25, 1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part, “Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840, and which now appeared for the first time in book form, exhibited more range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in some of the earlier stories—such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”—of a capacity for stronger and graver work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life” stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.” Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in the dénouement and confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend—like the Goddesses on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer, sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in particular. But in each and all of these protean shapes, he is equally fascinating and invincible. In “Beware of Dogs and Waltzing,” the author entered the confessional with even less precaution than usual. It is quite plain to one reading between the lines, that the hero, Mr. Lindsay Maud, with his retroussé nose, sanguineous tint, curly hair, and dimpled chin, is no other than Willis himself; that the Surrey manor where the scene is laid is Shirley Park; that its hospitable occupants, the Becktons, are in truth the Skinner family; that Mabel Brown, the heroine, is identical with Miss Mary Stace; and, lastly, that Miss Blakeney, the dazzling but heartless heiress, whose hand Mr. Maud’s hostess kindly destines for her young protégé, but whom, yielding to his better angel, he flings overboard in favor of the gentler and sweeter Mabel, is a certain belle of fortune, who figures in Willis’s private correspondence as “trotted out” by Mrs. Skinner for his inspection with a view to his making a rich marriage.