During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28, 1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was born April 27, 1850.
For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu, many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirable parti, slipped her a note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.” This being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,—
“Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel:
I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.”
When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb asylum which had an inscription over the gate, Stiftung, etc. “Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.”
Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to ask him to write a letter after his day’s work was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. His letters to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit on the stage, at the Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and ‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but have my doubts as to success.”
The easy dégagé air of his writing was, as is usually the case with seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copy must be followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends, “probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips, “which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business association.” “I would not stay one week a partner with a man who ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr. Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper, never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation. He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,—not to say reckless,—and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first to praise them, and to give circulation to their good things by copying them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich—who succeeded James Parton as assistant editor of the “Home Journal”—and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the “Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when he came to New York to seek the means for foreign travel he applied at once to the author whose brilliant pictures of European life had roused his young enthusiasm. Willis befriended him in every way; gave him letters to wealthy gentlemen in New York, and bestirred himself to interest people in his adventure and raise the sum necessary to start him on his journey. On his departure he gave him a letter to his brother Richard, in Frankfort, with whom the young handwerksbursch tarried for a time, while he was picking up the German language. His “Views Afoot”—the fruits of this venture—were dedicated to Willis, who contributed the preface. This patronage was unkindly referred to in Duganne’s “Parnassus in Pillory,” a little Dunciad of the old downright “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” variety, which made some noise in New York in the year 1851:—
“What time Nat Willis, in the daily papers,
Published receipts of shoemakers and drapers;