The blasé editor—at forty-three;
Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,
To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’
I lash not Willis even for this his crime—
Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;
The race o’er whom, in his own native power,
Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”
Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R. Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44, the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but remonstrating with him upon his declared intention—in a very appreciative review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”—to omit the James from his “musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:—
“Suppose I, dropping the ‘N.,’ should call you by that mysterious middle letter—whose signification, without reference to the Parish Register (or perhaps Griswold’s equally entertaining bead-roll) no man can fathom—and call you ‘P. Willis.’ Under such painful circumstances you could imagine how I feel, when you amputate one sound limb of my name.
“However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle, and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the warmer atmosphere of New York—as I shall before long.”[10]