Executive Mansion, July 24th.
Mr. N. P. Willis:
Dear Sir,—It will afford me much pleasure to receive yourself and ladies[12] this evening. Of course anything Mr. Willis writes is interesting, yet, pardon my weakness, I object to the “motherly expression.” If you value my friendship, hasten to have it corrected before the public is assured that I am an old lady with spectacles. When I am forty, four years hence, I will willingly yield to the decrees of time and fate.
Rather an indication, is it not, that years have not passed us lightly by? I rely on you for changing that expression before my age is publicly proclaimed. Quite a morning lecture, yet you certainly deserve it. Be kind enough to accept this modest bouquet from
Your sincere friend,
Mary Lincoln.
A sudden fit of sickness had hindered Willis’s plan to follow the army to Bull Run—fortunately, no doubt, as the correspondent who took his place was made prisoner. He afterwards took horseback rides into the enemy’s country, once narrowly escaping capture near Mount Vernon, and made excursions to Fortress Monroe, Manassas, Old Point Comfort, etc. On March 15, 1862, he was of the party which visited Harper’s Ferry at the invitation of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Hawthorne, too, was of the party and reported the occasion in his article, “Chiefly about War Matters,” in the July “Atlantic” of that year. “Hawthorne is shy and reserved,” wrote Willis in one of his letters to his wife, “but I found he was a lover of mine, and we enjoyed our acquaintance very much.” Emerson and Curtis lectured in Washington while Willis was there, and Greeley dined with him in January, 1862. The novelty and excitement of life at the capital were agreeable at first, but he soon grew homesick and pined for his beloved Idlewild.
In consequence of the war, the circulation of the “Home Journal,” a large proportion of whose subscribers were in the South, had fallen off seriously. Willis found himself greatly straitened, and was obliged to close his country house for a time. Mrs. Willis and the children had spent the winter and spring of 1861-62 at New Bedford, with her father. In April she rented Idlewild and went with her family to pass the summer at Campton, near Plymouth, New Hampshire. In June Willis left Washington and joined her at Campton for a few days, and then returned to New York and took lodgings for himself. Morris’s health had grown so feeble that it became necessary for his partner to apply himself more closely to the management of the paper and do double work. He had been much opposed to the renting of Idlewild, and it troubled him to think of the place in the hands of strangers. He paid it a visit in August, by invitation of his tenant, a Mr. Dennis, and was very hospitably treated. In the autumn of the following year (1863) Mrs. Willis opened at Idlewild a little school for girls, in the hope of persuading her husband to leave New York and come home for life. He appreciated her energy and devotion,—shown through long years of failing health and fortune,—but he doomed himself to homeless exile, and refused to abandon his post. He was opposed to the school project, as he had been to the renting of Idlewild, unreasonably, no doubt, since something of the kind had to be done. But it touched his pride, and with increasing illness there grew upon him a morbid horror of dependence on any one. He fancied that he could work better in his New York lodgings. By 1864, moreover, Morris had become quite imbecile, and the responsibilities of editorship weighed more and more heavily on Willis. He remained at New York, therefore, running up to Idlewild for an occasional visit of a day or two, over Sunday, or sometimes for a week at a time. In July, 1864, General Morris died. Willis was deeply moved as he stood by his coffin. “My beloved old friend,” he wrote, “looked wonderfully tranquil, and so sweetly noble that I could not forbear giving him a parting kiss, though William sobbed as he looked on. So passes from earth one who loved me devotedly.” After Morris’s death Willis took into partnership a young man named Hollister, who had capital and enthusiasm; but the business management of the “Home Journal” began to fall more and more upon the shoulders of its present editor, Mr. Morris Phillips.
The story of the last few years of Willis’s life is a melancholy chronicle of failing powers, and of persistent struggle with disease and narrowing fates. He had long borne up against ill health with the gay courage of a cavalier. His pen faltered, but nothing that it wrote gave signs of bitterness or discouragement. Toward the last his temper, which had been uniformly sweet, sometimes grew irritable and morbid, though nothing of this appeared in his writing. As early as 1852 he had fancied that he had consumption, but his cough turned out to be merely “sympathetic,” and his lungs were pronounced sound. His disease finally declared itself as epilepsy, and resulted at the last in paralysis and softening of the brain. He was subject for years to epileptic fits, occurring periodically, usually on the tenth day. During these attacks, so long as his strength lasted, he was extremely violent, but as he grew weaker, they simply made him unconscious, leaving him greatly prostrated when the fit was over. The true nature of his malady was, for some years, known only to his wife and his physician, Dr. Gray, who feared that it might injure Willis’s business and literary interests if it were publicly understood that his brain was affected, or in danger of being affected. Willis was himself very sensitive on this point, and begged that no stranger might see him during his attacks. Accordingly, the matter was kept secret as long as possible. After Willis’s death, one of his physicians, Dr. J. B. F. Walker, printed some “Medical Reminiscences of N. P. Willis,” in the course of which he said: “Not only was he a martyr to the agonies of sharp and sudden attacks, but he suffered all the languors of chronic disease. With the exception of Henry Heine, there has hardly been a man of letters doomed to such protracted torments from bodily disease.”
Under these trying circumstances he exhibited a persistence in his work which astonished his friends. They had not thought that such endurance was in the man. But from some underlying stratum of character, some strain of toughness inherent in his Puritan stock, he brought up resources of will and stubbornness which resisted all appeals. Though complaining sometimes in his letters that he was “pitilessly overworked,” he declared his intention of dying in harness, and clung to his desk and his lonely lodgings till the doctors pronounced him a dying man. A part of the summers of 1865 and 1866 he spent at Idlewild, but the autumn of the latter year found him still at work in the city. He was now so weak that he often fainted in the street and had to be carried to his rooms. His partner, Morris Phillips, was untiring in his attentions; and finally, early in November, he brought him home to Idlewild, Willis yielding at last to the united entreaties of his wife, his father, and his sisters, and the imperative command of his doctor, to stop work. But he had come home only to die. He kept his room and seldom went down-stairs. During the first month he had some enjoyment of the home associations, taking pleasure in the daily visit of his children, and listening to the reading of poetry, more for its soothing effect than for any intellectual apprehension of it. He soon became helpless and slept much of the time, and when waking lived in continual visions and hallucinations. His recognition of his family was fitful during the last six or eight weeks of his life. He was watched and cared for by his wife and faithful Harriet, and no strange hand ministered to him or marked his failing consciousness. He died on the afternoon of the 20th of January, 1867,—his sixty-first birthday,—so quietly that the single watcher could not say when. He was taken to Boston, and buried in Mount Auburn. The funeral service of the Episcopal Church was read over his body in St. Paul’s Church, by the Rev. P. D. Huntington, the bookstores of the city being closed, in token of respect, while the service lasted. His pall was borne by Longfellow, Dana, Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Dr. Howe, Merritt Trimble, and Aldrich. “I took the flower which lies before me at this moment, as I write,” says Dr. Holmes, in a recent number of the “Atlantic,” “from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad, overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867.”