The obituary notices which were published after Willis’s death made it evident that he had, in a sense, survived his own fame. They were reminiscent in tone, as though addressed to a generation that knew not Joseph. It was forty years since he had come before the public with his maiden book. It was twenty since he had put forth anything entitled to live; and meanwhile a new literature had grown up in America. The bells of morning tinkled faintly and far off, lost in the noise of fife and drum, and the war opened its chasm between the present and the past. For a time even Irving seemed sentimental and Cooper melodramatic. Yet these survive, but whether Willis, whose name has so often been joined with theirs, is destined to find still a hearing, it is for the future alone to say. “He will be remembered,” wrote his kinsman, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, “as a man eminently human, with almost unique endowments, devoting rare powers to insignificant purposes, and curiously illustrating the ‘fine irony of Nature,’ with which she often lavishes one of her choice productions on comparatively inferior ends.”
But, laying aside all question of appeal to that formidable tribunal, posterity, the many contemporaries who have owed hours of refined enjoyment to his graceful talent will join heartily with Thackeray in his assertion: “It is comfortable that there should have been a Willis.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] This statement needs, however, some qualification. Mr. Clark, of Clark & Maynard, who publish Willis’s poems, tells me that there is a steady sale for these of about two hundred copies annually. Fifty years after date this is not bad. How many copies of Something and Other Poems, issued in 1884, will be asked for at the booksellers’ in the year of grace 1934? The copyright of most of Willis’s poems having lately expired, a cheap reprint of them has just been put forth, bearing date 1884 and forming No. 352 of “Lovell’s Library.” This seems to point to a continued popular demand. His prose writings are at present out of print. The fourth volume of Stories by American Authors contains his “Two Buckets in a Well,” and it is understood that the publishers of that series have in mind the publication of a volume of selections from Willis’s prose.
[2] The book here mentioned was her compilation, Stories of American Life by American Authors, printed in 1830, to which reference was made in chapter III. A number of Willis’s letters to Miss Mitford are published in The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford, from one of which the above passage is taken.
[3] It was doubtless this article which encouraged Bates in the Maclise Portrait Gallery to describe Willis as a “sumph” and “N(amby) P(amby) Willis.”
[4] Mrs. Child.
[5] Not written by Willis.