This Indian Ilyssus was the scene of an adventure recorded in certain “Tête-à-tête Confessions” in the “American Monthly,” doubtless with some exaggerations for literary effect and with a dénoûment suspiciously dramatic. The passage may be given, however, for what it is worth:—
“Cytherean Venus! How I did love Miss Polly D. Low, the pride of the factory on the romantic Shawsheen! I saw her first in the tenderest twilight of a Saturday evening, washing her feet in the river. I was a lad of some impudence, and I sat down on a stone beside her, and by the time it was dark we were the best friends possible. She was beautiful. I think so now. She was about eighteen, and, though four years older than I, my education had more than equalized us. At least, if not the wiser of the two, I was the most skilled in the subtlety of love, and practiced with great success les petites ruses. She was a tall brunette, and I sometimes fancied, when her eye exhibited more than ordinary feeling, that there was Indian blood under that dark and glowing skin. The valley of the Shawsheen, just below the village where I was at school, is a gem of solitary and rich scenery, and the overhanging woods and long meadows afforded the most picturesque and desirable haunts for ramblers who did not care to be met. There on Sunday afternoons, when she was released from her shuttle and I from my Schrevelius, did we meet and stroll till the nine o’clock bell of the factory summoned her unwillingly home. I could go without my supper in those days, though I doubt if I would now on such slight occasion. By the time vacation came, I found myself seriously in love, declared my passion, and left her with my heart half broken. We were gone four weeks, and when I returned the butcher’s boy was engaged to Miss Low, and I was warned to avoid the factory at the peril of a flogging.”
In his last year at Andover Willis experienced religion and joined the church. Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called “revivals,” in some school or college needs no description of the kind of pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young consciences there assembled. At the first rumor of an unwonted “seriousness” abroad, occasioned perhaps by the death of a fellow-student, by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in a winter term, the machinery is set in motion. Daily prayer-meetings are held, in which the elders play part,—the movement at Andover was taken in hand by the “Seminarians,” that is, the students of the Divinity School;—the unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and submit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of stimulus there follows a great awakening. Many are “under conviction,” the air becomes electric, and there is a strange spiritual tension which is felt even by the resisting. Momentous choices are made in an instant and under the stress of contagious emotions. The awful issues of eternity are set before a roomful of boys in the midst of prayers and sobs and eloquent words, exhorting the sinner not to let pass this opportunity of salvation,—perhaps his last. And then the movement subsides, leaving an impression which endures with some, and with others quickly wears off. Those who believe that the Christian character and the Christian life are the result of nurture and slow endeavor look with distrust upon these sudden conversions. The hardened sinner may need some such violent call to repentance, but there is a sort of indecency in this premature forcing open of the simple and healthful heart of a boy, substituting morbid self-questionings, exaggerated remorse, and the terrors of perdition for his natural brave outlook on a world of hope and enjoyment. The story of Willis’s conversion is fully told in his letters home, and it reads like a chapter of “Doctor Johns.”
In 1821, being then fifteen years of age, he had written to his father:—
“I can plainly see an answer to prayer in the delay of my admission to the church. I prayed that God would, if I was in danger of making a hasty step, by some means or other prevent it. I doubted, till it became almost a certainty, whether it was proper. I doubted myself, my pretensions to a change of heart; and my very heart seemed to sink under me every time I thought of the solemn engagement I was unhappy, extremely unhappy, when in Boston, and have been, I might say, miserable ever since.”
And again in 1822:—
“As to becoming a Christian, it is morally beyond my power. I have not an objection against it that would weigh a feather, and yet I feel no more solicitude than I ever did about my eternal welfare.”
In a letter of the same year to his mother, who had his conversion much at heart, he says:—
“I do have times when the tears of regret flow, and I make the resolution of attending to the subject of religion. But my light head and still lighter heart dismisses the subject as soon as another object arrests my attention, and my resolutions and regrets are soon lost in the mazes of pleasure and folly.”
It is curious to reflect that these “mazes of pleasure and folly” meant nothing more than innocent school-boy diversions, such as black-berrying and swimming parties, or at worst a juvenile flirtation with some rural belle. The oldness and gravity of the phrase, in contrast with the boyish tone of other parts of his letters, illustrate well that moral precocity—precocity of the conscience as distinguished from the mind—developed in New England boys of the last generation by the Puritan training.