NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
POET, AND THE MOST NOTED MAGAZINIST OF HIS DAY.
T is perhaps unfortunate for Willis that he was such a devotee of fashion and form as to attain a reputation for “foppishness.” Almost all men of genius have some habit or besetting sin which renders them personally more or less unpopular and sometimes even odious to the public eye. The noted poet, Coleridge, of England, had the opium habit, and many people who know this cannot divest their minds of a certain loathing for the man when they come to read his poems. The drink habit of Edgar Allen Poe and other unfortunate facts in his personal life have created a popular prejudice also against this brilliant but erratic genius. A like prejudice exists against the poet naturalist, Thoreau, whose isolation from men and attempt to live on a mere pittance has prejudiced many minds against the reading of his profitable productions; for it has been said that no man ever lived closer to the heart of nature than did this friend of the birds, the insects, animals, flowers, mountains and rivers. It is doubtful if any man in literature has lived a purer life or possessed in his sphere a more exalted genius, given us so close an insight into nature, or awakened a more enthusiastic study of the subject.
Therefore let us look with a deserving charity upon the personal pride, or “foppishness,” if we may call it such, of the poet, Willis. He certainly deserves more general reputation as a poet than modern critics are disposed to accord him. Many of his pieces are of an extraordinary grade of merit, signifying a most analytical and poetic mind, and evincing a marked talent and facility for versification and prose writing executed in a style of peculiar grace and beauty.
Nathaniel Parker Willis was born in Portland, January 20th 1806. The family traces its ancestry back to the fifteenth century in England, and for more than two hundred years prior to his birth both his paternal and maternal ancestors had lived in New England. The poet’s father was for several years publisher and editor of the Easton “Argus,” a political paper established at Portland, Maine, in 1803. He founded a religious paper, the Boston “Recorder,” in 1816, which he conducted for twenty years, and he was also the founder of the first child’s newspaper in the world, which is the now famous and widely circulated “Youth’s Companion.” Willis was six years old when his father removed to Boston. He had the best educational facilities from private tutors and select schools, completing his course at Yale College, where he graduated in 1827. While in college he published several religious poems [♦]under the signature of “Roy,” gaining in one instance a prize of fifty dollars for the best poem. After his graduation Willis became the editor of a series of volumes published by S. G. Goodrich, entitled “The Legendary.” He next established the “American Monthly Magazine” which he merged after two years into the New York “Mirror,” to which paper his “Pencilings by the Way” were contributed during a four year’s tour in Europe, on which journey he was attached to the American legation at Paris, and with a diplomatic passport visited the various capitals of Europe and the East. During this sojourn, in 1835, he married Miss Mary Stace, daughter of a Waterloo officer.
[♦] ‘unter’ replaced with ‘under’