When he left college his father was living at Winchester, and there he himself pursued the study of the law. He wrote pieces in verse and prose for the Virginian, and The Southern Literary Messenger (then just started), and projected novels and an extensive work in literary criticism. Before he was twenty-one he was married, admitted to the bar, and had a fair prospect of practice, in Frederick, Jefferson, and Berkeley counties. "I am blessed by my fireside," he wrote, "here on the banks of the Shenandoah in view and within a mile of the Blue Ridge; I go to county towns, at the sessions of the courts, and hunt, and fish, and make myself as happy with my companions as I can."
"So," he wrote to us in 1846, "have passed five, six, seven, eight years, and now I am striving, after long disease of my literary veins, to get the rubbish of idle habits away and work them again. My fruit-trees, rose-bushes, poultry, guns, fishing-tackle, good, hard-riding friends, a long-necked bottle on my sideboard, an occasional client, &c., &c., &c., make it a little difficult to get from the real into the clouds again. It requires a resolute habit of self-concentration to enable a man to shut out these and all such real concerns, and give himself warmly to the nobler or more tender sort of writing—and I am slowly acquiring it."
The atmosphere in which he lived was not, it seems, altogether congenial—so far as literature was concerned—and he wrote:
"What do you think of a good friend of mine, a most valuable and worthy and hard-riding one, saying gravely to me a short time ago, 'I would'nt waste time on a damned thing like poetry; you might make yourself, with all your sense and judgment, a useful man in settling neighborhood disputes and difficulties.' You have as much chance with such people, as a dolphin would have if in one of his darts he pitched in amongst the machinery of a mill. "Philosophy would clip an angel's wings," Keats says, and pompous dulness would do the same. But these very persons I have been talking about, are always ready, when the world generally has awarded the honors of successful authorship to any of our mad tribe, to come in and confirm the award, and buy, if not read, the popular book. And so they are not wholly without their uses in this world. But woe to him who seeks to climb amongst them. An author must avoid them until he is already mounted on the platform, and can look down on them, and make them ashamed to show their dulness by keeping their hands in their breeches pockets, whilst the rest of the world are taking theirs out to give money or to applaud with. I am wasting my letter with these people, but for fear you may think I am chagrined or cut by what I abuse them for, I must say that they suit one half of my character, moods, and pursuits, in being good kindly men, rare table companions, many of them great in field sports, and most of them rather deficient in letters than mind; and that, in an every-day sense of the words, I love and am beloved by them."
Soon afterward he wrote:
"Mr. Kennedy's assurance that you would find a publisher for my poems leaves me without any further excuse for not collecting them. If not the most devoted, truly you are the most serviceable, of my friends, but it is because Mr. Kennedy has overpraised me to you. Your letter makes me feel as if I had always known you intimately, and I have a presentiment that you will counteract my idleness and good-for-nothingness, and that, hoisted on your shoulders I shall not be lost under the feet of the crowd, nor left behind in a fence corner. I am profoundly grateful for the kindness which dictated what you have done, and to show you that I will avail myself of it, I inclose a proem to the pieces of which I wrote you in my last."
The poem referred to was so beautiful that we asked and obtained permission to put it in Graham's Magazine, of which we were at that time editor. The author's name was not given, and it excited much curiosity, as but two or three of our poets were thought capable of such a performance, and there was no reason why one of them should print any thing anonymously. It was most commonly, however, attributed to Mr. Willis, at which Mr. Cooke was highly gratified. The piece, which was entitled "Emily," contained about three hundred lines, and was a feigned history of the composition of tales designed to follow it, exquisitely told, and sprinkled all along with gems that could have come from only a mine of surpassing richness. For examples:
Young Emily has temples fair
Caress'd by locks of dark brown hair.
A thousand sweet humanities
Speak wisely from her hazel eyes.
Her speech is ignorant of command,
And yet can lead you like a hand.
Her white teeth sparkle, when the eclipse
Is laughter-moved, of her red lips.
She moves, all grace, with gliding limbs
As a white-breasted cygnet swims.
I know some wilds, where tulip trees,
Full of the singing toil of bees,
Depend their loving branches over
Great rocks, which honeysuckles cover
In rich and liberal overflow.
In the dear time of long ago
When I had woo'd young Emily,
And she had told her love to me,
I often found her in these bowers,
Quite rapt away in meditation,
Or giving earnest contemplation
To leaf, or bird, or wild-wood flowers;
And once I heard the maiden singing,
Until the very woods were ringing——
Singing an old song to the hours!
One jocund morn: