Just a century ago, in 1806, was born Nathaniel Parker Willis, in Portland, Maine. Willis was a fellow townsman of Longfellow, but while the latter finally made his way to Boston and Cambridge, Willis found New York the most congenial residence. There he was successively editor of the Mirror, the Corsair, and the Home Journal, enlivening their pages with an inexhaustible supply of witty, well-timed, and sometimes brilliant prose and verse. He was the first American to write vers de société that deserved preservation, and that were at once light, amusing, and in good taste.
Willis affected an extreme elegance in dress, manner, and surroundings. He pretended to write amid rare flowers, with old vines beside him, and to use an amber penholder in the summer to cool his palm. Those who disliked this display of foppery were wont to explain the initials of his name as representing “Namby-Pamby.” But with all his superficial frivolity, Willis was a man of genuine talent. His early poems were quite as popular as Longfellow’s. He was the first American author to make a good living wholly by his pen. He discovered and gave substantial aid to many younger men of genius, among them James Russell Lowell and Bayard Taylor, and he first drew the attention of his countrymen to the great gifts of Thackeray, long before “Vanity Fair” had been written, and while the future novelist was still known only as a writer for the English magazines. He even engaged Thackeray to contribute a series of papers from Paris to the New York Corsair—this as far back as 1838. Willis also, in his own letters from Europe, created a model for all foreign correspondents since that time; and his collected epistles, “Pencilings by the Way,” still remain the most vivid sketches in existence of the men and women who were famous when Victoria first became queen.
The little poem here reprinted is one of the light, half-mocking productions, which its author wrote to amuse his urban public. It voices the sentiment of the young-man-about-town in the New York of the early fifties. Perhaps the best comment upon it is the fact that Willis himself, whenever he could possibly do so, was accustomed to leave the city and enjoy the rustic pleasures of his own country-house at Idlewild on the Hudson.
By NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
They may talk of love in a cottage,
And bowers of trellised vine,
Of nature bewitchingly simple,
And milkmaids half divine;
They may talk of the pleasure of sleeping