The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nathaniel Parker Willis, by Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers

American Men of Letters.

EDITED BY
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

S. Lawrence, 1837. Illman & Sons.

N. P. Willis.

American Men of Letters.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

BY
HENRY A. BEERS.

BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1890.

Copyright, 1885,
By HENRY A. BEERS.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

PREFACE.

The materials for a life of Willis are rich enough to be embarrassing. Most of his writings are, in a greater or less degree, autobiographical; and it would be possible to make a very tolerable life of him, by arranging passages from these in the right order, and linking them together with a few paragraphs of cold facts. Then, he lived very much in the world’s eye, and was constantly talked and written about, so that there is abundant mention of him in newspaper files, and in volumes of “Recollections,” etc., by his contemporaries. In addition to these printed sources, I have been furnished, by the kindness of Mrs. N. P. Willis, Miss Julia Willis, and Mrs. Imogen Willis Eddy, with private letters, journals, and other MS. memoranda by Willis, which extend from his school days at Andover down to a few weeks before his death—of course not without lacunæ. Although I have not quoted very freely from these letters, they have been of the greatest service, by supplying facts which I have incorporated with the body of the narrative, and by correcting or verifying data otherwise obtained. A biography of Willis could have been written without them, but this particular biography could not; and I take occasion hereby to acknowledge my debt to the ladies whose courtesy gave me access to this material.

There are many others who have helped my undertaking in various ways—too many for me to thank them all by name. But I cannot withhold mention of my obligations to Mr. Richard S. Willis and to Mr. Morris Phillips, the editor of the “Home Journal.”

HENRY A. BEERS.

CONTENTS.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

CHAPTER I.
1806-1823.
ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.

Willis was born January 20, 1806, in the little old seaport city of Portland, Maine, celebrated by the “Autocrat” for its great square mansions, the homes of retired sea-captains. The town had already made some noise in literature, as the residence of that wild genius, John Neal; and on February 27, 1807, little more than a year after the date with which this biography begins, it witnessed the birth of its most illustrious citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A comparison at once suggests itself between the subsequent fortunes in the republic of letters of these two infant poets, fellow townsmen for some five years. Willis was the earlier in the field. In 1832, when Longfellow, then a young professor at Bowdoin College, began to contribute scholarly articles to the “North American Review,” the former had been five years before the public, and was already well known as a poet, a magazine editor, and a foreign correspondent. When “Outre-Mer” was issued in 1835, Willis had won a reputation as a prose writer on both sides of the Atlantic by his “Pencillings” in the “New York Mirror;” and by 1839, when Longfellow published his first volume of original poetry, “Voices of the Night,” his senior by a year had printed five books of verse. But there is no question as to which has proved the better continuer. Longfellow is still the favorite poet of two peoples; a singer dearer, perhaps, to the general heart than any other who has sung in the English tongue. His brilliant contemporary, after being for about fifteen years the most popular magazinist in America, has sunk into comparative oblivion.[1] This is the fate of all fashionable literature. Every generation begins by imitating the literary fashions of the last, and ends with a reaction against them. At present “realism” has the floor, sentiment is at a discount, and Willis’s glittering, high-colored pictures of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact, have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James.

Without presuming any native equality between Willis and the Cambridge poet, it is fair to add that the former never found opportunity to deepen and ripen such gift as was in him. His life was passed not “in the quiet and still air of delightful studies,” but in the rush of the gay world and the daily drudgery of the pen; in the toil of journalism, that most exhausting of mental occupations, which is forever giving forth and never bringing in. His best work—all of his work which claims remembrance—was done before he was forty. His earlier writings are not only his freshest, but his strongest and most carefully executed.

Willis is a glaring instance of inherited tendencies, being the third journalist in succession in his line of descent. The founder of the family in this country, and the progenitor of our subject in the seventh generation, was a certain George Willis, born in England in 1602, who arrived in New England probably about 1630. He was a brickmaker and builder by trade, and is described as “a Puritan of considerable distinction,” who resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some sixty years, having been admitted to the Freeman’s Oath in 1638 and elected a deputy to the General Court. Probably the most noteworthy of the poet’s forbears, at least upon the father’s side, was the Rev. John Bailey, his ancestor in the fifth generation, a non-conforming Independent minister in Lancashire, who, having been silenced and afterwards imprisoned, escaped to Massachusetts in 1684, and was settled, first as minister over the church in Watertown, and later as associate minister over the First Church in Boston, where he died in 1697. Increase Mather preached his funeral sermon. His tomb is in the Granary Burying Ground, adjoining Park Street Church, and his portrait in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society. What more could a man ask for in an ancestor? No New England pedigree which respects itself is without one or more fine old Puritan divines of this kind. Accordingly, when Willis began to take that mild, retrospective interest in his own genealogy which foretokens the oncoming of age,—when new twigs upon the family tree give an unthought-of importance to the roots,—he bestowed the name of this particular forefather upon his youngest boy, Bailey Willis.

The poet’s great-grandmother Willis, born Abigail Belknap, was granddaughter to this Rev. John Bailey, and had some traits which cropped out in her posterity. At the time of the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor, she cannily saved a little for private use. She used to say, “I have got some Belknap pride in me yet;” and among her favorite maxims were, “Never go into the back door when you can go into the front,” and “Never eat brown bread when you can get white.” The husband of this lady was Charles Willis, a sail-maker and patriot, who was present on the occasion when tar and feathers and hot tea were administered to his Majesty’s tax-collector in Boston. His position and action in the affair were represented in an ancient engraving, bought long afterwards by his grandson, Deacon Nathaniel Willis, our Willis’s father. A copy of the same is now in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The son of Charles and Abigail Willis was Nathaniel, the third, though by no means the last, Willis with that baptismal name; the first literary man in the family, and the poet’s grandfather. He conducted in Boston, during the Revolutionary War, the “Independent Chronicle,” a Whig newspaper, published from the same building in which Franklin had worked as a printer. This Nathaniel senior, as we may call him, was an active man. He was a fine horseman, took part in the Boston tea-party, and was adjutant of the Boston regiment sent on an expedition to Rhode Island under General Sullivan. In 1784 he sold his interest in the “Independent Chronicle,” and became one of the pioneer journalists of the unsettled West. He removed first to Winchester, Virginia, where he published a paper for a short time; then to Shepardstown, where he also published a paper; and thence in 1790 to Martinsburg, Virginia, where he founded the “Potomac Guardian” and edited it till 1796. In that year he went to Chillicothe, Ohio, and established the “Scioto Gazette,” the first newspaper in what was then known as the Northwestern Territory. He was printer to the government of the territory, and afterwards held an agency in the Post Office Department. He bought and cultivated a farm near Chillicothe, on which he ended his days April 1, 1831. His wife was Lucy Douglas, of New London, Connecticut.

His son and the poet’s father, Nathaniel Willis, Junior,—the fourth Nathaniel in the family,—was born at Boston in 1780, and remained there until 1787, when he joined his father at Winchester and was employed in his newspaper office, and subsequently at Martinsburg on the “Potomac Guardian.” In the infancy of American journalism, the editor and publisher of a paper was usually a practical printer. Young Nathaniel was put to work at once in folding papers and setting types. At Martinsburg he used to ride post, with tin horn and saddle-bags, delivering papers to scattered subscribers in the thinly settled country. N. P. Willis himself served a year’s apprenticeship at his father’s press in Boston, in an interval of his schooling; and in his letters home from England alluded triumphantly to his having once been destined by his parents to the trade of a printer. His particular duty was to ink the types. “We remember balling an edition of ‘Watts’s Psalms and Hymns,’ and there are lines in that good book that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the ink-balls, while conning them over.” A sketch of the old office of the “Potomac Guardian,” made by “Porte Crayon,” is in the possession of Mr. Richard Storrs Willis of Detroit.

At the age of fifteen young Nathaniel returned to Boston and entered the office of his father’s old paper, the “Independent Chronicle,” working in the same press-room in Court Street where his father had once worked, and the great Franklin before him. He also found time, while in Boston, to drill with the “Fusiliers.” In 1803, invited by a Maine congressman and other gentlemen of the Republican party, he went to Portland and established the “Eastern Argus” in opposition to the Federalists. Here the subject of this biography was born three years later. “Well do I remember that day,” his father wrote to him fifty-seven years after the event, “and the driving snow-storm in which I had to go, in an open sleigh, to bring in the nurse from the country. Francis Douglas boarded with us at that time. He was a very pleasant young man, and had a half promise (if it was a boy) it should be called Francis. But your mother soon overruled that, and decided that you should have both of our names, for fear she should never have another son! You was a fine fat baby, with a face as round as an apple.”

Party spirit ran high at this time, and political articles were acrimonious. Libel suits were brought against the publisher of the “Argus,” which involved him in trouble and expense; and six years after its establishment it was sold for four thousand dollars to the same Francis Douglas who had come so near imposing his Christian name on the infant Willis. At Portland Nathaniel Willis came under the ministrations and influence of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D.,—on whose death, many years after, his son composed some rather perfunctory verses,—and began henceforth to devote himself to the cause of religion. From 1810 to 1812 he sought to establish a religious newspaper in Portland, but met with no substantial encouragement. At the latter date he returned to Boston, where, after years of effort, during which he supported himself by publishing tracts and devotional books, he started, in January, 1816, the “Boston Recorder,” which he asserted to be the first religious newspaper in the world. It was in this periodical that the earliest lispings of Willis’s muse reached the ear of the public. The “Recorder” was conducted by his father down to 1844, in which year it was sold to the Rev. Martin Moore. It still lives as the “Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.”

Nathaniel Willis also originated the idea of a religious paper for children. “The Youth’s Companion,” which he commenced in 1827 and edited for about thirty years, was the first, and remains one of the best, publications of the kind in existence. In a letter to his son he gave the following account of its inception: “He was in the habit of teaching his children, statedly, the Assembly’s Catechism, and to encourage them to commit to memory the answers, he rewarded them by telling them stories from Scripture history without giving names. The result was that the Catechism was all committed to memory by the children, and the idea occurred of a children’s department in the ‘Recorder.’ This department being much sought for by children, it suggested the experiment of having a paper exclusively for children.” Around the fireplace where Mr. Willis sat with his children were some old-fashioned Dutch tiles, representing scenes from the New Testament, and it was in answer to their questions about these that he began his narrations. One sees in this little domestic picture the beginnings of the young Nathaniel’s literary training and the germ of his “Scripture Sketches.” Years after, a college lad, when shaping into smooth blank verse the story of the widow of Nain or the healing of Jairus’s daughter, his memory must have gone back to their rude figures about his father’s hearth, seeming to move and stir in the flickering light of the wood fire; and the recollection of his father’s voice and the listening group of brothers and sisters gave tenderness to the strain.

He was only six when the family removed from Portland to Boston, and he appears to have kept little remembrance of his birthplace. The noble harbor, with its islands, which were the Hesperides of Longfellow’s boyish dreams, the old fort on the hill, the mystery of the ships, the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, the noise of the sea fight far away, and the faces of the dead captains as they lay in their coffins, did not enter into Willis’s experience. Indeed, the period of childhood, which has been to many poets so fruitful in precious memories, seems to have left few deep traces on his mind, if we except its religious impressions. The life of his father’s household, though rich in domestic affections, was probably not stimulating to the imagination. It was the life of a Puritan home, of what is called in England a “serious family,”—that life which oppresses Matthew Arnold with its ennui; its interests divided between “business and Bethels;” its round of long family devotions, strict Sabbath observances, catechisms, and visiting missionaries. Dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going were, of course, forbidden pleasures. The elder Willis, though a thoroughly good man and good father, was a rather wooden person. His youth and early manhood had been full of hardship; his education was scanty, and he had the formal and narrow piety of the new evangelicals of that day, revolting against the latitudinarianism of the Boston churches. He was for twenty years deacon of Park Street Church, profanely nicknamed by the Unitarians “Brimstone Corner.” “My recollection of a particular occasion,” says an old member of that society, “when, at a conference meeting in the church, he, as presider, was expounding John xv., is that I regarded it as a memorable illustration of a man’s attempting to expound without ideas. I hear him saying,—more than fifty years ago,—‘v. 4. Abide in me. Abide is to dwell,’ in a most monotonous tone, and the rest in the same manner of appreciation.” His rigidity was, perhaps, more in his principles than in his character, and his austerity was tempered by two qualities which have not seldom been found to consist with the diaconate, namely, a sense of humor—“dry,” of course, to the correct degree—and an admiration for pretty women, or, in the dialect of that day, for “female loveliness.” These tastes he bequeathed to his son, as also a certain tenacity of will, which, latent throughout the latter’s career, came to the surface in an astonishing way during the trials of his last years. This trait is amusingly illustrated in the senior Willis’s correspondence with his son by his allusions to an interminable litigation that he was carrying on in his eighty-fourth year. “I should have written you sooner,” he says, “but that Irishman, Garbrey, has sued me the fourth time about that old drain which he dug up before my front door, in Atkinson Street, that we never knew before was there. He has lost his case in three different courts, and now sends to the Supreme Court a ‘Bill of Exceptions,’ which all my friends think he cannot recover. It has been a great trouble and expense to me. But I have carried the case in prayer to God, constantly, and He has three times defeated the extortioner.” Willis always retained a cordial affection and respect for his father, but between two such different natures and divergent lives there could be little genial sympathy or real intellectual intimacy. The tough old deacon outlived the inheritor of his name and calling by some three years, and died May 26, 1870, at the age of ninety.

For his mother Willis cherished, as boy and man, a devotion that may well be called passionate, and which found utterance in many of his most heartfelt poems, such as his “Birth-Day Verses,” “Lines on Leaving Europe,” and “To my Mother from the Apennines.” Her maiden name was Hannah Parker. She was born at Holliston, Massachusetts, and was two years younger than her husband. She was a woman whose strong character and fervent piety were mingled with a playful affectionateness which made her to her children the object of that perfect love which casteth out fear. Like many another poet’s mother,—like Goethe’s, for example,—she supplied to her son those elements of gayety and softness which were wanting in the stiffer composition of the father:—

“Von Mutterchen die Fröhnatur,

Die Lust zu fabuliren.”

He inherited from her the emotional, impulsive part of his nature as well as his physical constitution, his light complexion, full face, and tendency, in youth, to a plethoric habit. “My veins,” he wrote, “are teeming with the quicksilver spirit which my mother gave me. Whatever I accomplish must be gained by ardor, and not by patience.” She was his confidant, his sympathizer, his elder sister. The testimony to her worth and her sweetness is universal. The Rev. Dr. Storrs of Braintree, in an obituary notice written on her death, in 1844, at the age of sixty-two, spoke of her as “the light and joy of every circle in which she moved; the idol of her family; the faithful companion, the tender mother, the affectionate sister, the fast and assiduous friend.”

Willis was the second in a family of nine children, all of whom reached maturity, and two of whom, besides himself, achieved literary reputation. These were Sarah Payson Willis, afterwards famous, under the nom de plume of “Fanny Fern,” as a prolific and successful writer for children, and Richard Storrs Willis, his youngest brother, formerly editor of the “Musical World,” the author of “Our Church Music,” and known both as a musical composer and a poet. Julia Willis, his favorite sister and constant correspondent, was also a woman of remarkable talent, with a gift of tongues and a sounder scholarship than her more showy brother. She wrote many of the book reviews in the “Home Journal,” but always declined to renounce her anonymity.

Such were the influences which surrounded Willis’s early years. And if, at the first touch of the world, the youthful members of the household flew off like the dry seeds of the Impatiens, it need not therefore be hastily concluded that the home training, though perhaps too repressive and severe, was without lasting effect for good. Among the children and grandchildren of Nathaniel Willis are Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and representatives of other shades of belief and unbelief. But this is the history of many a New England Puritan family, and such are the disintegrating forces of American life. In the case of the eldest brother, it may be affirmed that, from a career which was certainly worldly, and in some of its aspects by no means edifying, the light that shone from his mother’s face uplifted in prayer for him never altogether faded away.

Willis began school life under the tuition of the Rev. Dr. McFarland, of Concord, New Hampshire. “I have forgotten every circumstance,” he wrote long after, “of a year or two that I was at school at Concord, New Hampshire, when a boy, except the natural scenery of the place. The faces of my teacher and my playmates have long ago faded from my memory, while I remember the rocks and eddies of the Merrimac, the forms of the trees on the meadow opposite the town, and every bend of the river’s current.” Later he was brought home and sent to the Boston Latin School, then under “its well-remembered Pythagoras, Ben Gould.” A few reminiscences of his slate-and-satchel days are scattered here and there through his writings. Thus he vaguely recalled Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one of the boys whose fathers were Unitarians,” and he was greatly impressed by Edward Everett, then a young Harvard professor, whose stylishly dressed figure used to appear occasionally in Atkinson Street, at No. 31, in which thoroughfare the Willises dwelt. He remembered “the rousings before daylight,” on May-day, “to go to Dorchester Heights, and the shivering search after never found green leaves and flowers; the buttoning up of boy-jacket to keep out the cold wind, and pulling out of penknife to cut off the bare stems of the sweet-brier in search of the hidden odor of the belated bud.” In “The Pharisee and the Barber,” one of the two or three stories of Willis whose scenes are laid in Boston, the description of Sheafe Lane is evidently from the life. The Pharisee of that tale, Mr. Flint, an “active member of a church famed for its zeal,” who “dressed in black, as all religious men must (in Boston),” was doubtless a sketch from memory of some pious familiar of his father’s house, whose black eyes and formal talk left upon the lad a mixed impression of awe and distrust.

Harvard was the natural destination of a Boston Latin School boy intending college. But the line between the Orthodox and the Unitarians was drawn more sharply in 1820 than in 1884. Even now stray youths from Boston are found at other colleges than Harvard, attracted elsewhere by family ties or theological affinities. But at that time the cleavage made by the schism in Eastern Massachusetts was still raw, and Deacon Willis would almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college.

“Larry’s father,” wrote Willis in “The Lunatic’s Skate,” “was a disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a four years’ ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the other; and in the New England States these two sects are bitterly hostile. So to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of ‘election and free grace,’ whether or no.”

Of the two great fitting-schools founded by Samuel and John Phillips respectively at Andover and at Exeter, the latter had been captured by the Unitarians. But the Andover academy, under the sheltering wing of the famed theological seminary in the same town, though barely thirty miles from Boston, remained an insoluble lump of Calvinism, a wedge of defiant Orthodoxy in partibus infidelium. To Andover, accordingly, young Willis was sent, after a course in the Latin School, to complete his preparation for Yale. The academy was then under the headship of that sound classical master, John Adams, who was principal from 1810 to 1833. It gave an excellent fit in the classics, insomuch that Willis, though the reverse of diligent in college, was carried along a good way, with little study, by the impetus acquired at Andover. At Andover, too, he began to give signs of literary tastes and in particular to scribble verses, which had already given him the reputation of a poet among his fellows before he came up to college. A letter dated July 3, 1823, and addressed to his elder sister Lucy, about a fortnight before her marriage, incloses a copy of verses which is perhaps the earliest poem of Willis now extant. It has no merit, but as containing hints of his later manner and the unformed germs of that smooth, diffuse blank verse in which his “Scripture Sketches” were written, the opening lines may be not without interest:—

“There was a bride, and she was beautiful

And fond, affectionate; her soul did love.

’Twas not the transient feeling of an hour,

That loves and hates, and loves and hates again,—

Oh, no; it was a purer, kindlier feeling,—

A something rooted, grafted on the soul,

That cannot help but live and bud and blossom.”

He also began to wreak thought upon expression in that common vent to the cacoethes scribendi, of young writers,—keeping a diary, “a red morocco volume, of very ornate slenderness and thinness, in which I recorded my raptures at spring mornings and blue sashes, my unappreciated sensibilities, my mysterious emotions by moonlight, and the charms of the incognita whom I ran against at the corner. This precious record shared in the final and glorious conflagration of Latin themes, grammars, graduses, and old shirts, on leaving academy for college.”

“The Lunatic’s Skate” opens with some reminiscences of school life at Andover:—

“In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from him), and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s clearing and that by our own door. Out of school Larry and I were inseparable. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made in the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other’s approbation.”

One of his school-fellows here was Isaac McLellan, who afterwards became a contributor to Willis’s “American Monthly.” He published a long poem, “The Fall of the Indian,” which Willis reviewed in the same periodical, referring to the poet as “the very boy that has tracked the woods with us, and called us by our nickname over a hedge, and cracked nuts with us by the fire in the winter evenings. Which of us dreamed, as we read in our blotted classic, ‘Quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum,’ that he should ever be guilty of a book? How it would have swelled our idle veins, as we lay half asleep, bobbing our lines over the bank of the Shawsheen on those long Saturday afternoons, that we should ever play for each other the gentle office of critic!”

In after years the rice fields of Georgia, with their embankments and green surfaces, reminded Willis of “the gooseberry pies which formed part of my early education at Andover, and which are among the warmest of my recollections of that classic academy.” “We have fine times picking berries here,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “Every kind grows in profusion in Andover,—raspberries, black, blue, thimble, and whortle berries. The woods are crowded with them. After tea we generally start, and after we have eat enough go and bathe in the Shawsheen, our Andover river.”

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.

In January, 1823, the great revival which had been in progress at Boston struck the Andover academy. Mr. Willis made his son a visit, and urged him to join the church. After his return to Boston he received the following letter:—

Andover, Mass., January 12, 1823.
Sunday afternoon.

Dear Father,—I received your package last evening, with my Testament, etc., inclosed. As the word of God I prize it, and as the gift of my affectionate father I love it, and shall always look upon it as a remembrance of an era in my feelings which I hope I shall always be thankful for. You cannot imagine how much your visit and advice strengthened me in my resolutions, and spurred me forward in the good work I had begun. I hope I have now the assurance of being an heir of life and a recipient of the protection which the wings of a Saviour’s mercy must afford to those who are gathered under them. My hope is sometimes shaken when I find my thoughts wandering to other subjects while the ordinances of God are administering before my eyes. But the moment that I get upon my knees and pray for strength I feel my assurance renewed, and rise happier and happier from every renewal of my supplications.… Saturday evening I attended our usual meeting in the academy for the first time since I have been in Andover. It is conducted by the pious scholars of the academy in succession, and is very interesting. This evening Dr. Shedd preached the lecture, and after meeting there is to be another at Mr. Adams’s house. So you see, pa, we are engaged here, and have reason to hope that many will be inquiring the way to the foot of the cross.…—Nine o’clock. I have been to meeting at the chapel, and after that attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Adams’s. They were both very solemn. Louis Dwight led the last.—Monday evening, 12 o’clock. I have truly spent an evening of happiness, and I thought I must open my letter and tell you. At half-past six William Adams and I had appointed a meeting, to be conducted wholly by ourselves. We had invited only a few, but when we got there it was so crowded that I could scarcely make my way through the room to the Bible-stand. I believe nearly all our unconverted brethren were there.… After it was dismissed, many seemed to linger, as if they did not want to go, and we conversed with some of them. I then went into Cutler’s room, and Allen and I stayed there till almost eleven o’clock. There were several of the Seminarians there, and we prayed and sung, prayed and sung, till it seemed a little heaven on earth. The seriousness increases; many more are deeply impressed, and the academy presents solemn countenances generally. It is late, and my eyes smart badly.

Your affectionate son,

N. P. Willis.

The William Adams here mentioned was a son of the principal of the academy, and was afterwards Willis’s classmate at Yale. Louis Dwight was a theological student, who a year later was married to Willis’s second sister, Louisa. The subsequent progress of the revival is related in the following letter, written two or three days later:—

Andover, Mass., January 15.
Wednesday evening, 12 o’clock.

My dear Father,—My heart is so overflowing with joy and gratitude and happiness that I could not rest till I had sat down and told you all. We have had a meeting in Allen’s room to-night. Mr. Styles was there, and talked so that I thought I could almost see a halo round his head, and expected him to turn into St. Paul come down again from heaven. After meeting Mr. S. told them the meeting was closed, but if any wished to converse with him or the other professors of religion in the room, they might tarry. The room was crowded, body and all, so that you could not have got through, but no one stirred. Sobbing and weeping was heard all round the room. William Adams, Allen, Styles, and I then went round and conversed with them. They all burst into tears immediately, and listened with the greatest eagerness, and when I got up to go to the next one, they held on to me as though salvation depended on my talking with them. Isaac Stuart sobbed aloud the whole meeting time. Joseph Jenkins was in tears, and came down to my room after meeting and asked me to pray for and with him. He said he could not pray himself; he dared not. I gave him the best advice I could and prayed with him, and he is now in his room, as I hope praying for himself. I talked with little Joshua Huntingdon, and told him about his father. He wept, and promised to go home and pray. J. C. Alvord, a member of my class and a fine fellow, was in the greatest misery. He could not sit upon his chair, and took me out of the meeting to go to my room and pray with him. Jno. Tappan of Boston was very deeply affected. I conversed with Darrach of Philadelphia, Carter of Virginia, King of Convers, and several others. They all seemed to feel very deeply, and all begged me earnestly to pray for them. We could not get them away. They stood round weeping and looking for some one to say something to them. Oh, my dear father, what can we render to God for all his mercies! Allen has been down in my room several times to pray for some particular one. There were so many to pray for that we have been on our knees from seven o’clock till now almost all the time. Kennett, my room-mate, is very much affected. He fears to delay repentance, but says his father won’t like it when he goes back to Russia, and that there are no Christians in Russia.… Prayer ascends continually, sinners are repenting, and I am as proud as Lucifer. I feel as if I was going to do all myself; as if I could convert a thousand without God, if I only told them the truth. Oh, pray that I may have humility! It is and must be the burden of my supplications.

Of the names mentioned in this letter, that of Isaac Stuart is not unknown to fame. Joseph Jenkins afterwards became Willis’s brother-in-law, marrying his sister Mary in 1831. He was from Boston, and was graduated at Yale the year after Willis.

CHAPTER II.
1823-1827.
COLLEGE LIFE.

In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer. It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in time the founder and first president of the University of California, and a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and “Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek.

Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of 1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same hall—the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed, athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after years,—in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.

Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia—afterwards, with the titular embellishment of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”—happened to be in New Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,” published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:—

“I also remember two men who graduated in the class of 1827, that were frequently pointed out to me as its most conspicuous members. One was the son of a very prominent statesman, which, in fact, explained the notice he attracted; but there was enough of individuality about John Van Buren to command attention. He had already revealed the traits which distinguished him in after life,—easy and careless in manner, bold in character, and of an aggressive turn of mind. His rival in notoriety had no hereditary claims to support him, but he was gifted with a rare poetical talent that had already secured him distinction both in and out of college. His tone and bearing were aristocratic, not unmixed with hauteur, and though admired for his abilities he never commanded the sympathies of his comrades. Such was N. P. Willis, and such he remained to the end of his life. Neither of these graduates, if I remember, bore off ‘honors;’ but Willis was requested by his class, with the approval of the faculty, to deliver a poem at the Commencement of 1827. I was too young to approach these Titans, as I regarded them, and was content to gaze on them with deference as they swept by me in the street. In after years I became intimate with them both.”

The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of ’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman, were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s counsel, and Willis as a particeps criminis and witness for the plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere, was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.

Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman, Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church. Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of to-day such a stirring microcosm,—with its athletic and social clubs, its regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls, boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.,—was all undreamed of. Far from owning a yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown, to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on “necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.

“The day,” wrote Willis in a freshman letter to his father, “is the greatest of the year at the South, and our Southern students seem disposed to be restless under the restriction of a lesson on playday. There were many of them drunk last evening, and still more to-day. Christmas has always been, ever since the establishment of the college, emphatically a day of tricks: windows broken, bell-rope cut, freshmen squirted, and every imaginable scene of dissipation acted out in full. Last night they barred the entry doors of the South College, to exclude the government, and then illuminated the building. This morning the recitation-room doors were locked and the key stolen, and we were obliged to knock down the doors to get in; and then we were not much better off, for the lamps were full of water and the wicks gone. However, we procured others, and went on with the lesson.”

Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used, between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.

New Haven in 1823-27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia” or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor of Rhetoric, used to go to “explode the elements.” Down by the bay, in a region now occupied by great factories, stood the old “Pavilion,” a famous seaside hotel much resorted to by Southern families. The first railroad from New Haven was laid in 1839. As yet even the Farmington Canal was only projected. Willis and the Boston contingent used to come all the way by stage-coach, passing through Framingham, Worcester, and Hartford,—in which last he had acquaintances, with whom he sometimes spent a day en route. Anthracite coal was not in use in New Haven before 1827. Citizens and students alike depended on wood, the latter buying theirs at the regular wood-stand near South College, and having it cut in the yard behind the colleges, wood-saws not being in general vogue. The habits of the collegians, from a hygienic point of view, were usually bad. They sat up late drinking strong coffee in their rooms, rose very early perforce, prayed and recited on an empty stomach, and took little regular exercise. Dyspepsia was naturally rife.

But en revanche New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already, thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets,—a dream-city of shaded squares and white—piazzaed mansions shining among cool green gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known,—that class of freshmen. It was a fair arena.… Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth,—of the few, the very few, that have no recoil and leave no repentance,—this leaping from the starting post of mind, this first spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge, is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most unmingled.”

This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823. His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman, simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home, thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor, who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards if you wish, but it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the entry,”—a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way five or six dollars, and had a scrape upon it, and the conclusion of the matter was their getting so intoxicated as to be unable to reach home.” The freshmen have likewise had their windows broken, and Willis’s chum has been smoked out, during the former’s absence from his room, by cigars inserted in the keyhole. A somewhat distant and impersonal form of the persecution this will seem to modern freshmen. But Sophomore Kneeland, from Georgia, having been collared by Tutor Stoddard, red-handed, in the act of breaking windows, and having knocked down the tutor and run, has been publicly expelled, the president reading out his mittimus in chapel to the whole college. Willis has joined the Linonian Society,—“Calhoun, the candidate for the presidency, was once a member of it” (an ancient “campaign” argument); also a freshman debating club, the officers of which “are almost all professors of religion,” and in which he has been chosen, in his absence, “critic on composition and speaking.” He has drunk tea at Miss Dunning’s. He has called upon Mrs. Daggett and Mrs. T. Dwight, finding the former of these two ladies to be “a very pious woman, and a woman of uncommon understanding,” and the latter “a woman of noble mind, though plain in person.” He has taken a walk to the Cave of the Regicides on West Rock,—time out of mind the goal of the freshman’s first pilgrimage. He has been appointed one of the committee to solicit subscriptions in his own class for the Greeks, and is also one of the managers of the Bible Society, and active at the Friday evening prayer-meetings, there being just at present considerable “engagedness” among “professors” in the several classes. Meanwhile Tutor Twining has been hissed and scraped at while conducting services in chapel. The government “are growing more and more rigorous. Almost every member of the freshman class is called up and questioned. Many are dismissed, and an examination is made of everything, from the stealing of a sugar-bowl out of the hall to the prostration of a tutor. Tutor Woolsey was smoked the other evening by two fellows who were too drunk to make their escape, and were caught without any difficulty. They did it at twelve o’clock at night, wrapped in sheets, and are both dismissed.” The disturbances between the sophomores and freshmen culminated for Willis in a short suspension in the winter of 1823-24 for honorably refusing to disclose the names of sophomores by whom he had been smoked and squirted, or the names of persons in whose rooms he had seen a squirt,—an instrument of torture whose possession involved expulsion. The letter in which he announced his suspension is very long and filled with heroic sentiments.

“All my friends have been to see me, and justify me in my conduct. There are two professors of religion in the sophomore class who have done exactly so, and will be treated accordingly. And though it is a matter of policy with the government to pursue this course, it is said, and justly, that they despise an informer. My meeting with this squirt was entirely unavoidable, not originating (as perhaps you may suppose) from being in company where I ought not to be.”

Willis suffered frequently from homesickness and low spirits during the winter of his freshman year. He had the poetic temperament, and was subject to his moods, easily elated and easily depressed. His chum was away somewhere teaching, and Willis, in his loneliness, had recourse to his pen.

“I find but few among the students,” he wrote to his father, “whom I should choose as companions. Most of them are profane and dissipated, and their highest ambition seems to be to show off as a high fellow, and one who can overreach the government and laugh at its officers. The pious students in my class are mostly men, without any refinement either of manners or feeling,—fresh from the country,—whose piety renders them respectable, and who without it would be but boors. But there are a few students who have both piety and refinement, and some who, though not professors of religion, respect it, and who are moral in their outward conduct, whatever be the state of their hearts. These I can generally associate with, but when they are all out of the way, and I am in need of something to brighten my feelings, I can find in the flow of fancy a forgetfulness of the darker side. I have written a great deal in this way since my college life commenced, and my writing will always depend on the thermometer of my feelings.”

As the youthful scribe gained readier power of expression his home correspondence became fuller and more effusive. He wrote with much minuteness a narrative of an evening spent at a country parsonage in West Haven, of a walk to the light-house, a visit to the cave of the hermit of East Rock, and of a trip by steamboat to New York. He dwelt at length upon all the impressions which the varying seasons and his daily experiences made upon his mind. There is, of course, no literary art in most of these juvenile confidences. The language is apt to be sophomorical, and the letters, as a whole, will seldom repay quotation, but an extract may be given here and there as a specimen of his epistolary style. The following is from a letter of July 11, 1824, to his sister Julia, with whom he was always particularly unreserved:—

“I wish you were here to walk with me these beautiful moonlight evenings. I have seldom gone to bed and left the mild Queen of the Night riding in the heavens, for it seems a waste of noble feelings. When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past, and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in sleep without reluctance. I really think we had better lay it down as a rule never to go to sleep while the moon is shining. In fact, Julia, I suspect (for I find no one who sympathizes with me in this feeling) that I am something of a lunatic,—affected by the rays of that beautiful planet with a kind of happiness which is the result of a heated imagination, and which is not felt by the generality of the common-sense people of the world. Last Friday evening, you know, was beautiful. I attended a meeting of the professors of religion, statedly held on that evening in the theological chamber, and when it was out went alone to walk. I strolled along upon the shore of the bay towards the light-house a mile or more, and never did I meet with so delightful a scene. There was no wind stirring, or not enough to make a ripple on the wave, and the hardly perceptible swell of the tide cast its waters upon the pebbles without a sound. You know the appearance of a bay when the light is shed obliquely upon it—looking like one immense sheet of liquid silver, and if you have ever seen a boat pass across it at such a moment, and seen that beautiful phenomena of the phosphorus dripping like fire from the oars and gilding the foam before the prow, you can have some idea of the scene I then witnessed. Now and then a sloop stole languidly across the bay, hardly appearing to move, and presenting an alternate light and shade as the moon struck upon the flapping sail or the helmsman tacked to take advantage of the hardly perceptible breeze which swept him slowly from the land. I declare it did seem like enchantment. The clock struck one, but I felt no disposition to go home, and, as the air was pure and balmy, the thought struck me that it would be a pleasant hour to bathe. Accordingly I undressed, and swam along the shore slowly for about half a mile in the cool, refreshing waters, with sensations which must be felt to be understood. After this delightful exercise I walked home, and, seating myself by the window where I could look at the moon, fell asleep, and did not wake till near morning.”

This fancy, that he was peculiarly affected by the light of the moon, was the first suggestion of his wild tale, “The Lunatic’s Skate,” one of his most imaginative stories, and not unworthy of comparison with the weird fictions of Edgar Poe.

In the summer term of his sophomore year Willis was again suspended for a few weeks, this time in common with a majority of his class and in consequence of what was known as “the Conic Sections Rebellion.” The class had been assured by the tutors that they would not have to learn the corollaries to the propositions in that branch of mathematics, and when the objectionable corollaries were, notwithstanding, imposed upon them, the mercury then standing at 90° and the annual examinations at hand, eighty-four members bound themselves by a solemn pledge not to recite them. The government were firm, and the recalcitrant sophomores were suspended in platoons, day after day. Horace Bushnell was a ring-leader in this revolt, which included the “professors” equally with the worldly. All the suspended men were taken back at the end of the term.

In some recollections of Willis by his classmate, Hugh Blair Grigsby, published in the latter’s journal, the “Norfolk Beacon,” in the autumn of 1834, he says:—

“The first notice that the public had of his budding genius was a little poem in six verses, the two first lines of the first verse being,—

‘The leaf floats by upon the stream

Unheeded in its silent way,’

We cannot recall the whole stanza; but our fair readers may remember that their albums contained, some time since, a beautiful vignette representing a lady resting in her bower, listening to the notes of a pretty songster perched above her. This engraving was taken from these lines in this poem:—

‘The bird that sings in lady’s bower,

To-morrow will she think of him?’”

Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824-25, about an old man planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,” where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of these juvenilia were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the “Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,” “The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.” It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best poem printed in their columns during the year,—a device now relegated to the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his “Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the ‘Christian Watchman,’” as announced in the issue of that paper for March 30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,” and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode Island,” and other publications.

All this literary glory gave the young undergraduate great éclat in New Haven. He received many invitations out, and was teased for verses by the owners of countless albums. He began to frequent the society of the town, where his rapidly developing social gifts soon made him a favorite. He was at this time a tall, handsome stripling, with an easy assurance of manner and a good deal of the dandy in his dress. His portrait, painted by Miss Stuart of Boston, a daughter of the famous portrait-painter, Gilbert Stuart, shows him with a rosy face, very fair hair hanging in natural curls over the forehead, a retroussé nose, long upper lip, pale gray eye with uncommonly full lid (a family trait), and a confident and joyous expression. He carried himself with an airy, jaunty grace, and there was something particularly spirited and vif about the poise and movement of his head,—a something which no portrait could reproduce. With naturally elegant tastes, an expansive temper, and an eagerness to see the more brilliant side of life, Willis could at all times make himself agreeable to those whom he cared to please. But he was quick to feel the chill of a hostile presence, and toward any one, in especial, who seemed to disapprove of him he could be curt and defiant. He had a winning way with women, who were flattered by his recognition of their influence over him and grateful for les petits soins which he never neglected.

Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to literature.

Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia, that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:—

“I sunk some pocket money in a blank book on reading Wilson’s ‘Noctes.’ Celestial nights I thought we had of it, at old black Stanley’s forbidden oyster house in New Haven; and it struck me it was robbery of posterity (no less!) not to record the brilliant efflorescence of our conviviality. Regularly on reaching my chambers (or as soon after morning prayers as my head became pellucid), I attempted to reduce to dialogue the wit of our Christopher North, ‘Shepherd’ and ‘Tickler;’ but alas! it became what may be called ‘productive labor.’ Either my memory did not serve me, or wit (I shouldn’t be surprised) reads cold by repentant daylight. It was heavy work, as reluctant as a college exercise, and after using up for cigar-lighters the short-lived ‘Noctes,’ I devoted the remainder of the book to outlines of the antique (that is to say, of old shoes), my passion just then being a collection of French slippers from the prettiest feet in the known world (‘known,’ to me).”

Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines have gone through this species of measles.

“I do not hate, but I have felt

Indifferent to woman long:

I bow not where I once have knelt,

I lisp not what I poured in song.

They are too beautifully made

For their tame earthliness of thought;

Ay, their immortal minds degrade

The meaner work His hands have wrought.”

The specifications of this painful charge were several. He had been walking with a beautiful girl one glorious night, with his soul uplifted by the influences of the hour, when she rudely jarred upon his mood by remarking that “their kitchen chimney smoked again.” Another young woman, with whom he was viewing a Crucifixion in a picture gallery, had “coldly curled her lip and praised the high priest’s garment.” A third had profaned one of his religious hours.

“I turned me at the slow Amen

And wiped my drowning eyes, and met

A trifling smile! Think ye of men?

I tell you man hath heart:—no, no,

It was a woman’s smile. They tell

Of her bright ruby lip, and eye

That shames the Arabic gazelle;

They tell of her cheek’s glowing dye,

Of her arch look and witching spell:

But there is not that man on earth

Who at that hour had felt like mirth.”

Worse than all, he had been watching by a corpse, in company with a young lady of his acquaintance, when

“She trifled, ay, that angel maid,

She trifled where the dead was laid!”

These misogynistic musings called forth a remonstrance,—“Woman—to Roy,”—by one of the “Recorder’s” poetesses, who signed herself “Rob.” “Ye know her not,” she sang,

“An idle name

Ye give to toys of fashion’s mould,

And well ye scorn those guilty ones

Who curl their smiles of pride to heaven.

Oh, seek her not in halls of mirth,

But in those calm dwellings of earth,” etc.

Meanwhile, rumors of his idleness and dissipation began to reach Boston, and caused his family much distress. These reports were absurdly exaggerated, and were warmly denied by his friends, who asserted that the head and front of his offending were an occasional moonlight drive to “the Lake” and a supper, with a glass of ale at “Barney’s.” Willis was gay in college, but very far from dissipated. In the select circles where he was made at home nothing like dissipation was tolerated. The society of the little university town was as simple as it was refined. He was cordially welcomed in such families as the Whitings, the Bishops, the Hubbards, and the entire Woolsey, Devereux, and Johnson connection in New Haven, Stratford, and New York. His winter holidays were spent partly at New York with his classmates Rankin and Richards, partly at Stratford with the Johnsons, once at New London among the kinsfolk of his grandmother, Lucy Douglas; and once he traveled as far as Philadelphia. His “dissipations” in New Haven were picnics to East Rock, rehearsals of “The Lady of the Lake” at a seminary for young ladies, pie-banquets in Thanksgiving week,—paid for with verses,—and New Year’s calls with their accompaniments of a cooky and a glass of wine.

That his head was a little turned by his literary and social successes is not wonderful. He had his share of vanity, and in his confidential letters to his parents and sisters he made no effort to conceal his elation. A passage from one of these, dated January 7, 1827, will give a good idea of his occupations and his frame of mind at this point in his senior year:—

“I stayed in Stratford till Friday, and then the Johnsons offered me a seat in the carriage to New York. This, of course, was irresistible; and Friday night at ten o’clock I was presented to the mayor of the city, at a splendid levee. It was his last before leaving his office, and I never saw such magnificence. The fashion and beauty and talent of the city were all there, crowding his immense rooms to show their respect for his services.… I found many old acquaintances there and made some new ones,—among the latter, a Mrs. Brunson, as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and her sister, Miss Catherine Bailey, also a most beautiful woman. I met the very accomplished Adelaide Richards there, who patronized me and played my dictionary, and from whose father and mother I received an invitation to dine on New Year’s day. At two or three o’clock I went home to Mr. William Johnson’s (who married Miss Woolsey’s sister), and in a glorious bed, with a good coal fire by my side, slept off the fatigues of a sixty miles’ ride and four hours’ dissipation.

“On Saturday evening I went to a genuine soirée at the great Dr. Hosack’s. This man is the most luxurious liver in the city, and his house is a perfect palace. You could not lay your hand on the wall for costly paintings, and the furniture exceeds everything I have seen. I met all the literary characters of the day there, and Halleck, the poet, among them. With him I became quite acquainted, and he is a most glorious fellow. More of him when we meet.… You know on New Year’s day in New York all the gentlemen call on all their acquaintances. I began at twelve o’clock at the Battery, and went up to St. John’s Park, merely running in and right out again till four, the dinner hour. I called on everybody. William Woolsey went with me, and, by appointing a rendezvous in every street, we kept along together. At four I went to Mr. George Richards’s to dine. He is no relative of Robert’s, and lives in the best style in a large house on St. John’s Park. We sat down to dinner between five and six, and sat several hours with a very large party. I got a seat next to the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed it much. They live in the French style, and the last course was sugar-plums!”

In another letter he says:—

“I was much flattered in vacation by the attentions of literary men and women; the latter more particularly, who seemed to consider it quite the thing to find a poet who was not a bear, and who could stoop so much from the excelsa of his profession as to dress fashionably and pay compliments like a lawyer. I heard of a very blue young lady who said, ‘La, how I should love to see Mr. Willis! I am sure I should fall in love with a man who writes such sweet poetry.’ She is both belle and bluestocking, they say.”

One of the families in which Willis was an habitué was the household of Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that “in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W——, Two Years of Age”—one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s “Parnassus”—were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune, who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters, Julia and Pastora—matre pulchra filiæ pulchriores—were great belles among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.”

The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:—

“My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy of the hopes which are experienced in revivals. I understand your anxiety for me, and I understand the feelings which prompted mother’s most tender and affectionate addition to your letter. If I perish it will not be because I do not know my duty, for there are few who have been better instructed. But my feelings are most peculiar and most trying. I am under one ceaseless and enduring conviction of sin; one wearing anxiety about my soul, without making any visible progress. I know what you will write about it. I could anticipate every word you can say upon the point. But so it is, and I have done with all discussion of it.”

At the completion of the senior examinations Willis delivered the valedictory poem to his class, “with a simplicity and feeling which thrilled the audience,” says one who was present. Portions of this were printed in his “Sketches” and in subsequent editions of his poems. It is one of the hardest things in the world to write a good occasional poem, and Willis’s Class Day address does not differ much from other performances of the kind. It is in blank verse, laboriously didactic, and expresses the usual conventional sentiments and noble moral reflections proper to the occasion. It is by no means as good as another occasional poem of his, “The Death of Arnold,” written upon the burial of the class champion, and first printed in the “Connecticut Journal.”

Willis spent the senior vacation—a halcyon period of six weeks that formerly intervened between Class Day and Commencement—in a trip through New York State and Canada; taking what is now known as the grand tour, and gathering impressions which he ultimately worked into the texture of his vivid sketches of “Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence.” He traveled by the Erie Canal, then newly opened through an almost unbroken wilderness, dotted here and there with stripling cities, Utica, Palmyra, Rochester,—the last only a few years old.

“The burnt stumps of the first settlers are all over the town: you find them close by the doors and in the yards of the people, and you may look between elegant blocks of stone and brick buildings and see the natural forest within five minutes’ walk. It is complete mushroom. We saw Colonel Rochester, who first settled it. He and his wife were sitting at their front door, enjoying the evening under trees which twelve years ago were the depth of the wilderness.”

There was a perpetual novelty in these contrasts. He saw the country, as it were, in the making. The canal-boat went only four miles an hour, and the voyager could get out, when so minded, to stretch his legs and pick the wild flowers along the tow-path. Odd experiences relieved the monotony of this quiet sail along the amber Mohawk, “bonniest stream that ever dimpled.” One Sunday, at the request of old General Wadsworth of Geneseo, who happened to be aboard and took a great fancy to Willis, the latter preached a sermon to the passengers assembled in the cabin, and passed among them, in consequence, as a young minister who “had geten him yet no benefice.” And here is a little idyl perhaps worth recording:—

“On Sunday morning I saw a girl on a hillside in the wildest part of the Mohawk Valley, milking. So I leaped ashore, to the great amusement of the passengers, and ran up to give her a lecture. She was quite pretty, and blushed when I asked her if she knew it was wicked to milk on Sunday. She had a pretty little clean foot, probably washed by the wet grass, and held up the milking-pail for me to drink with considerable grace. I should have begged a kiss if the boat had not been in sight. I have just been called up to look at Palmyra. It is curious to sail through the centre of a town, and see people in the windows above you and on the steps of the houses, crowding to see the strange faces on board. They look so much at home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”

At Utica he found a host of friends, was received with Western hospitality, and had twenty or thirty invitations to dinners and parties. A Utica belle whom he had known in New Haven made up a picnic in his behoof to Trenton Falls, the scenery of which he described so admirably in “Edith Linsey.” It was his hap to visit Trenton on the very day when a Miss Suydam, a young lady from New York, fell over the falls and was killed. From Auburn he drove out on a visit to another fair acquaintance, Miss Adele Livingston, whose country house on Skaneateles Lake he found to be a “little palace of cultivation and refinement” dropped down unexpectedly in the wilderness. This was “Fleming Farm” in “Edith Linsey,” though it would probably be a mistake to identify the heroine of that tale with Willis’s hostess. With her he took a horseback ride round the head of the lake, and then he returned to his canal. At Niagara he encountered a pleasant party of Boston and Salem people, and was asked to attach himself to their train on the way up Ontario and down the St. Lawrence. Among them was a “Miss E. M——” (Emily Marshall?), a famous beauty, who figures in Willis’s “Niagara” sketch in a romantic and perilous adventure behind the fall. “I am sorry I may not mention her name,” he says, “for in more chivalrous times she would have been a character of history. Everybody who has been in America, however, will know whom I am describing.” At Montreal he fell in with Chester Harding, the artist, with whom he afterwards became intimate at Boston, and who painted an excellent portrait of Willis, now owned by Mr. Charles A. Dana. In September he went back to New Haven to take his degree and say good-by, and then college life was over and the world before him.

Willis always looked back with tenderness to his college days. Years after, in his “Slingsby” papers, contributed to an English magazine, he made New Haven and the university the scene or background of some of his best stories and sketches of American life, such as “Edith Linsey,” “F. Smith,” “Scenes of Fear,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “The Cherokee’s Threat.” These, however, are not college stories in the common meaning of the term. The heroes of these amusing and often incredible adventures are undergraduates, but they have the easy savoir faire of men of the world, and the incidents of the narrative are mainly enacted outside the college fence, and consist for the most part of love-making, driving stanhope, and touring about the country in an independent manner. The academic life of the time offered but a meagre field to the romancer, nor indeed is the case much altered since. There have been loud calls, at present subsiding, for an “American Tom Brown.” A few patriotic Harvard graduates have responded, but their success has been such that the alumni of other colleges have congratulated themselves that no one has been moved to perform the same office for their own Almæ Matres. It may be doubted whether the four years of a college course are a broad enough base to support a full-length novel. A man is not born in college, and he seldom dies or marries there. The struggle which decides his final success or failure is fought on other fields. As to the life itself, though engrossing enough to those who lead it, as stuff for fiction it is scant,—a life of pleasant monotony, varied by contests for honors and prizes which seem paltry to the man, and made exciting by that most fatuous of pursuits, college “politics.” Nevertheless, it has unique features of its own, peculiar developments of sentiment and humor which appeal to the imagination. To these, the man who has lived it and found it sweet will often attempt to give shape, as he looks back upon it in less happy years, even though he may understand well enough that such fragmentary experiences want the unity and importance required in a continuous fiction. As experiments of this nature, Willis’s college stories should be regarded. It must be confessed that he idealized a good deal. His geese were always swans, and he practiced an airy exaggeration provoking to the statistician or the literal minded. He speaks, for example, in an off-hand way of “the thousand students of the university,” though the number never reached half a thousand at any time when he was a student. But in the incidental glimpses of the life which he described, in the atmosphere which he flung around it, he was true to the spirit of that life,—the gay, irresponsible existence of half-idle, half-earnest youth, whose friendships are warm and unquestioning, to whom the world is new, the future full of promise, and every girl a Venus. There is a glamour over it all—“the golden exhalations of the dawn”—and romance is the proper medium in which to present it.

“Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater, however,” wrote Willis in “Edith Linsey,” “and gayly as I describe it, it is to me a picture of memory, glazed and put away; if I see it ever again it will be but to walk through its embowered streets by a midnight moon. It is vain and heartbreaking to go back after absence to any spot of earth, of which the interest was the human love whose home and cradle it had been. There is nothing on earth so mournful and unavailing, as to return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others as we were when we thus knew them.”

On leaving college, Willis signalized his entrance upon a literary career of forty years by collecting and publishing a score of his juvenile poems, in a thin volume entitled “Sketches,” and dedicated to his father. It contained, among other things, four of the scriptural pieces which had done more than anything else to give him reputation. This vein he continued to cultivate, and added others in later volumes till they reached the number of eighteen. Even in his last years he wrote one more scriptural poem for the “New York Ledger,” at the persuasion of the enterprising Mr. Bonner, reinforced by the proffer of a hundred dollars. As there is little difference in value between the earliest and latest of these, it may be well to speak of them here collectively. It is not hard to explain the vogue which they obtained, or the reason why many people at this day, who know nothing else of Willis, have read his Scripture poems. One still encounters, here and there, a good old country lady who reads little poetry, but who can quote from “Absalom” or “Jephthah’s Daughter” and thinks them quite the best product of the American Parnassus. They made good Sunday reading. They appealed to an intensely biblical and not very literary constituency; to a public familiar with the Old and New Testaments alike, and familiarized also with the life and scenery of the East through Bible commentaries and the lectures of missionaries who had traveled in Palestine. They were pleased to meet again the most striking episodes and affecting situations in the sacred narratives, set forth in easy verse, embroidered prettily, and with the sentiments and reflections proper to the subject all duly marshaled before them. It lent concreteness to the story to learn that in the room of Jairus’s daughter,

“The spice lamps in the alabaster urns

Burned dimly and the white and fragrant smoke

Curled indolently on the chamber walls;”

or that the Shunamite’s little son, on his way to the field, passed

“Through the light green hollows where the lambs

Go for the tender grass;”

or that the scene of Christ’s baptism

“Was a green spot in the wilderness

Touched by the river Jordan. The dark pine

Never had dropped its tassels on the moss

Tufting the leaning bank, nor on the grass

Of the broad circle stretching evenly

To the straight larches had a heavier foot

Than the wild heron’s trodden. Softly in

Through a long aisle of willows, dim and cool,

Stole the clear waters with their muffled feet,

And, hushing as they spread into the light,

Circled the edges of the pebbled tank

Slowly, then rippled through the woods away.”

For the merely literary quality of these poems, independent of their sacred associations, not very much can be said. They were certainly remarkably mature work for a college boy, pure in taste, delicate and correct in execution. But there is a slightly hollow ring to them, as of verse exercises on set themes. The inspiration is at second hand, from books and not from life. As other juvenile poets have gone to their classics for a subject, Willis went to his Bible. He drank at Siloa’s fount instead of Helicon, and tuned the psaltery instead of the lyre. We have evidently not reached the real Willis yet. In general the experiment of paraphrasing the narrative portions of the Scriptures has not been successful. Something is lost when the impressive simplicity of the original is blown out into wordy and sentimental verse. This process of spinning rhetorical commonplaces from brief texts is well illustrated in the following passage from “Lazarus and Mary:”—

“But to the mighty heart

That in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,

Taking for us the cup that might not pass—

The heart whose breaking chord upon the cross

Made the earth tremble and the sun afraid

To look upon his agony—the heart

Of a lost world’s Redeemer—overflowed,

Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”

This is what Lowell called “inspiration and water.” Alfred de Vigny, a fine spirit and good poet, has tried the same thing in French and succeeded little, if at all, better than the Yankee collegian. The inadequacy of Willis’s Scripture renderings is made more apparent by the fact that his blank verse is not a good vehicle for strong feeling. It is correct and flowing, sometimes musical, but seldom energetic. It favored his tendency to diffuseness and it often degenerates into a kind of accentless oratio soluta, which is only verse because it scans, and only blank verse because it does not rhyme.

Upon the whole the most genuine expression of Willis’s talent in this early volume was in the piece entitled “Better Moments,” which remains one of his best, because one of his most spontaneous poems.

It makes one realize the startling growth of the United States in the last fifty years, to remember that Willis had already won a “national reputation” by his poetry when he left college. The air was much thinner then, American literature much scantier, the population so small and so comparatively homogeneous, that the suffrages of a few hundreds of readers in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia, and the praises of a few dozen journals were enough to bestow fame. What undergraduate nowadays, however clever or precocious, could hope to make his voice heard beyond the limits of the college yard?

It remains only to mention that the presence in New Haven of the two poets Percival and Hillhouse, when Willis was a student there, was not without influence on his literary development. Percival went to West Point as Professor of Chemistry in 1824 and did not come back to New Haven until 1827, but Hillhouse resided constantly at his beautiful home in the outskirts of the city, “Sachem’s Wood.” His Master’s Oration, “The Education of a Poet,” and his Phi Beta Kappa poem, “The Judgment,” had given him great fame in the university as an orator and poet. “‘Hadad’ was published in 1825,” wrote Willis, “during my second year in college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.” Of its author he said, “In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished mien.… Though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me, in a casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and leisure he could command.”

CHAPTER III.
1827-1831.
BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY.

The profession of letters was Willis’s manifest destiny. Family tradition, his inborn tastes and talents, the course of his studies, and his achievements hitherto, all pointed that way. Yet in the then state of the American press it took no small amount of self-confidence to decline a paying profession and launch upon the uncertain currents of literary life. His next four years were spent in Boston and were years of apprenticeship in his life-work as an editor and journalist. He continued to write and publish verses, but his hand was acquiring cunning, through constant practice and frequent failure, in the production of that light, brilliant prose which made him the favorite periodical writer of his day; and he was also learning how to conduct a magazine. He still made occasional contributions to the “Recorder”—among others the New Year’s verses, then essential to every well-regulated paper—for 1828 and 1829. But his first editorial engagement was with Samuel G. Goodrich, the well-known bookseller and publisher, who had removed from Hartford to Boston in 1826. One of the first books which he had published in Boston was Willis’s “Sketches,” and he now employed the author of it to edit “The Legendary” for 1828 and “The Token” for 1829. Goodrich was a fine example of Yankee enterprise and versatility. He was one of the pioneers of “the trade” in America, entering the field at the same time with the Harpers. Under the pen-name of “Peter Parley,” he wrote or edited a long list of books for the young, histories, travels, biographies, tales, works of natural history, school text-books, etc. He had himself some pretensions as a poet, by virtue of “The Outcast and Other Poems,” 1841. He was an extensive traveler, and he became in 1851 United States consul at Paris. It was the fashion among a certain set in Boston to abuse “Peter Parley” and laugh at his literary claims. But he was a very successful publisher, and in selecting his editorial assistants, he had a keen eye for the kind of talent that takes, and the kind of work that pays. In his interesting “Recollections of a Lifetime” he gives contrasted sketches of the two principal contributors to his annuals—Willis and Hawthorne. Goodrich’s perceptions were, perhaps, not of the finest, but he was a shrewd observer of matters within his ken, and his recollections of Willis are worth repeating.

“The most prominent writer for ‘The Token’ was N. P. Willis. His articles were the most read, the most admired, the most abused, and the most advantageous to the work. In 1827 I published his volume entitled ‘Sketches.’ It brought out quite a shower of criticism, in which praise and blame were about equally dispensed: at the same time the work sold with a readiness quite unusual for a book of poetry at that period. One thing is certain, everybody thought Willis worth criticising. He has been, I suspect, more written about than any other literary man in our history. Some of the attacks upon him proceeded, no doubt, from a conviction that he was a man of extraordinary gifts and yet of extraordinary affectations, and the lash was applied in kindness, as that of a school-master to a loved pupil’s back. Some of them were dictated by envy, for we have had no other example of literary success so early, so general, and so flattering. That Mr. Willis made mistakes in literature and life, at the outset, may be admitted by his best friends; for it must be remembered that before he was five-and-twenty he was more read than any other American poet of his time; and besides, being possessed of an easy and captivating address, he became the pet of society and especially of the fairer portion of it. As to his personal character, I need only say that, from the beginning, he has had a larger circle of steadfast friends than almost any man within my knowledge. It is curious to remark that everything Willis wrote attracted immediate attention and excited ready praise, while the productions of Hawthorne were almost entirely unnoticed. Willis was slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheek ruddy, his aspect cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand and was received readily and with welcome.”

It is needless to pursue the contrast which the writer goes on to draw between Willis and the other and greater Nathaniel, who was then “the obscurest man of letters in America.” The publisher’s sympathies were obviously with his more lively and popular contributor, and he is puzzled to understand why such articles as “Sights from a Steeple,” “Sketches beneath an Umbrella,” “The Wives of the Dead,” and “The Prophetic Pictures,” should have “extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame” when originally published in “The Token,” while “now universally acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and power.” He is inclined to attribute it to a “new sense” in a portion of the reading world—obtained unluckily too late to profit the publisher of “The Token”—“which led them to study the mystical.” To Goodrich’s personal description of Willis may be added the following little portrait by Dr. Holmes, who remembers him well, as he looked during this Boston period.

“He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance, and his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights, and he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a remembrance of Count d’Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phædra, in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked stepmother, always reminded me of Willis.”

“The Legendary” described itself as consisting of original pieces in prose and verse; tales, ballads, and romances, chiefly illustrative of American history, scenery, and manners. It was designed as a periodical, but only two volumes were issued, one in the early, and one in the later part of 1828. “The work proved a miserable failure,” said Goodrich, though numbering among its contributors Mrs. Sigourney, Miss Sedgwick, Halleck, Pierpont, Willis, Gaylord Clark, George Lunt, Grenville Mellen, and others less known to this generation. Willis wrote the two prefaces and contributed half a dozen poems of no importance, unless we except “The Annoyer,” which had considerable currency, and three prose papers, “Unwritten Poetry,” “Unwritten Philosophy,” and “Leaves from a Colleger’s Album.” These last were very juvenile and he never reprinted them. The first two were tales with a moral, one depicting the restorative influences of nature on a heart crushed by bereavement, the other describing a scholarly recluse, who lived alone with nature and his books, and finally educated and married his landlady’s daughter. The story in both instances is very slight, overladen with sentiment, descriptive digressions, and philosophy, that might better have stayed “unwritten.” In short, they are tedious—which Willis in his later work never was. “Unwritten Poetry” included, however, a description of Trenton Falls and a fine rhapsody about water which he rehabilitated afterwards and incorporated with “Edith Linsey.” Both of these had the honor—in the then paucity of our literature—to be selected by Mary Russell Mitford for her “Stories of American Life by American Authors.” “Leaves from a Colleger’s Album” was a first experiment of another kind, a humorous sketch of a trip on the Erie Canal, utilizing the experiences of his senior vacation, and, in particular, the incident of his reading a sermon in the cabin of the canal boat on Sunday. It contains, in the person of Job Clark, the nucleus of Forbearance Smith in the “Slingsby” papers—the nearest approach that Willis ever made to the genuine creation of a character. He was always thus economical of his material, repeatedly working over the same stuff into new shapes.

“The Token” belonged to the class of illustrated publications known as Annuals. It was the age of Annuals, Gift Books, Boudoir Books, Books of Beauty, Flowers of Loveliness, and Leaflets of Memory. The taste for these ornate combinations of literature and art was imported from England, where the Ackermans had published “The Forget-Me-Not,” the earliest specimen of the kind, in 1823. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia brought out the first American Annual, “The Atlantic Souvenir,” for which Willis had been asked to write, when in college, and to which he actually did contribute a copy of birthday verses, “I’m twenty-two—I’m twenty-two,” in the volume for 1829. These were written, he affirmed, “in a blank leaf of a barber’s Testament, while waiting to be shaved.” They were also inserted in the “London Literary Souvenir” for the same year, by Alaric A. Watts, a copious editor of Annuals, whose middle initial was cruelly asserted by Lockhart to stand for Attila. The rage for Annuals soon became general and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates some forty of them, bearing such fantastic titles as The Gem, The Opal, The Wreath, The Casket, The Rose, The Amulet, The Keepsake, Pearls of the West, Friendship’s Offering. And these are probably not half the list. There were religious Annuals, juvenile Annuals, oriental, landscape, botanic Annuals. Most rummagers among the upper shelves of an old library have taken down two or three of them, blown the dust from their gilt edges, ruffled the tissue papers that veil “The Bride,” “The Nun,” “The Sisters,” and “The Fair Penitent,” and wondered in what age of the world these remarkable “embellishments” and the still more remarkable letterpress which they embellish could have reflected American life. There is a faded elegance about them, as of an old ball dress: a faint aroma, as of withered roses, breathes from the page. Those steel-engraved beauties, languishing, simpering, insipid as fashion plates, with high-arched marble brows, pearl necklaces, and glossy ringlets—not a line in their faces or a bone in their bodies: that Highland Chieftain, that Young Buccaneer, that Bandit’s Child, all in smoothest mezzotint,—what kind of a world did they masquerade in? It was a needlework world, a world in which there was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the nightingale chanted in the grove ’neath the mouldering ivy-mantled tower; where vesper chimes and the echoes of the merry bugle-ugle-ugle horn were borne upon the zephyr across the yellow corn; where Isabella sang to the harp (with her hair down) and the tinkling guitar of the serenader under her balcony made response; a world in which there were fairy isles, enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly rococo landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a “sincere” art and an “earnest” literature.

In these Gems and Albums, the gemmy and albuminous illustrations alternated with romantic tales of mediæval or eastern life and with “Lines on Seeing——,” or “Stanzas occasioned by” something. “The May-Flowers of Life,” for example, “suggested by the author’s having found a branch of May in a volume of poems which a friend had left there several years ago.” In the Annual dialect a ship was a “bark,” a bed was a “couch,” a window was a “casement,” a shoe was a “sandal,” a boat was a “shallop,” and a book was a “tome.” Certain properties became gemmy by force of association, as sea-shells, lattices, and Æolian harps. In England L. E. L. and in America Percival and Mrs. Sigourney were perhaps the gemmiest poets. But much of Willis’s poetry was album verse, with an air of the boudoir and the ball-room about it, a silky elegance and an exotic perfume that smack of that very sentimental and artificial school. This passage from “The Declaration” is in point:—

“’Twas late and the gay company was gone,

And light lay soft on the deserted room

From alabaster vases, and a scent

Of orange leaves and sweet verbena came

From the unshuttered window on the air,

And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,

Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things

Seemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,

The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,

Was leaning on her harp.”

“The Token,” begun in 1828 and continued to 1842, was edited by Goodrich every year except 1829, when Willis had charge of it. Like other Annuals it contained, in spots, some good art and good writing. There were delicately designed and engraved vignette titles or presentation plates by Cheney, the Hartford artist. There was an occasional contribution, in prose, from Longfellow or Mrs. Child—then Miss Francis, and likewise a contributor to “The Legendary.” Many of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales” came out in “The Token.” Mrs. Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” divided with Willis’s “The Soldier’s Widow” the $100 prize offered by the publisher for 1828. Among the contributors to Willis’s volume (1829) were John Neal, Colonel William L. Stone, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hale, the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet, Willis’s Albany friend, J. B. Van Schaick, and Goodrich himself. The Rev. G. W. Doane—afterward Bishop Doane—gave his well known verses, “What is that, Mother?” Willis gave five poems of his own, the only noteworthy one among which was “Saturday Afternoon,” written to accompany the frontispiece, engraved by Ellis from a painting by Fisher, and representing children swinging in a barn. This had more the character of a simple, popular ballad than anything else which he had written, and was liked by many readers who cared little about his more elaborate verse. Another poem in “The Token,” “Psyche before the Tribunal of Venus,” he wrote for the engraving by Cheney from a drawing of Fragonard. A college tale, “The Ruse,” was a slight advance on the experiments in “The Legendary;” the dialogue was handled more freely, but the story was weak as a whole, hardly worth mentioning, certainly not worth preserving. Willis continued to contribute verses to “The Token” after he had resigned its editorship. “To a City Pigeon,” “On a Picture of a Girl leading her Blind Mother through the Woods,” and doubtless other pieces were printed in subsequent numbers. He wrote for other Annuals, at various times: “The Power of an Injured Look,” for “The Gift,” a Christmas book, 1845; an article “On Dress,” for “The Opal,” 1848, and edited “The Thought Blossom,” a memorial volume, as late as 1854. “The Torn Hat” was contributed to “The Youth’s Keepsake” for 1829, and “Contemplation” was written in 1828 to accompany an engraving in “Remember Me,” a religious Annual published in Philadelphia. But he had no very high opinion of the class of literature that they cultivated, and spoke of them as “yearly flotillas of trash.”

In the spring of 1829 he entered upon his first serious venture as a journalist, by starting the “American Monthly Magazine,” which ran two years and a half—from April, 1829, to August, 1831. Mr. Thomas Gold Appleton describes Willis’s undertaking as “a slim monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Appleton and his friend Motley, then students in Harvard, were both contributors. For a young littérateur, only a year and a half out of college, without capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of a monthly magazine was certainly an enterprise of some boldness. His expectations, however, were modest enough, and his preliminary card, “To the Public,” casts some light on the conditions of literary journalism at that time. He says that he cannot pay much for contributions, like the English magazines which he took for his model. “The difficulties of transmission over such an immense country and the comparatively small proportion of literary readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two, at the farthest.” He had, moreover, “the ebb of a boyish reputation” against him. Notwithstanding he launched upon his voyage with excellent pluck and vigor. He conducted his magazine with little assistance, writing himself from thirty to forty pages of printed matter every month in the shape of tales, poems, essays, book reviews, and sketches of life and travel. Boston was not yet the Boston of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, but it had already as fair a claim to the title of literary metropolis as New York. Everett and Channing were great names. Dana, Pierpont, and Sprague were among its poets. These men were not available for Willis’s purposes, but he rallied to his support a number of younger men, such as Richard Hildreth, the historian, George Lunt, the poet, Park Benjamin, Isaac McLellan, the Rev. George B. Cheever, Albert Pike, afterwards the Arkansas poet and fire-eater, and Rufus Dawes,—then a budding genius, subsequently a preacher of erratic doctrines,—J. O. Rockwell, Mrs. Sigourney, and others whose names have fallen silent. Next to the editor’s own graceful work, the most notable things given to the public through the columns of the “American Monthly” were Pike’s “Hymns to the Gods,” poems of a richly classical inspiration, which have often provoked comparison with Keats’s odes; and which, if their workmanship were equal to their imaginative fervor, would justify the comparison.

Willis led off in the opening number with a carefully written, but not very characteristic, essay on “Unwritten Music.” It was thought monstrous fine by his friends, but suggests, it must be confessed, that dreariest product of the human mind,—a prize composition. As a study of the harmonies of nature, it was much too general in its reflections and descriptions to please a modern taste, wonted to the sharp and full detail of Thoreau and his successors. The editorial articles, prose and verse, in the “American Monthly” were too many to be mentioned here individually. There were stories, “The Fancy Ball,” “The Elopement,” “P. Calamus, Esq.,” and others which their author never recognized so far as to give them any place in his collected writings. Others, as “Baron von Raffloff,” “Captain Thompson,” “Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man,” etc., were the rough drafts of later tales, such as “Pedlar Karl,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “Scenes of Fear.” “Albina M’Lush” was the best of these. “The Death of the Gentle Usher” contained an eloquent passage on the night heavens, which obtained a better setting in “Edith Linsey.” “An Inkling of Adventure” lent its name and nothing else to the first published collection of Willis’s “Slingsby” stories. Then there were sketches of travel in New York State and Canada, partly reminiscences of senior vacation and partly memorials of holidays from the editorial desk, spent at Saratoga, Lebanon Springs, or elsewhere: “Notes upon a Ramble,” “Letters of Horace Fritz, Esq.,” and “Pencillings by the Way,”—a title afterward used to better advantage. Parts of these were similarly refurbished for later employment. The secret of that skillful blending of gayety and sentiment, the quick, light transitions, which make much of the charm of Willis’s best stories and sketches, like “F. Smith,” or “Pasquali,” he had not yet learned. In these earlier efforts the serious parts drag and the humorous parts are flashy and thin. Besides the monthly “table” there were editorial articles of that rambling, chatty description peculiar to the period, and which the “Noctes” had done as much as anything to introduce: “Scribblings,” “The Scrap Book,” “The Idle Man,” “Tête-à-tête Confessions,” etc., in which the editor takes the reader into his confidence and his sanctum, makes him sit down in his red morocco dormeuse, reads him bits of verse from his old scrap-books and his favorite authors, calls attention to his japonica, his smoking pastille, his scarlet South American trulian (a most familiar bird with Willis—he gets it in again in “Lady Ravelgold”), and his two dogs Ugolino and L. E. L., whose lair is in the rejected MSS. basket. He fosters an agreeable fiction that he writes with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, and he says now and then in a hospitable aside “Take another olive,” or “Pass the Johannisbergh”; this to his imaginary interlocutor, Cousin Florence, or Tom Lascelles, or The Idle Man, an epicure and dandy, “who eats in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool.”

These amiable coxcombries of Willis gave dire offense to the critics, and especially to Joseph T. Buckingham, the veteran of the Boston press and editor of the “Courier,” then the most influential Whig newspaper in Massachusetts. He published epigrams on Willis, with very blunt points, administered fatherly rebukes to him for his affected English, and objected strongly to Ugolino, L. E. L., and the trulian. Willis retorted in kind, and a good-natured war raged between the “Courier” and the “American Monthly,” though their editors were privately the best of friends. In his “Specimens of Newspaper Literature,” Buckingham paid a glowing and, indeed, extravagant compliment to the talents of his young adversary. Willis’s experience in editing the “American Monthly” was of great advantage to him. He had a natural instinct for journalism, and he soon acquired by practice that personal, sympathetic attitude toward his readers, and that ready adjustment of himself to the public taste, which made him the most popular magazinist of his day and defined at once his success and his limitations. For its purposes Willis’s crisp prose was admirable: “delicate and brief like a white jacket,—transparent like a lump of ice in champagne,—soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.” It had an easy, conversational grace, the air of “the town,” the tone of good society. In his review of Lady Morgan’s “Book of the Boudoir,” he made a plea for that negligé style which he practiced so daintily himself. “We love this rambling, familiar gossip. It is the undress of the mind. There are few people who possess the talent of graceful trifling, either in writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is like naïveté in character,—nature let alone.” There was a great deal of good writing in Willis’s “American Monthly” articles; bright thoughts expressed in exquisite English, here and there a page which Charles Lamb or Leigh Hunt might have been glad to claim. Some of these he rescued from the old files of the magazine and inserted in his later work. The chapter on “Minute Philosophies,” “A Morning in the Library,” and “The Substance of a Diary of Sickness” were used again in “Edith Linsey,” and a spirited description of Nahant in one of the “tables” did duty in “F. Smith.” But many a nice bit was too small for resetting and remained lost in the ephemeral context,—many such a scrap as this little picture of summer in town:

“Was ever such intense, unmitigated sunshine? There is nothing on the hard, opaque sky but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair, and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting on the broad sidewalk.”

The “New England Galaxy,” which was also under Buckingham’s management, was edited for a time by one William Joseph Snelling, who made quite a stir in Boston newspaper circles. He had been an under-officer in the army and stationed somewhere in the Northwest, but came to Boston about 1830 and devoted himself to sensational journalism and in particular to a crusade against gamblers. His life was threatened for this, and he converted his office into a sort of arsenal. In 1831 he published a slashing lampoon, “Truth: a New Year’s Gift for Scribblers,” in which he blackguarded American writers in general and paid his respects to Willis as follows:—

“Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford

To give poor Natty P. his meet reward?

What has he done to be despised by all

Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall?

Why, as in band-box trim he walks the streets,

Turns up the nose of every man he meets,

As if it scented carrion? Why of late

Do all the critics claw his shallow pate?

True he’s a fool;—if that’s a hanging thing,

Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”

Some of this delicate banter was exhumed and quoted a few years later by Captain Marryat, in the article in the “Metropolitan” which led to the affair of honor between that warrior and Willis. The latter answered Snelling “contemptuously but effectively,” Goodrich reports, “in some half dozen verses inserted in the ‘Statesman,’ and addressed to Smelling Joseph. The lines stuck to poor Smelling for the remainder of his life.” The pasquinader himself afterwards went to New York and conducted a meat-axe publication, “The Censor.” Goodrich adds, that he “fell into habits of dissipation, which led from one degradation to another, till his miserable career was ended,”—a victim, no doubt, to the angry muse. Willis also contrived to offend Mrs. Lydia Maria Child by a satirical review of her “Frugal Housewife” and by harping on a sentence from that authority, “hard ginger-bread is nice.” She took this very much to heart, and when she afterwards had charge of the literary department of the “Traveller” showed an abiding hostility toward her whilom critic. He early attained to the dignity of parody. “The Annoyer” was travestied in the “Amateur” and a humorous imitation of “Albina M’Lush” was also printed. Mere literary criticism, however unfair, need not greatly disturb any one. But Willis was subjected, in Boston, to personalities of a very annoying character. He was constantly in receipt of anonymous letters calling him a puppy, a rake, etc. He was attacked in the newspapers for his frivolity, his dandyism, and his conceit. Private scandal, circulated by word of mouth, concerning his debts and his alleged immoralities, sometimes got into print. It would not be easy to explain why so kind a man as Willis, one always so eager to oblige and so prone to say good-natured things about everybody, should have excited so much wrath, not only at this time, but all through his life, by his harmless literary fopperies and foibles, did we not remember that he was successful, that he was a favorite in society, and, above all, that he wore conspicuously good clothes. There was also something about his airy way of writing and the personality it suggested that was and is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of serious-minded people who resent all attempts to entertain them on the part of any one whom they cannot entirely respect. Willis carried it off lightly enough, though, of course, it must have stung him. He knew, he said, “how easy it is to despise the ungentlemanly critic and forget the poor wrong of his criticism.”

In intervals of work on the “American Monthly” he contributed frequently to the “Boston Statesman,” having been engaged, together with Lunt and Dawes, to write something for it every week, “short or long, prose or verse,” at the rate of five dollars an article, an arrangement that lasted for some months. This seems now beggarly pay, but Nathaniel Greene of the “Statesman” was, according to Willis, the only editor in the country who, as early as 1827, paid anything at all for verse. During these early years of journalistic life Willis sojourned awhile in the pleasant land of Bohemia. He was a member of a supper club, which included two representatives of each profession. Washington Allston and Chester Harding were the artists; Willis and Dawes the men of letters; Horace Mann and five or six more completed the tale. Willis was a frequent lounger in Harding’s studio, and some years after he was delighted to come across his tracks at Gordon and Dalhousie castles, where Harding was known. Willis was fond of fast horses, and used to drive his friends out to Nahant, for a spin on the hard beach along the edge of the surf. This was the scene of “F. Smith,” one of his most perfect and characteristic stories. With Dawes and others he resorted, not seldom, for a game supper, to an ancient and once somewhat stately hostelry, known as the “Stackpole House,” where the wines were excellent and the landlord good-humored and disposed to trust,—the original, doubtless, of Gallagher in “The Female Ward,” a story written long afterwards, but whose incidents and descriptions are assignable to this period.

Willis’s position in Boston was in some respects a difficult one. His family connection were plain, good folks, not “in society,”—not, at least, in the literary society, which was Unitarian, or in the so-called aristocratic society, which was mainly either Unitarian or Episcopalian. He himself was socially ambitious, and these were the circles which he wished to frequent. “The pale of Unitarianism,” he wrote, “is the limit of gentility.” He was a great favorite with Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, the “lady autocrat” and leader of the ton in the Puritan capital for many years. He was constantly at her house when she was in town, and was invited to be one of her party when she went to Saratoga in the summer. Nor was this a passing fancy with Mrs. Otis, but stood the test of time and separation. She made him a long visit at Idlewild during the latter years of his life. But the Park Street Church people, among whom he had been brought up, looked askance upon his fashionable associations. The old stories of his college dissipations were revived, while rumors of his Boston irregularities reached the ears of his New Haven acquaintances. Willis himself took no notice of these slanders, but they were warmly resented by his friends. His brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, wrote to Mr. D. W. Whiting of New Haven: “Nat is a good fellow. He is not dissipated in any way; nor traveling the Tartarean turnpike, as the good New Haven people suppose. He is attending to his magazine, and doing his duty as well as any of us.” Though Willis did not make the impression of a man of very scrupulous morality, he was certainly not given to any serious dissipations. It was not in his temperament to run into physical excesses. His senses were delicate, and he always respected them. He never, for example, used tobacco; he was never a hard drinker. In youth he affected a moderate conviviality and had an æsthetic liking for champagne. In middle age he was accustomed to mix a little spirit with his water, expressing a horror for the pure element, on the whimsical ground that it tasted of sinners ever since the flood. In this Boston period, his offenses were probably limited to running up bills at livery stables and inns, with a too sanguine expectation of being able to pay them from the proceeds of his literary work. Edward Beecher, who had been a tutor at Yale during his college course, was at this time pastor of the Park Street Church. Finding himself unwilling to conform his life to the strict rules of that society, Willis called on Mr. Beecher and stated the manner of his supposed conversion in a revival at Andover, and the influences that had induced him to join the church. He said that he was sincere in the act, but was convinced afterward that he was mistaken in his conviction, and that he had not experienced the change that qualified him for church membership; and he requested Mr. Beecher to obtain for him an honorable dismission. Mr. Beecher sympathized with him in his feelings, and made an effort to satisfy his request, but failed, as the church then believed that there were but three ways out of it, death, dismissal to another church, or excommunication. Accordingly, at a church meeting on April 29, 1829, in which Mr. Beecher took no part, the following sentence was passed:—

“Whereas certain charges have been made against Brother N. P. Willis, which, in the opinion of this church has been fully proved, namely: Absence from the communion of this church and attendance at the theatre as a spectator; and whereas he has neglected to appear before the church to answer the said charges, although duly notified; and has not given to the church satisfactory evidence of penitence, but has evinced by a letter laid before the church an entirely different state of feeling; therefore voted, That Mr. Nathaniel P. Willis be, and he hereby is, in the name and by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, excommunicated from this church.”

Deacon Willis was naturally grieved by this turn of affairs, although he acquiesced silently in the church’s decision. Theatre going, indeed, was an offense against family, as well as church discipline. Naturally, also, the object of this significavit always afterwards thought and spoke with some bitterness of “the charity of a sect in religion.” He never renounced definitely his Christian belief. He never became skeptical; was not at any time, in fact, a thinker on such themes and subject to the speculative doubts which beset the thinker. He remained through life easily impressible in his religious emotions. “Worldling as I am,” he wrote many years after, “and hardly as I dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted.” But this ended his connection with organized Christianity, and he ceased for a long time to be a church-goer.

His position in Boston was also made painful by an unsuccessful love affair. He had paid court to Mary Benjamin, a woman of uncommon beauty of person and graces of mind and character, the sister of Park Benjamin and afterwards the wife of the historian Motley. She returned his feeling and the two were engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken through the determined opposition of the lady’s guardian, Mr. Savage. Willis carried this thorn in his side for years, and it gave him many hours of bitter homesickness while abroad. In a letter written a few days after landing in England, in the summer of 1834, he said:—

“I loved Mary B., and never think of her without emotion; but with all the world in France, Italy, and England treating me like a son or a brother, I am not coming home to fight my way to her through bitter relatives and slander and opposition. They nearly crushed me once, and I shall take care how they get another opportunity. Still, after three years’ separation, I think I never loved any one so well, and if my way were not so hedged up, it would draw me home now.”

To Mary Benjamin was addressed the lovely little poem, “To M——, from Abroad,” with its motto from Metastasio,—

“L’alma, quel che non ha, sogna et figura.”

By 1829 Willis had accumulated verses enough to fill another slender volume of “Fugitive Poetry.” Of the forty-three pieces in this, the “Dedication Hymn,” written to be sung at the consecration of the Hanover Street Church in Boston, has the best title to remembrance. It possesses a brief energy seldom attained by Willis. As late as 1856, his old English friend, Dr. William Beattie, wrote to him: “Your beautiful ‘Hymn’ was sung in one of our cathedral towns, at the consecration of a new church, by an overflowing congregation. Surely this is a fact worth noting. Miss Rogers was the first who told me of it, and often have I repeated ‘The perfect world by Adam trod,’ etc.” “The Annoyer” and “Saturday Afternoon” have been already mentioned. “Contemplation”—

“They are all up, the innumerable stars”—

had the feeling, though not the artistic touch, of Tennyson’s “St. Agnes,” and came near to being a fine poem. There were five sonnets, one of them—an acrostic to Emily Marshall—with a good closing couplet,—

“Life in thy presence were a thing to keep,

Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep.”

“A Portrait,” also, which Willis did not republish, contained an effective passage, beginning

“I go away like one who’s heard,

In some fine scene, the prompter’s word,” etc.

There were two more scriptural pieces, and the remainder of the book was of no importance. Many of its contents were written before those of the earlier volume of “Sketches.”

The “American Monthly” proved a failure financially, owing, doubtless, to a lack of the right business management, for which Willis had no faculty, and with which, in truth, he had nothing to do. At the close of the summer of 1831 the magazine suspended publication, and its editor, shaking off the dust of his feet against the New England metropolis, fled to more genial climes. He left behind him the squibs of his brother journalists, the cackle of the tea-tables, and some $3,000 of debts incurred through the failure of his enterprise. He never quite forgave Boston. In a letter to his mother from England, September 12, 1835, he wrote:—

“They have denied me patronage, abused me, misrepresented me, refused me both character and genius, and I feel that I owe them nothing. I have never suffered injustice except from my countrymen, and I have in every other land found kindness and favor. I would not write this for another human eye, but you know how unjustly I have been treated, and can understand the wound that rankles even in so light a heart as mine. The mines of Golconda would not tempt me to return and live in Boston.”

The “New York Mirror” of September 10, 1831, contained the following item: “We take much pleasure in announcing to our readers that the ‘American Monthly Magazine’ has been united to the ‘New York Mirror,’ and that Nathaniel P. Willis, Esq., will, from this period, be an associate editor of the joint establishment.” This announcement was followed in the next week’s issue by “A Card to the Public,” in which the new editor promises that, “having transferred the only literary undertaking in which he has any interest to the proprietor of the ‘Mirror,’ his whole time and attention will hereafter be given to this work.” The “Mirrors” of September 10th and 17th published, furthermore, two letters from Saratoga, written by Willis in August, and containing some characteristic verses, “The String that tied my Lady’s Shoe,” and “To——,”—

“’Tis midnight deep: I came but now

From the bright air of lighted halls;”

as also a “Pencilling by the Way,” descriptive of Providence and Brown University, where he had just been delivering a Commencement poem. On September 25th the editorial page for the first time bore the heading, “Edited by George P. Morris, Theodore S. Fay, and Nathaniel P. Willis.”

The journal with which he had now connected himself—and with whose successors, under different names, he continued to be identified until his death, thirty-six years later—was a weekly paper, published on Saturdays, and “devoted to literature and the fine arts.” It had been founded in 1823 by Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and General George P. Morris, but Woodworth had withdrawn some time before Willis joined it. Morris, with whom Willis now began a business partnership that lasted, with slight interruptions, for the rest of their lives, and a personal friendship almost romantic in its tenderness and fidelity, was the most popular song writer of his generation in America,—a sort of cis-Atlantic Tom Moore, whose songs, adapted to the piano, were on all the music-racks in the land. “Near the Lake where droops the Willow” was a universal favorite in the days of gem-book minstrelsy. “My Mother’s Bible” was dear to the great heart of the people, and the air of “Woodman, spare that Tree” was heard by wandering Americans ground out from every hurdy-gurdy in the London streets. Unless a clever letter in the “Mirror” of March 2, 1839, is wholly a hoax, this last-mentioned song compared in popularity with “Home Sweet Home,” having suffered translation into French (“Bûcheron, épargne mon arbre”), German (“Haue nicht die alte Eiche nieder”), Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; the German version being even introduced by an essay, “Ueber Morris’s Entwickelung, Denken und Wirken.” “The Amaranth” for 1840, an annual, edited by Nathaniel Brooks and dedicated to Morris, contains Greek and Latin renderings of his “Woodman,” as well as of Wilde’s almost equally familiar and far better lyric, “My Life is like the Summer Rose.” Morris was a bustling, affable little man, with a shrewd, practical side to him. He was a good business manager, and as Willis had no talent in that kind, the association was mutually advantageous. Morris’s intellectual stature was not great, and Willis, who loved the man, was unable to admire the poet. He praised his songs in print, but there was more of friendship than critical sincerity in his praise. He had been in correspondence with Morris before, and had contributed occasionally to the “Mirror,” having sent it a poem in competition for a twenty-dollar prize when he was still in college. He now began to decant into its columns a number of his “American Monthly” articles, a circumstance which not only shows how local the circulation of the latter must have been, but sheds a curious light on the methods of journalism at that epoch. The old “New York Mirror” had a reputation for brightness in its time and a circulation then considered large, but as compared with the great magazines of to-day it seems a very primitive affair, with its “Original Essays,” its “Popular Moral Tales,” “Desultory Selections,” and “Extracts from an Unpublished Tragedy,” its poems “For the ‘Mirror,’” by Isidora and Iolanthe, and its solemn “Answers to Correspondents.” Now and then there is a contribution of more pronounced individuality, a poem by Halleck, a story by Paulding or Fay. Theodore S. Fay, the other editor, was a man of parts. He was the author of several once popular novels, “The Countess Ida” and “Hoboken,” tendenz romances against dueling, “Ulric,” a poetical romance, and “Norman Leslie,” which was afterwards dramatized, and was founded on a famous murder trial in which Burr and Hamilton had figured as counsel. Fay contributed to the “Mirror” satirical letters on New York society, “The Little Genius,” and in 1832 published a volume of his “Mirror” articles under the title of “Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man.” In 1833 he went abroad, and his letters from Europe, “The Minute Book,” appeared in the paper side by side with Willis’s “Pencillings.” He was appointed secretary of legation at Berlin in 1837, and minister resident at Berne in 1853. His novels have now gone quite out of sight, but many of his short tales are really very clever,—written in a rattling style, with abrupt, jerky dialogues,—and may be read even now without much effort. Another name connected with the “Mirror” was that of William Cox, an English printer employed upon the paper, whose “Crayon Sketches by an Amateur,” published in 1833, were highly commended by Willis. He, too, was abroad during Willis’s and Fay’s sojourn in Europe, and wrote letters from England to the “Mirror,” whose foreign correspondence was thus uncommonly varied. The first thought of sending Willis abroad occurred while the three editors were supping together at Sandy Welsh’s oyster saloon. Long and earnestly they revolved the question of ways and means. At length $500 were scraped together as viaticum, and it was agreed that Willis was to write weekly letters at ten dollars the letter. The investment proved a good one both for the “Mirror” and for its traveling editor. With this slender capital in his pocket he embarked at Philadelphia October 10th, the only passenger on the merchant brig Pacific, bound for Havre. He was young, sanguine, eager to see life, but in his most hopeful mood he could hardly have foreseen the dazzling experiences of his next four years, or the far-reaching consequences which the trip thus lightly undertaken were to have for him.

Before sailing he had found time to visit Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Mount Vernon, and make a “Pencilling” of them for the “Mirror.” Another letter gave his impressions of New York, now become his American address. He had also put to press the poem delivered before the “Society of United Brothers,” at Brown University, on September 6th, the day before Commencement, together with a few other pieces written since 1829. The dedication was “To one of whom, in this moment of departure for a foreign land, I think sadly and only—to my mother.” The name-poem was one of those conventional performances with which unlucky recipients of invitations to “speak a piece” before Phi Beta Kappas, United Brothers, or other such academic bodies, are wont to dazzle the young alumni. It was in blank verse, of course, and dealt with the usual commonplaces about ambition, content, the beauty of human love, and the folly of skepticism and contempt. It showed more maturity than the poem delivered before his own Alma Mater four years before, but it was much the same sort of thing. Of the remaining contents of the book two were Scripture sketches and four were of a more ambitious description than Willis had previously attempted. These were “Parrhasius,” “The Dying Alchemist,” “The Scholar of Thebet Ben Chorat,” and “The Wife’s Appeal” to her husband to “awake to fame.” The theme of all these and the central thought of this whole volume is the vanity of an inordinate thirst for knowledge, power, or fame. “Parrhasius,” the story of an old Olynthian captive who was tortured to death by the Athenian painter that he might catch the expression of his last agony for his picture of Prometheus, comes the nearest to success. Willis had read the tale in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” “The Scholar of Thebet Ben Chorat” was the story of a young Bedouin who grew mad and died from too close application to astrology, on which science Willis seems to have crammed up for the nonce, if one may judge from the profusion of his foot-notes. But in truth these poems were little better than wax-work. The sweet and natural lines, “To a City Pigeon,” were worth all the rest of the book.

CHAPTER IV.
1831-1834.
LIFE ABROAD.

Whatever may have been the effect of Willis’s career in Europe upon his character, its influence on his literary fortunes was most propitious. Foreign travel furnished just the stimulus that he wanted. As a writer he was at all times very dependent on his supplies. If they were fresh and abundant his writing was correspondingly so; if life stagnated with him his writing wore thin. Place is comparatively indifferent to men of deep or intense genius, to a philosopher like Emerson or a brooding idealist like Hawthorne. They strike root anywhere, and it is no great matter from what corner they look forth upon the world. The life of the soul, the life of nature, the problems of the conscience, may be studied in Concord or Salem as well as anywhere else. A profound insight, a subtle imagination will interpret the humblest environment into philosophy and poetry. And yet even these are not quite free of their surroundings. To all but sworn Emersonians “English Traits” is probably the most intelligible and satisfactory of Emerson’s writings. “The Marble Faun” is not Hawthorne’s greatest romance, but there is a richness about it, a body, that comes simply from its material, and is not to be found in “The Scarlet Letter” or “The House of the Seven Gables.”

As for Willis, his genius, such as it was, was frankly external. His bright fancy played over the surface of things. His curiosity and his senses demanded gratification. He needed stir, change, adventure. He was always turning his own experiences to account, and the more crowded his life was with impressions from outside, the more vivid his page. He had the artist’s craving for luxury, and was fond of quoting a saying of Godwin: “A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding.” This taste for the sumptuous had been starved in Willis at home. Not only were literature and society in America far more provincial then than now, but life was plainer in every way. The rapid growth of wealth has obliterated the most striking contrasts between cities like New York and Boston, on the one hand, and cities like London and Paris, on the other. In every foreign capital nowadays one finds his simple republican compatriots grumbling at the absence of American conveniences, cursing the steamboats, the railway carriages, the hotels, the luggage system, the portable baths and bed-room candles, and proclaiming loudly that the Americans are the most luxurious people on the face of the earth. In Europe, and especially in England, circumstances threw Willis into a new world. He shared for a time in the life of the titled aristocracy and the idle rich, and he took to it like one to the manner born. He was at home at once amid all that gay ease and leisure. The London clubs, the parks, the great country houses, Almack’s and the Row, the beautiful haughty women, the grace, indolence, and refinement, hereditary for generations, seemed no more than the birthright of this New England printer’s son, from which some envious fairy had hitherto shut him out.

“I have now and then a fit of low spirits,” he says, in a letter from Marseilles, April 28, 1832, “though generally the excessive excitement of new scenes and constant interest occupies me quite. It is like an intoxication to travel in Europe. I feel no annoyance, grumble at no imposition, am never out of temper. Fatigue is the only thing that bears me down. I want leisure and money. I shall come back, I think, to America after my engagement with Morris is over, and marry and come out again. As to settling down for these ten years, I cannot think of it without a sickness at my heart. I wish to heaven I could keep a journal and publish after I got home. This writing and sending off unrevised is the worst thing in the world for one’s reputation. However, I see a world of things that I cannot put into letters, and I feel every day that my mind is ripening and laying up material which I could get nowhere else. You can have no idea of the stirring, vivid habit one’s mind gets into abroad. Living at home forever would never be of half the use to me.”

Willis arrived at Havre November 3d, and went on by diligence to Paris, where he spent between five and six months. He had taken out with him a number of good letters, some from Martin Van Buren among the rest. The American colony in Paris was then small and select. It was under the wing of Lafayette, who was very polite to Willis during his stay. Cooper was there and his protégé, Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, who had come from Florence to execute a bust of Lafayette. Morse, the artist, too, who, on his return trip to America in a Havre packet, in the year following, was to hit upon his invention of the electric telegraph. And lastly, Willis’s fellow-townsman, Dr. Howe, then a zealous young philanthropist, who had won much glory by his recent campaign in Greece, and was now attending medical lectures at the French capital. Willis took lodgings with Howe until the latter, having been appointed president of the American committee for the relief of the Poles, went off on his dangerous mission of distributing supplies among the insurgent bands in Polish Prussia, an enterprise which ended in his capture and confinement for six weeks in a Prussian prison. All these gentlemen Willis had the good fortune to meet in familiar and cordial intercourse. Cooper asked him to breakfast with Morse and Howe, and walked and talked with him in the gardens of the Tuileries. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun between the two authors was afterwards renewed at home, though, from accidents of geography, they never became really intimate.

Willis also made desirable acquaintances among the foreigners resident in Paris. Morse took him to call upon Sir John Bowring, editor of the “Westminster Review,” the translator of much of the national poetry of the Russians and Hungarians, and afterwards the English governor of Hong Kong at the time of the Opium War. He made acquaintance, too, with Spurzheim, the phrenologist, who took a cast of his head; with General Bertrand, who had been with Napoleon at St. Helena; and with the Countess Guiccioli, who presented him with a sonnet by herself, and an autograph note from Shelley. The glamour of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was still over Europe, and everywhere the American traveler looked eagerly for his footprints. Mr. Rives, the minister of the United States at Paris, was very attentive to his young countryman, and presented him to the king, with two other American gentlemen, Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Carr. The latter was American consul at Tangiers. He took a great liking to Willis, made him a number of presents, and offered to appoint him his secretary, and take him to Morocco. This offer Willis was at first inclined to accept. It was a tempting one in many particulars, and in a birthday letter to his mother, January 20, 1832, he thus explained its advantages:—

“Mr. Carr takes me into his family and pays all my expenses. We go to the old palaces of the Abencerrages, perhaps the most romantic country in history, and one very little written about, and it will double the value of my journey to Morris at the same time that it secures me from any reverse of fortune. He means to spend his summers in Spain, which is right opposite Tangiers at two hours’ sail, and next fall he will run down to Italy and the Sicilies, thus giving me every opportunity I want. I have letters from Lord James Hay to his brother-in-law, the governor of Gibraltar, and one from Lord Fife to the governor of the Ionian Islands.”

Why he did not embrace this golden chance remains uncertain, though he hints at a possible difficulty in the fact that his friend, the consul, was a notorious duelist, who had shot seven or eight men and had a very pretty wife. However, before he left Paris, Mr. Rives attached him to his own embassy, a courtesy which proved of the greatest service to him. It entitled him to wear the uniform of a secretary of legation, and the diplomatic button gave him the entrée to the court circles of every country he visited.

Willis saw Paris at an interesting moment. The Polish revolution had just failed, and the city swarmed with refugees. Louis Philippe was already growing unpopular, and there were continual small émeutes on the Boulevard Montmartre, at the Porte Saint Denis, and in other quarters, led by Polytechnic students and put down without much trouble by the troops. It was a cholera year and people were dying by the hundreds daily. Meanwhile the gay world went on much as ever. Carnival was kept with the usual elaborate follies. There were masked balls at the palace. Malibran and Taglioni were on the stage. Paris, with its novelties and splendors, exercised the same fascination over Willis that it exercises proverbially over his compatriots. He was never tired of promenading and sight-seeing. His lodgings were in the Rue Rivoli, facing the Tuileries. Sismondi, the historian, had the apartment under him. In a private letter he thus describes his daily occupations:—

“I have bought a coffee maker and cups, and a loaf of sugar and a pan, etc., etc., and my hostess’s daughter, Christine, brings me my bread and butter, and I breakfast gloriously alone, the doctor (Howe) being always at the hospitals in the morning. I breakfast and write all along the forenoon till twelve, and then see sights and hear lectures till dark, dine at five or six, and either go to some party in the evening, or stay at home and study with Zelie.”

He had no fear of the cholera and firmly believed that it was not contagious. He was advised that good living, frequent bathing, a cheerful frame of mind, and regular habits were the best preventives. He even went boldly through the cholera wards of the Hôtel Dieu, and sent a harrowing description of them to the “Mirror.” But towards spring the pestilence gained more and more. The theatres were shut, all gayeties suspended, and thousands fled the city daily. The upper classes, who had thus far escaped, began to be attacked. The streets were almost deserted, people went about holding camphor bags to their nostrils, and the panic became universal. Finally, toward the middle of April, while dancing at a party, Willis was seized with violent pains in the stomach, vomiting, and chills. He ran out of the room to an apothecary’s, swallowed thirty drops of laudanum, took a carriage home, and a prescription of camphor and ether, and went to bed. These instant remedies, he had no doubt, were all that saved him, and on April 16th he started for Italy.

It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the “Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.” Both described well the character of these letters, which were written hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision, to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.” There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s “Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and “Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born “foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber. Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous works of art are often either at second hand or incorrect. His education had not prepared him to pronounce on these, and he had not the patience to cultivate a critical appreciation of them. But in the crowd and out of doors—whither he gladly escapes—he is always happy, and there are many pictures, scattered here and there through these excellent letters, which for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled either by Hawthorne, in his “Note-Books,” or by Bayard Taylor, in his numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.

Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, and become the interpreter to the New World of the Old World’s romantic past. He was never much of a scholar. The literature and legends of the countries he traveled had little to give him, though he possessed just enough of the historic imagination for the proper equipment of a picturesque tourist. In general it was the present that interested him: all this stirring modern life, the strange manners and dresses, the changing landscapes, the gay throngs in the streets, the pretty women and notable men at the drive or the ball. Nor was his attitude that of criticism, but rather of intense personal enjoyment. He had gone out ready to be pleased, and he was pleased. He gave, in consequence, a somewhat rose-colored view of Europe to his readers at home. Not that the disagreeable side escaped his notice, but he was having his holiday and he gave a holiday account of it, and his engaging egotism lent a personal interest to his descriptions. The “Edinburgh Review,” in a just but rather heavy notice of “Pencillings,” complained of the scantiness of useful information in them. Useful information was a thing which Willis eschewed. He took small interest in politics, public institutions, industrial conditions, etc.; and he knew that they would bore nine out of ten among his readers. He lumped them jauntily under the head of “statistics,” referred the anxious inquirer concerning them to the cyclopædias, acknowledged with delightful candor that he himself was an ornamental person, and went on with his sketches of people and places. Yet “Pencillings by the Way” was a book which so solid a man as Daniel Webster carried with him on a journey, and which, says his biographer, “he read attentively and praised. He said the letters were both instructive and amusing and evinced great talents on the part of the author.” They inspired the young Bayard Taylor with his first longing to travel. Thousands of Americans have taken their impressions of Europe from them; and in spite of all that has since been written by more leisurely and better instructed observers, they retain their freshness wonderfully, and present to the reader of to-day vivid glimpses of the outside of European life, at a time when steam had not yet made the byways of all countries accessible.

Willis spent the summer and autumn of 1832 in the north of Italy, making Florence his headquarters. Dr. Bowring had given him in Paris a letter to Count Porro at Marseilles. The latter had been with Byron in Greece, where Count Gamba, the Guiccioli’s brother, was of his corps and served under him. He gave Willis letters to “half the rank of Italy:” among others, to the Marquis Borromeo, who owned the “Isola Bella” in Lake Maggiore. Porro assured Willis that Borromeo would give him the use of one of his palazzos, “as he has five or six and is happy when people he knows occupy his servants.” The nominal position of attaché to the American legation at Paris obtained for him a private presentation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and an invitation to the ducal balls and the receptions at the Casino, both of which were given weekly. The Florentines did not entertain much at their houses, but the foreign residents did, and especially the English. Willis was dined by Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Westphalia, who was living at the Tuscan capital with the title of Prince Montfort, and giving very exclusive parties. He resorted to the Saturday soirées of Prince Poniatowski, who professed love for Americans, and whose august name was afterwards borne by the favorite pony of the Willis children at Idlewild. In short, he was freely admitted to Florentine society and took part in its fashionable intrigues and dissipations. He secured lodgings in Florence in the same palazzo with Greenough, in the apartment just vacated by Cole, the American landscape painter. Through Greenough he saw a great deal of artist life in Italy. At Rome Greenough subsequently introduced him to Gibson, the English sculptor, who presented him with a cast of his bas-relief, Cupid and Psyche. Under the guidance of the two, Willis amused himself by trying his hand, in an amateurish fashion, at moulding in clay. He was flattered by their assurances that he had a good touch, and felt half inclined, for a moment, to exchange his dilettantish pursuit of letters for an equally dilettantish pursuit of art. His dreams of the possibilities of such a career took shape long after in the novel of “Paul Fane.” Greenough had moulded a bust of Willis at Florence, and some years after he cut it in marble and gave it to him. There is a story about this which is authentic, and too pretty to leave untold. Mr. Joseph Grinnell of New Bedford happened to be in Florence in the spring of 1830 and had employed Greenough to make him a statue of his niece Cornelia,—then a child of five years,—who became in time Willis’s second wife. It was from a remnant of the same block used for her statue that the sculptor, unconscious of the omen, afterwards carved the bust of her future husband. The two fragments thus strangely reunited stand now in the same drawing-room, the head of the youthful poet, with its Hyperion curls, and the full-length figure of the demure little Quaker maiden, holding in one hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat abroad. His inherited tendency to embonpoint was counteracted in later life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,” apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.”

August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting, and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season.

“In London I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then live abroad altogether. It costs so little here and one lives so luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one’s mind and eye, that I think of returning to naked America with daily increasing repugnance. I love my country, but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none. I shall pass the next summer, perhaps, in Germany at a university, and I mean to learn German thoroughly. You would be astonished at the facility of learning a language in the country. I speak French well and Italian passably, and you know how little I knew and how short a time I have been abroad.”

This programme was altered for some reason. Instead of starting for England, he made a second visit to Venice, then returned to Florence, and when the autumn was far enough advanced to make it safe went on to Rome. In the letter just quoted he mentions that he has made the acquaintance of a young Mr. Noel, a cousin of Byron.

The winter of 1832-33 and the spring of 1833 were spent between Florence, Rome, and Naples.

Wherever he traveled he made friends. He was not without a title to his secretary’s button, for his whole progress through Europe was a ticklish feat of diplomacy. Few of the people whom he met in society suspected what thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant that the dashing young attaché was dependent for his bread and butter on weekly letters to a newspaper. The failure of remittances from Morris sometimes put him in an awkward predicament, but he always managed to find a way out. In one of the letters which he made it a religion to write his mother on each recurring birthday—this one dated at Florence, January 20, 1833—he relates some of his experiences of the kind:—

“I have dined with a prince one day and alone for a shilling in a cook-shop the next. I have twice been entirely destitute of money in places where I had not an acquaintance, and the instant before the last coin was out of my pocket, chances too improbable for a dream have provided for me. One was at Marseilles. I had relied on receiving a letter of credit when I got there. I was disappointed and was at the hotel a week, wondering whether I should find fate working its usual miracle for me. I had only two francs remaining, when a gentlemanly man, who had commenced conversation with me at table, asked me to his room and ended with offering me a seat in his carriage to Nice. The quarantine drove him back, but he had brought me two hundred miles on my route, and knowing my disappointment by my inquiries at the post office, he offered me the use of his banker to any amount and took drafts for the money on my partner in New York. This now is a thing that does not occur once in a century. I have corresponded with Doyne (that was his name) ever since. I find that he is a religious man, and from one of the first families in Dublin.”

With all his taste for luxury, Willis knew how to make economies, and living was much cheaper then. He never affected a mystery, and in one of his letters to the “Mirror” he explained how it was that he could live in Florence on three hundred dollars a year “exclusive of postage and pleasure,” paying four dollars a month for his apartment and attendance, breakfasting for six cents, and dining “quite magnificently” for twenty-five. Meanwhile a deal of gossip about him was in circulation in America, and the editor of the “Mirror” had to contradict, inter alia, a rumor that his foreign collaborator had married the widow of a British nobleman and was faring sumptuously in Rome.

Having been invited by the officers of the frigate United States to join them in a six months’ cruise up the Mediterranean, he repaired to Leghorn, from which port the United States, with her consort the Constellation, set sail on the 3d of June, 1833. Commodore Patterson of Baltimore commanded the former ship and Captain Reed of Philadelphia the latter. Both gentlemen were accompanied by their wives and the commodore by his three beautiful daughters. These were all old friends of Willis, and he had made acquaintance with the other officers of the squadron in Italy. He could not have seen the East under pleasanter auspices, and the next half year was the richest in literary fruit of his entire sojourn upon the continent. The squadron loitered along like a pair of pleasure yachts, touching at all the more interesting ports. The bright shores of the Mediterranean and the Levant passed in a magic panorama before the eyes of the passengers, who sailed and danced and ate the lotus day after day. Elba, Naples, and Sicily; Trieste and Vienna; the Ionian Islands, Greece, and the shores of the Dardanelles were visited in turn, and at length in October the frigate dropped anchor in the Golden Horn. Willis’s “Pencillings” of Constantinople are among the best in his portfolio, among the best, indeed, that have ever been made of the surface of Oriental life. Italy was hackneyed: the Rialto and Saint Mark’s, the Coliseum and the Vatican, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples, had been described a thousand times. But here he was off the track of common tourists. His nature reveled in the barbaric riches of the East and cheerfully blinked the discomforts and the dirt. The mysteries of the seraglio and the slave market and the veiled women in the bazaars piqued his curiosity, and the poetry of the Turkish cemeteries and mosques appealed to his sentiment. He was never weary of wandering through the grand bazaar. “I have idled up and down in the dim light and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable odors of its thousand spices.” Willis was a born shopper and had a feminine eye for the niceties not only of costume, but of upholstery, pottery, and all kinds of purchasable knick-knacks. He relished a fine appeal to his senses and his fancy all in one. So he liked to go through the street of the confectioners and taste the queer sweetmeats with flowery names, “peace to your throat” and “lumps of delight,” and to inventory the merchants’ stock in trade, their gilded saucers, brass spoons, and vases of rose water. He liked the opium-eating druggists, smoking their narghiles and fingering their spice wood beads, the edges of their jars “turned over with rich colored papers (a peculiar color to every drug), and broad spoons of box-wood crossed on the top.” He delighted to cheapen amber and embroidered slippers in the Bezestein, and best of all to lounge on the cushioned divan, taking sherbet and aromatic coffee and bargaining for attar of roses in the octagonal shop of Mustapha, the perfumer to the Sultan, whom he has introduced as a deus ex machina into his story, “The Gypsy of Sardis.” In the “Letters from under a Bridge,” he affirms, whether seriously or not I cannot say, that the English artist Bartlett, who was his collaborator in “American Scenery,” encountered old Mustapha in Constantinople, and that the latter showed him Willis’s card “stained to a deep orange with the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath hour to bath hour with the precious oils he traffics in.” He questioned Bartlett about America, “a country which to Mustapha’s fancy is as far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt tip of the seraglio,” and finally gave him a jar of attar of jasmine to send to Willis. “The small gilt bottle, with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breathing before me.” Then there was the street of the booksellers, where “the small brown reed stood in every clotted inkstand,” and the bearded old Armenian bookworm, interrupted in eating rice from a wooden bowl, took down an illuminated Hafiz, “and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian.” Willis also struck up an acquaintance with Dr. Millingen, the Sultan’s physician, who had attended Byron in his last illness. He spent two days with him, by invitation, at his house on the Bosphorus, and picked up a smattering of Romaic from Mrs. Millingen, who was a Greek.

After five weeks at Constantinople, the frigate weighed anchor for Smyrna. There he found an old schoolmate, Octavus Langdon, a Smyrniote merchant, who entertained him very hospitably, and invited him to join a party for a few days’ tour in Asia Minor. The party consisted of Willis and his host, an American missionary named Brewer, and two other gentlemen, and their adventures included a night in a real Oriental khan at Magnesia, and a visit to the site of ancient Sardis. A beautiful girl, of whom Willis caught a glimpse, through a tent door, in a gypsy encampment on the plain of Hadjilar, was the original of his “Gypsy of Sardis.” At Smyrna he said good-by to Commodore Patterson and his other friends on the United States; and the ship which had been his home for more than six months sailed away to winter at Minorca, leaving him “waiting for a vessel to go—I care not where. I rather lean toward Palestine and Egypt, but there are no vessels for Jaffa or Alexandria.”

By this time Willis’s literary reputation had penetrated to the London press, though not as yet to the London public, possibly through scattered copies of his “Mirror” letters; and while staying at Smyrna he received “an offer of a thousand dollars a year to write for the London ‘Morning Herald.’ But the articles were to be political, and that I had modesty enough to think beyond my calibre. I was to live abroad, however, and go wherever there was a war or the prospect of one. I would much rather write about pictures and green fields.” The not unpleasant hesitation as to his next move was ended at last by the departure from Smyrna of the Yankee brig Metamora, bound for his native Portland with a cargo of figs and opium. The skipper, a Down-Easter, agreed to take him as a passenger, and land him at Malta. At Malta, accordingly, he arrived late in December, after being nearly shipwrecked in a Levanter, and was put ashore through a heavy sea in the brig’s long boat, narrowly escaping being carried all the way to America. The letter to the “Mirror” in which this part of his travels was recorded was lost, and the “Pencillings” leap at once from Smyrna to Milan. He afterwards rewrote the episode, turning it into a capital story (“A Lost Letter Rewritten,” in the “Mirror” for May 14 and June 11, 1836), which figures in his collected writings as “A Log in the Archipelago.” The startling conjunction of East and Down East on board the Metamora suggested, no doubt, some of the incidents in “The Widow by Brevet,” a tale which moves between the poles of Constantinople and Salem, Massachusetts.

From Malta he made his way via Italy, Switzerland, and France to England, arriving at Dover on the 1st of June, 1834.