“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.”
“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 receivedwith 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. Everybodywho 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 easysavoir faireof 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 presentsubsiding, 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 ownAlmæ 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 geesewere 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.”
“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 entranceupon 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 commentariesand 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 urnsBurned dimly and the white and fragrant smokeCurled indolently on the chamber walls;”
“The spice lamps in the alabaster urnsBurned dimly and the white and fragrant smokeCurled indolently on the chamber walls;”
“The spice lamps in the alabaster urnsBurned dimly and the white and fragrant smokeCurled indolently on the chamber walls;”
“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 lambsGo for the tender grass;”
“Through the light green hollows where the lambsGo for the tender grass;”
“Through the light green hollows where the lambsGo for the tender grass;”
“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 wildernessTouched by the river Jordan. The dark pineNever had dropped its tassels on the mossTufting the leaning bank, nor on the grassOf the broad circle stretching evenlyTo the straight larches had a heavier footThan the wild heron’s trodden. Softly inThrough 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 tankSlowly, then rippled through the woods away.”
“Was a green spot in the wildernessTouched by the river Jordan. The dark pineNever had dropped its tassels on the mossTufting the leaning bank, nor on the grassOf the broad circle stretching evenlyTo the straight larches had a heavier footThan the wild heron’s trodden. Softly inThrough 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 tankSlowly, then rippled through the woods away.”
“Was a green spot in the wildernessTouched by the river Jordan. The dark pineNever had dropped its tassels on the mossTufting the leaning bank, nor on the grassOf the broad circle stretching evenlyTo the straight larches had a heavier footThan the wild heron’s trodden. Softly inThrough 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 tankSlowly, then rippled through the woods away.”
“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, notvery 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 heartThat in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,Taking for us the cup that might not pass—The heart whose breaking chord upon the crossMade the earth tremble and the sun afraidTo look upon his agony—the heartOf a lost world’s Redeemer—overflowed,Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”
“But to the mighty heartThat in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,Taking for us the cup that might not pass—The heart whose breaking chord upon the crossMade the earth tremble and the sun afraidTo look upon his agony—the heartOf a lost world’s Redeemer—overflowed,Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”
“But to the mighty heartThat in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,Taking for us the cup that might not pass—The heart whose breaking chord upon the crossMade the earth tremble and the sun afraidTo look upon his agony—the heartOf a lost world’s Redeemer—overflowed,Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”
“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 andsucceeded 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 accentlessoratio 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.”
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. Buthis 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 thefinest, 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 alarger 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.”
“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 alarger 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 byDr. 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.”
“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, “UnwrittenPoetry,” “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 forAttila. The rage for Annuals soon became general and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates someforty 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 smoothestmezzotint,—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 willowand 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 pleasantlyrococolandscape 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 EnglandL. 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 roomFrom alabaster vases, and a scentOf orange leaves and sweet verbena cameFrom the unshuttered window on the air,And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,Hung like a twilight landscape, and all thingsSeemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,Was leaning on her harp.”
“’Twas late and the gay company was gone,And light lay soft on the deserted roomFrom alabaster vases, and a scentOf orange leaves and sweet verbena cameFrom the unshuttered window on the air,And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,Hung like a twilight landscape, and all thingsSeemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,Was leaning on her harp.”
“’Twas late and the gay company was gone,And light lay soft on the deserted roomFrom alabaster vases, and a scentOf orange leaves and sweet verbena cameFrom the unshuttered window on the air,And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,Hung like a twilight landscape, and all thingsSeemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,Was leaning on her harp.”
“’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 aPicture 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 younglittérateur, only a year and a half out of college, without capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of a monthly magazine was certainlyan 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 hiscollected 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 peculiarto 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 moroccodormeuse, 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 rebukesto 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 thatnegligéstyle 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, eitherin writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is likenaïvetéin 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.”
“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, whomade 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 affordTo give poor Natty P. his meet reward?What has he done to be despised by allWithin 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 lateDo all the critics claw his shallow pate?True he’s a fool;—if that’s a hanging thing,Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”
“Muse, shall we not a few brief lines affordTo give poor Natty P. his meet reward?What has he done to be despised by allWithin 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 lateDo all the critics claw his shallow pate?True he’s a fool;—if that’s a hanging thing,Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”
“Muse, shall we not a few brief lines affordTo give poor Natty P. his meet reward?What has he done to be despised by allWithin 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 lateDo all the critics claw his shallow pate?True he’s a fool;—if that’s a hanging thing,Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”
“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 toSmellingJoseph. Thelines 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 explainwhy 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, paidanything 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 thetonin 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 thechange 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:—