CHAPTER VII.1845-1852.THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND—THE HOME JOURNAL.

“The green tent where your harness was put on,”

and of summer nights in Academus, when the bird

“Sang a half carol as the moon wore onAnd looked into his nest.”

“Sang a half carol as the moon wore on

And looked into his nest.”

But the blank verse carried him along into that smooth diffuseness which was his besetting sin, and the poem, as a whole, did not rise above commonplace. It compares but poorly with Dr. Holmes’s noble “Astræa,” delivered in 1850 before the Phi Beta Kappa society at New Haven by a poet who, though the son of another Alma Mater, gracefully acknowledged himself the grandson of Yale. At another time, in response to an invitation from James T. Fields to recite a poem in Boston, Willis wrote: “I tookthe time to consider whether therecould besuch a thing as an effectivespokenpoem. I am satisfied now, that my style depends so much on those light shades which would be lost on more ears than two at a time, that I should make an utter failure.” In 1843 he lectured on the formation of character before the Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore, and the audience—a large one—was disappointed by the serious nature of the address. A “Lecture on Fashion” given before the New York Lyceum and published in 1844 was more characteristic, at least in subject. He lectured also in Boston and Albany, perhaps in other places, but without marked success, being an indifferent orator and not at home on the platform. “The calling on a hen for an egg, while she stands on the fence, would seem to me reasonable,” said he, “in comparison with asking for my sentiments, to be delivered on my legs.”

In the issue of the “New Mirror” for September 28, 1844, the editors announced that they had been driven out of the field of weekly journalism by the United States Post Office. The “Mirror,” being stitched, could not go at newspaper rates, but was taxed, at the caprice of postmasters, from two to fifteen cents a copy. This more than doubled the price to country readers and killed the mail subscription. Remonstrancesaddressed to the authorities at Washington only brought, in reply, a letter of “sesquipedalian flummery.” Accordingly the editors decided to change the shape of the paper and publish it as a daily. The first number of the “Evening Mirror” came out October 7, 1844. It was published every day in the week but Sunday, and ran till the close of the following year, under the joint conduct of Morris, Willis, and Hiram Fuller. The last was a young man, and a far-away cousin of Margaret Fuller. He continued the paper, under the same name, for years after his partners had left him. It was of Fuller that Bennett said, “We saw the editor of the ‘Evening Mirror,’ the other day, treating his subscribers to an excursion; he drove them all down Broadway to the Battery in an omnibus.” Edgar Poe was engaged upon the “Evening Mirror” as critic and sub-editor in the autumn of 1844, and remained upon it about six months. His relations with Willis were of the pleasantest. The latter tried to befriend him in various ways and lent him the hearty support of his paper. His recollections of his former associate were given in the “Home Journal” for October 13, 1849, shortly after Poe’s death, in an article bearing generous testimony to his perfect regularity, reasonableness, and courtesy, while engaged upon the“Mirror.” Poe’s own estimate of Willis is given at some length in his series of papers on “The Literati of New York.”[7]It is friendly in tone, but quite impartial and discriminating. Its literary criticism need not be here repeated, but Poe’s personal impressions of Willis are worth giving:—

“Mr. Willis’s career,” he writes, “has naturally made him enemies among the envious host of dunces whom he has outstripped in the race for fame; and these his personal manner (a little tinctured with reserve,brusquerie, or even haughtiness) is by no means adapted to conciliate. He has innumerable warm friends, however, and is himself a warm friend. He is impulsive, generous, bold, impetuous, vacillating, irregularly energetic, apt to be hurried into error, but incapable of deliberate wrong. He is yet young and, without being handsome in the ordinary sense, is a remarkably well-looking man. In height he is perhaps five feet eleven and justly proportioned. His figure is put in the best light by the ease and assured grace of his carriage. His whole person and personal demeanor bear about them the traces of ‘good society.’ His face is somewhat too full or rather heavy in its lower proportions. Neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended. The latter would puzzle phrenology. His eyes are a dull bluishgray and small. His hair is of a rich brown, curling naturally and luxuriantly. His mouth is well cut, the teeth fine, the expression of the smile intellectual and winning. He converses little,wellrather than fluently, and in a subdued tone.”

It was after Morris and Willis had dissolved their connection with the “Evening Mirror” that that journal published the article, by Thomas Dunn English, reflecting severely on Poe’s character, for which he sued Fuller and recovered $225 damages. His “Raven” was written while he was on the paper, and first published anonymously in the “American Review.” Willis reprinted it in the “Mirror” over Poe’s name, with a send-off, in which he said, “We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.”[8]

The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity—and calamity as yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother whose love had been to him botha stay and an inspiration. His youngest sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25, 1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part, “Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840, and which now appeared for the first timein book form, exhibited more range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in some of the earlier stories—such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”—of a capacity for stronger and graver work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life” stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.” Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in thedénouementand confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend—like the Goddesses on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer, sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in particular. But in each and all of these protean shapes, he is equally fascinating and invincible. In “Beware of Dogs and Waltzing,” the author entered theconfessional with even less precaution than usual. It is quite plain to one reading between the lines, that the hero, Mr. Lindsay Maud, with hisretroussénose, sanguineous tint, curly hair, and dimpled chin, is no other than Willis himself; that the Surrey manor where the scene is laid is Shirley Park; that its hospitable occupants, the Becktons, are in truth the Skinner family; that Mabel Brown, the heroine, is identical with Miss Mary Stace; and, lastly, that Miss Blakeney, the dazzling but heartless heiress, whose hand Mr. Maud’s hostess kindly destines for her youngprotégé, but whom, yielding to his better angel, he flings overboard in favor of the gentler and sweeter Mabel, is a certain belle of fortune, who figures in Willis’s private correspondence as “trotted out” by Mrs. Skinner for his inspection with a view to his making a rich marriage.

In “A Revelation of a Previous Life” and “The Phantom Head upon the Table,” the supernatural is introduced, but not with success. Willis had not the weird, haunting imagination of Hawthorne or Poe. He does not prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have novraisemblance. Nor was he more at home inbroad comedy. His humor—and he had humor—was delicate rather than robust; was made out of irony, pleasantry, and gay spirits, and depended more upon situation than character. If the situation was droll, the humor was good; otherwise not. “Miss Jones’s Son,” “The Spirit Love of Ione S——,” “Nora Mehidy,” “Meena Dimity,” and “Born to love Pigs and Chickens” were allmanqué. The best of the humorous tales is “The Female Ward,” which tells of the embarrassments of a rather fast young gentleman in Boston, who receives an unexpected consignment, in the shape of a raw heiress, from a Southern plantation; her confiding parents intrusting her to his guardianship, with a request that he place her at school in some high-toned seminary. His difficulties in trying to perform this commission, ending with his lodging her temporarily in a private lunatic asylum, are very happily imagined. “The Female Ward” would lend itself nicely to the dramatizer, and make up into a most amusing little farce. “Those Ungrateful Blidginses” was funny, but wicked. It was Willis’s way of avenging himself upon two maiden ladies with whom he had fallen in, and subsequently fallen out, during his travels in Italy, and who, on returning to America, had circulated reports not to his credit. He had another hit at them in “Ernest Clay,” as “two abominable oldmaids by the name of Buggins or Blidgins, representing thescan. mag.of Florence.” The story caused a good deal of scandal. The victims (whose names were thinly disguised) were high in Knickerbocker social circles, and the doors of many of the best houses in Albany and New York were closed forever against Willis, as a consequence of this indiscretion. There was even some rumor in the Albany newspapers to the effect that he had been challenged by a friend of the injured ladies, and had declined the challenge, but this he denied. “Kate Crediford” is a clever specimen of anti-climax. The writer sees an old love at the theatre and, fancying that she looks unhappy, his flame revives, and he goes home and writes her an impassioned declaration. His letter is answered by the lady’s husband, who informs him of her recent marriage, and explains her pensiveness by the fact that she had eaten too heartily of unripe fruit before going to the play. In “The Poet and the Mandarin” and “The Inlet of Peach Blossoms,” the descriptions are richly fanciful. But the most truly imaginative of all these tales is “The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall.” The theme is one that would have delighted Hawthorne, and though he might have treated it more meaningly, he could not have improved upon its wild, half-eerie gayety, with its undercurrentof regret—the old Horatian regret for the shortness of life and vanished youth. A superannuated beau, lingering in the empty colonnade of Congress Hall after the close of the Saratoga season, sees a spectral procession of coaches drive up to the door and deposit, one after another, their loads of ladies with escorts and baggage. Later in the evening, peering in through the ball-room windows, his brain reels as he beholds the well-remembered belles and dandies—apparently grown no older—of the golden age of the springs, the days of “the Albany regency.” They dance to the same old waltz music, played by the same old negro fiddlers, by the light of spermaceti tapers that floods the dusty evergreens “with a weird mysteriousness, an atmosphere of magic, even in the burning of the candles,” and drink champagne of “the exploded color, rosy wine suited to the bright days when all things were tinted rose.”

It is needless to say that there is an abundance of pretty and clever things scattered through these tales of Willis. “Flirtation”—as an instance of his epigrams—“is a circulating library in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.” “His politeness,” he says of one of his characters, “had superseded his character altogether.” He tells of “a person of excellent family, after the fashion of a hill of potatoes,the best part of it under ground;” and of the Frenchman who could trace his lineage back to “the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel.” “Mr. Potts’s income was a net answer to his morning prayer: it provided his daily bread.” “Wigwamvs.Almacks,” which follows out the suggestions of a true story told in “À l’Abri,” is not very satisfactory as a fiction, but is worth noticing for the lovely description, with which it opens, of a wayside spring in the valley of the Chemung.

On his arrival in London, Willis was attacked with a brain fever, which confined him to his bed for a fortnight. As soon as he could get about he brought his little daughter to see Lady Blessington, and then took her and her nurse to Steventon Vicarage, near Abingdon, in Berkshire, to stay with her aunt, the wife of Rev. William Vincent, formerly of Bolney Priory. He took lodgings for himself in the village near by, and, after a short trip to Bath, returned to London and spent some time in visiting, dining out, sight-seeing, and making new acquaintances. He met a Mr. Stiles of Georgia, an old schoolmate, who was passing through England on his way to Vienna, where he had lately been appointedchargé d’affaires, and who gave him a complimentary appointment asattachéto his legation, an addition to his passport of the kind that had proved so serviceable in the days of his“Pencillings.” This determined him to shape his course for the capital of Austria, taking in Germany, which was new to him, on the way. Leaving his daughter at Steventon, he crossed the Channel, went up the Rhine, and joined his brother Richard, who was studying music at Leipsic. Here he passed a month, and then, accompanied by his brother, went on to Dresden. There the two parted, and Willis traveled alone to Berlin, where he was again seriously ill, and was kindly ministered to by his old friend and associate on the “New York Mirror,” T. S. Fay, at that time secretary of legation at Berlin. Mr. Henry Wheaton, the American minister, attached Willis also to the Prussian mission. But of these appointments and the opportunities they promised he was unable to avail himself. Continued ill health forced him to abandon his journey to Vienna, and to make his way back to England, whence he sailed for home in the spring of 1846. He had meant to leave Imogen with her mother’s family for a time, to be put to school in England. But his heart failed him at the last, and he brought her back with him to America, sending her, still in charge of her nurse, to live with his sister, Mrs. Louis Dwight, in Boston. He himself took rooms in New York until other arrangements could be made. His child’s nurse, Harriet Jacobs, whowas in his employ from 1842 to 1861, was a remarkable woman, whose career, if fully told, would form an interesting chapter in the history of American slavery. She was an escaped slave from a plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. She had run away from her master when a young woman, and taken refuge with a family of free negroes, her kinsfolk. They kept her hidden for five years in a cubby under the roof, during which time she supported herself by fine needlework which her friends sold for her in town. At last she escaped to the North, and was engaged by Willis as a house servant when he went to Glenmary. Her attachment to the interests of the family during the whole period of her service was a beautiful instance of the fidelity and affection which sometimes, but not often, distinguish the relation of master and servant even in this land of change. Mrs. Jacobs’s former owners, having got wind in some way of her whereabouts, came North in quest of her, and spared no pains to reclaim the runaway. Several times she had to leave the Willises and go into hiding at Boston and elsewhere. At last, tired of these alarms, Willis sacrificed whatever scruples he might have had against such a step, and bought her freedom out and out. When the civil war began she went to Washington, and employed her practical abilities, which were ofa high order, in the post of matron to a soldiers’ hospital. In that city she is still living, at an advanced age.

Though ill nearly all the time of this his third trip abroad, Willis managed to write a number of “Invalid Letters” to the “Evening Mirror,” which were collected in “Famous Persons and Places” and in “Rural Letters.” They were scarcely worth preserving. England was now a twice-told tale, and in Germany, which was a pasture new, he was too tired and sick and borne down by his recent bereavement to take much interest in anything. His articles about the great fair at Leipsic—“What I saw at the Fair,” in “Godey’s” for October, 1847; and “On Dress,” in “The Opal” for 1848, and “Godey’s” for June, 1849—were the most considerable literary results of the journey. He also superintended the publication of an English edition of “Dashes at Life,” in three volumes, and came home under engagement to write for the London “Morning Chronicle.”

Meanwhile the editorial corps of the “Evening Mirror” had tapered down to Hiram Fuller. Willis had practically retired from any active share in its management when he left the country in the spring of 1845. He was still abroad when Morris withdrew from it and started a new paper, the “National Press,” towardthe close of the same year. Willis joined him in this enterprise as soon as he got back from England. During the spring and summer of 1846 he was often in Washington, as correspondent of the “National Press” and the “Morning Chronicle,” and while there he met Miss Cornelia Grinnell, the niece and adopted daughter of the Hon. Joseph Grinnell, who was then representative in Congress from New Bedford, Massachusetts. To this lady he was married on October 1, 1846, the eleventh anniversary of his first marriage. She was his junior by nearly twenty years, but she united to her graces of person and character a penetrating mind and an uncommon energy and firmness of will, which made her an invaluable helpmate through the years of trial that were in store for both. On the 21st of November following, the name of the “National Press” was changed to the “Home Journal,” under which title the paper has ever since been published. This was Morris’s and Willis’s final and most prosperous experiment in journalism. They both remained connected with it till death: in Willis’s case a service of twenty-one years, during which his literary toil was devoted almost exclusively to building up the paper. “For the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive, and the beautiful,” ran the legend upon its title-page, followed by asentence from Goethe, which still stands as the motto of the paper, and would have served well enough as the motto of Willis’s own career: “We should do our utmost to encourage the beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It was not a very solid type of literature which was fostered by the “Home Journal,” but it made for itself a peculiar constituency, and a place in the world of letters which it still successfully occupies, under the editorship of Morris Phillips, General Morris’s adopted son, who has carried out the traditions of the paper as established by his predecessors. It was and is the organ of “japonicadom,” the journal of society and gazette of fashionable news and fashionable literature, addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to “the ladies.”

Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator, and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses, the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafés, the hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes inequipages, customs, dress. He grew to be a recognizedarbiter elegantiarum, and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in “Ephemera,” and some little wholes,—like the letter from Saratoga, “To the Julia of Some Years Ago,”—which deserve to be rescued from the oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher; he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares, and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;” and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear brook—a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through the hotsummer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a private yacht.”

When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade, Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters. The old Park Theatre was—after the burning of the National—the only respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in some sort,to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the “Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford, Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay toowas abroad, filling diplomatic posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America, he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular “Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His “Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the mentaldisease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in them,—to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the “Cyclopædia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so that, should I live to see him sixteen,I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it appeared.”

During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28, 1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was born April 27, 1850.

For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu, many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirableparti, slipped her a note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.”This being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,—

“Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel:I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.”

“Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel:

I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.”

When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb asylum which had an inscription over the gate,Stiftung, etc. “Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.”

Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to ask him to write a letter after his day’s work was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. His letters to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit onthe stage, at the Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and ‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but have my doubts as to success.”

The easydégagéair of his writing was, as is usually the case with seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copymustbe followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends, “probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips, “which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business association.” “I would not stayone week a partner with a man who ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr. Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper, never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation. He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,—not to say reckless,—and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first to praise them, andto give circulation to their good things by copying them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich—who succeeded James Parton as assistant editor of the “Home Journal”—and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the “Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when he came to New York to seek the means for foreign travel he applied at once to the author whose brilliant pictures of European life had roused his young enthusiasm. Willis befriended him in every way; gave him letters to wealthy gentlemen in New York, and bestirred himself to interest people in his adventure and raise the sum necessary to start him on his journey. On his departure he gave him a letter to his brother Richard, in Frankfort, with whom the younghandwerksburschtarried for a time, while he was picking up the German language. His “Views Afoot”—the fruits of this venture—were dedicated to Willis, who contributed the preface. This patronage was unkindly referred to in Duganne’s “Parnassus in Pillory,” a little Dunciad of the old downright “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” variety, which made some noise in New York in the year 1851:—

“What time Nat Willis, in the daily papers,Published receipts of shoemakers and drapers;What time, in sooth, his ‘Mirror’ flashed its rays,Like Barnum’s ‘drummond’ on the Broadway gaze,When lisping misses, fresh from seminaries,Worshiped ‘mi-boy’ and ‘brigadier’[9]aslares;Then Bayard Taylor—protégéof Natty,Dixon-like walked into the ‘literati;’And first to proper use his genius put,Like ballet-girls, by showing ‘Views Afoot.’”

“What time Nat Willis, in the daily papers,

Published receipts of shoemakers and drapers;

What time, in sooth, his ‘Mirror’ flashed its rays,

Like Barnum’s ‘drummond’ on the Broadway gaze,

When lisping misses, fresh from seminaries,

Worshiped ‘mi-boy’ and ‘brigadier’[9]aslares;

Then Bayard Taylor—protégéof Natty,

Dixon-like walked into the ‘literati;’

And first to proper use his genius put,

Like ballet-girls, by showing ‘Views Afoot.’”

In another part of his squib the lampooner returns to the charge against Willis as follows:—

“I almost passed by Willis—‘ah,mi-boy!Foine morning! da-da!’ Faith I wish him joy—He’s forty-three years old—in good condition—And, positively, he has gained ‘position.’Gad! what a polish ‘upper-ten-dom’ givesThis executioner of adjectives;This man who strangles English worse than Thuggists,And turns ‘the trade’ to trunk-makers or druggists;Labors on tragic plays that draw no tiers—Writes under bridges, and tells tales of peers;His subjects whey—his language sugared curds;Gods! What a dose!—had he to ‘eat his words!’His ‘Sacred Poems,’ like a rogue’s confessions,Gain him indulgence for his worst transgressions:His ‘Fugitive Attempts’ will doubtless live—Oh! that more works of his were fugitive!Fate to his fame a ticklish place has given,Like Mahomet’s coffin, ’twixt the earth and heaven;But be it as it will—let come what may—Nat is a star, his works—the Milky Way!“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries(Who readsDe Trobriandin an English guise).Why so severe? Because my muse must makeExample stern for injured Poesy’s sake.Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair—Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air—Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn,For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn.But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart,He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part;Trifled with all he might have been to beTheblaséeditor—at forty-three;Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’I lash not Willis even for this his crime—Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;The race o’er whom, in his own native power,Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”

“I almost passed by Willis—‘ah,mi-boy!

Foine morning! da-da!’ Faith I wish him joy—

He’s forty-three years old—in good condition—

And, positively, he has gained ‘position.’

Gad! what a polish ‘upper-ten-dom’ gives

This executioner of adjectives;

This man who strangles English worse than Thuggists,

And turns ‘the trade’ to trunk-makers or druggists;

Labors on tragic plays that draw no tiers—

Writes under bridges, and tells tales of peers;

His subjects whey—his language sugared curds;

Gods! What a dose!—had he to ‘eat his words!’

His ‘Sacred Poems,’ like a rogue’s confessions,

Gain him indulgence for his worst transgressions:

His ‘Fugitive Attempts’ will doubtless live—

Oh! that more works of his were fugitive!

Fate to his fame a ticklish place has given,

Like Mahomet’s coffin, ’twixt the earth and heaven;

But be it as it will—let come what may—

Nat is a star, his works—the Milky Way!

“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries(Who readsDe Trobriandin an English guise).Why so severe? Because my muse must makeExample stern for injured Poesy’s sake.Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair—Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air—Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn,For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn.But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart,He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part;Trifled with all he might have been to beTheblaséeditor—at forty-three;Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’I lash not Willis even for this his crime—Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;The race o’er whom, in his own native power,Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”

“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries

(Who readsDe Trobriandin an English guise).

Why so severe? Because my muse must make

Example stern for injured Poesy’s sake.

Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair—

Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air—

Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn,

For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn.

But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart,

He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part;

Trifled with all he might have been to be

Theblaséeditor—at forty-three;

Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,

To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’

I lash not Willis even for this his crime—

Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;

The race o’er whom, in his own native power,

Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”

Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R. Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44, the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but remonstrating with him upon his declared intention—in a very appreciative review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”—to omit theJamesfrom his “musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:—

“Suppose I, dropping the ‘N.,’ should call you by that mysterious middle letter—whose signification, without reference to the Parish Register (or perhapsGriswold’s equally entertaining bead-roll) no man can fathom—and call you ‘P. Willis.’ Under such painful circumstances you could imagine how I feel, when you amputate one sound limb of my name.“However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle, and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the warmer atmosphere of New York—as I shall before long.”[10]

“However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle, and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the warmer atmosphere of New York—as I shall before long.”[10]

In point of fact—if the item is not below the dignity of biography—this threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural and baptismalprænomen, and used to figure on the title-pages of his later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel; respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis. “Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,—in spite of its familiarity to many readers,—because itsspirit is kindly and it is one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:—

“There’s Willis sonattyand jaunty and gay,Who says his best things in so foppish a way,With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.…His prose had a natural grace of its own,And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone,But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired,And is forced to forgive where he might have admired.Yet whenever it slips away free and unlacedIt runs like a stream with a musical waste,And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep.’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?…No volume I know to read under a treeMore truly delicious than his À l’Abri,With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,And Nature to criticise still as you read—The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.…His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;So his best things are done in the flush of the moment:If he wait, all is spoiled: he may stir it and shake it,But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.…He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid,His wit running up as canary ran down,—The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.”

“There’s Willis sonattyand jaunty and gay,

Who says his best things in so foppish a way,

With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,

That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.…

His prose had a natural grace of its own,

And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone,

But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired,

And is forced to forgive where he might have admired.

Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced

It runs like a stream with a musical waste,

And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep.

’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?…

No volume I know to read under a tree

More truly delicious than his À l’Abri,

With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,

Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;

With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,

Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,

And Nature to criticise still as you read—

The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.…

His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,

As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;

So his best things are done in the flush of the moment:

If he wait, all is spoiled: he may stir it and shake it,

But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.…

He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,

Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid,

His wit running up as canary ran down,—

The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.”

One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs nolabel, and until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors: his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.

“My dear Sir:” he is made to write in response to an imaginary request for a contribution, “to be obliged to penetrate with the pump-buckets of necessity, prompted by the piston of a fifty-dollar compensation, with a publisher as the pump-handle, in search of a poem, is, of itself, annoying enough. To draw one up with the rope and bucket of gratuity, is a labor which qualifies one for a long residence in fatiguedom. Your letter found me fagging away over my work-desk—chasing a brilliant idea in and out of the myriads of convolutions of my brain. All the while that I was aping Prometheus (the window being half-opened), I could sniff the delightful odors of a rose which a fair neighbor will insist on keeping,” etc., etc.

The requested poem is annexed—a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”—

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