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American Men of Letters.
Edited by
Charles Dudley Warner.
[Illustration: S. Lawrence, 1837. Illman & Sons.
N. P. Willis.]
American Men of Letters.
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
by
HENRY A. BEERS.
[Illustration]
Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1890.
Copyright, 1885,
By Henry A. Beers.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
PREFACE.
The materials for a life of Willis are rich enough to be embarrassing.
Most of his writings are, in a greater or less degree, autobiographical;
and it would be possible to make a very tolerable life of him, by
arranging passages from these in the right order, and linking them
together with a few paragraphs of cold facts. Then, he lived very much in
the world’s eye, and was constantly talked and written about, so that
there is abundant mention of him in newspaper files, and in volumes of
“Recollections,” etc., by his contemporaries. In addition to these printed
sources, I have been furnished, by the kindness of Mrs. N. P. Willis, Miss
Julia Willis, and Mrs. Imogen Willis Eddy, with private letters, journals,
and other MS. memoranda by Willis, which extend from his school days at
Andover down to a few weeks before his death--of course not without
_lacunæ_. Although I have not quoted very freely from these letters, they
have been of the greatest service, by supplying facts which I have
incorporated with the body of the narrative, and by correcting or
verifying data otherwise obtained. A biography of Willis could have been
written without them, but this particular biography could not; and I take
occasion hereby to acknowledge my debt to the ladies whose courtesy gave
me access to this material.
There are many others who have helped my undertaking in various ways--too
many for me to thank them all by name. But I cannot withhold mention of my
obligations to Mr. Richard S. Willis and to Mr. Morris Phillips, the
editor of the “Home Journal.”
HENRY A. BEERS.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 1
CHAPTER II.
COLLEGE LIFE 31
CHAPTER III.
BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY 71
CHAPTER IV.
LIFE ABROAD 107
CHAPTER V.
LIFE ABROAD CONTINUED 154
CHAPTER VI.
GLENMARY--THE CORSAIR--THE NEW MIRROR 219
CHAPTER VII.
THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND--THE HOME JOURNAL 283
CHAPTER VIII.
IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS 326
BIBLIOGRAPHY 353
INDEX 357
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
CHAPTER I.
1806-1823.
ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.
Willis was born January 20, 1806, in the little old seaport city of
Portland, Maine, celebrated by the “Autocrat” for its great square
mansions, the homes of retired sea-captains. The town had already made
some noise in literature, as the residence of that wild genius, John Neal;
and on February 27, 1807, little more than a year after the date with
which this biography begins, it witnessed the birth of its most
illustrious citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
A comparison at once suggests itself between the subsequent fortunes in
the republic of letters of these two infant poets, fellow townsmen for
some five years. Willis was the earlier in the field. In 1832, when
Longfellow, then a young professor at Bowdoin College, began to
contribute scholarly articles to the “North American Review,” the former
had been five years before the public, and was already well known as a
poet, a magazine editor, and a foreign correspondent. When “Outre-Mer” was
issued in 1835, Willis had won a reputation as a prose writer on both
sides of the Atlantic by his “Pencillings” in the “New York Mirror;” and
by 1839, when Longfellow published his first volume of original poetry,
“Voices of the Night,” his senior by a year had printed five books of
verse. But there is no question as to which has proved the better
continuer. Longfellow is still the favorite poet of two peoples; a singer
dearer, perhaps, to the general heart than any other who has sung in the
English tongue. His brilliant contemporary, after being for about fifteen
years the most popular magazinist in America, has sunk into comparative
oblivion.[1] This is the fate of all fashionable literature. Every
generation begins by imitating the literary fashions of the last, and ends
with a reaction against them. At present “realism” has the floor,
sentiment is at a discount, and Willis’s glittering, high-colored pictures
of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact,
have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James.
Without presuming any native equality between Willis and the Cambridge
poet, it is fair to add that the former never found opportunity to deepen
and ripen such gift as was in him. His life was passed not “in the quiet
and still air of delightful studies,” but in the rush of the gay world and
the daily drudgery of the pen; in the toil of journalism, that most
exhausting of mental occupations, which is forever giving forth and never
bringing in. His best work--all of his work which claims remembrance--was
done before he was forty. His earlier writings are not only his freshest,
but his strongest and most carefully executed.
Willis is a glaring instance of inherited tendencies, being the third
journalist in succession in his line of descent. The founder of the family
in this country, and the progenitor of our subject in the seventh
generation, was a certain George Willis, born in England in 1602, who
arrived in New England probably about 1630. He was a brickmaker and
builder by trade, and is described as “a Puritan of considerable
distinction,” who resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some sixty years,
having been admitted to the Freeman’s Oath in 1638 and elected a deputy to
the General Court. Probably the most noteworthy of the poet’s forbears, at
least upon the father’s side, was the Rev. John Bailey, his ancestor in
the fifth generation, a non-conforming Independent minister in Lancashire,
who, having been silenced and afterwards imprisoned, escaped to
Massachusetts in 1684, and was settled, first as minister over the church
in Watertown, and later as associate minister over the First Church in
Boston, where he died in 1697. Increase Mather preached his funeral
sermon. His tomb is in the Granary Burying Ground, adjoining Park Street
Church, and his portrait in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical
Society. What more could a man ask for in an ancestor? No New England
pedigree which respects itself is without one or more fine old Puritan
divines of this kind. Accordingly, when Willis began to take that mild,
retrospective interest in his own genealogy which foretokens the oncoming
of age,--when new twigs upon the family tree give an unthought-of
importance to the roots,--he bestowed the name of this particular
forefather upon his youngest boy, Bailey Willis.
The poet’s great-grandmother Willis, born Abigail Belknap, was
granddaughter to this Rev. John Bailey, and had some traits which cropped
out in her posterity. At the time of the destruction of the tea in Boston
harbor, she cannily saved a little for private use. She used to say, “I
have got some Belknap pride in me yet;” and among her favorite maxims
were, “Never go into the back door when you can go into the front,” and
“Never eat brown bread when you can get white.” The husband of this lady
was Charles Willis, a sail-maker and patriot, who was present on the
occasion when tar and feathers and hot tea were administered to his
Majesty’s tax-collector in Boston. His position and action in the affair
were represented in an ancient engraving, bought long afterwards by his
grandson, Deacon Nathaniel Willis, our Willis’s father. A copy of the same
is now in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The son of
Charles and Abigail Willis was Nathaniel, the third, though by no means
the last, Willis with that baptismal name; the first literary man in the
family, and the poet’s grandfather. He conducted in Boston, during the
Revolutionary War, the “Independent Chronicle,” a Whig newspaper,
published from the same building in which Franklin had worked as a
printer. This Nathaniel senior, as we may call him, was an active man. He
was a fine horseman, took part in the Boston tea-party, and was adjutant
of the Boston regiment sent on an expedition to Rhode Island under General
Sullivan. In 1784 he sold his interest in the “Independent Chronicle,” and
became one of the pioneer journalists of the unsettled West. He removed
first to Winchester, Virginia, where he published a paper for a short
time; then to Shepardstown, where he also published a paper; and thence in
1790 to Martinsburg, Virginia, where he founded the “Potomac Guardian” and
edited it till 1796. In that year he went to Chillicothe, Ohio, and
established the “Scioto Gazette,” the first newspaper in what was then
known as the Northwestern Territory. He was printer to the government of
the territory, and afterwards held an agency in the Post Office
Department. He bought and cultivated a farm near Chillicothe, on which he
ended his days April 1, 1831. His wife was Lucy Douglas, of New London,
Connecticut.
His son and the poet’s father, Nathaniel Willis, Junior,--the fourth
Nathaniel in the family,--was born at Boston in 1780, and remained there
until 1787, when he joined his father at Winchester and was employed in
his newspaper office, and subsequently at Martinsburg on the “Potomac
Guardian.” In the infancy of American journalism, the editor and publisher
of a paper was usually a practical printer. Young Nathaniel was put to
work at once in folding papers and setting types. At Martinsburg he used
to ride post, with tin horn and saddle-bags, delivering papers to
scattered subscribers in the thinly settled country. N. P. Willis himself
served a year’s apprenticeship at his father’s press in Boston, in an
interval of his schooling; and in his letters home from England alluded
triumphantly to his having once been destined by his parents to the trade
of a printer. His particular duty was to ink the types. “We remember
_balling_ an edition of ‘Watts’s Psalms and Hymns,’ and there are lines in
that good book that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the
ink-balls, while conning them over.” A sketch of the old office of the
“Potomac Guardian,” made by “Porte Crayon,” is in the possession of Mr.
Richard Storrs Willis of Detroit.
At the age of fifteen young Nathaniel returned to Boston and entered the
office of his father’s old paper, the “Independent Chronicle,” working in
the same press-room in Court Street where his father had once worked, and
the great Franklin before him. He also found time, while in Boston, to
drill with the “Fusiliers.” In 1803, invited by a Maine congressman and
other gentlemen of the Republican party, he went to Portland and
established the “Eastern Argus” in opposition to the Federalists. Here the
subject of this biography was born three years later. “Well do I remember
that day,” his father wrote to him fifty-seven years after the event, “and
the driving snow-storm in which I had to go, in an open sleigh, to bring
in the nurse from the country. Francis Douglas boarded with us at that
time. He was a very pleasant young man, and had a half promise (if it was
a boy) it should be called _Francis_. But your mother soon overruled that,
and decided that you should have both of our names, for fear she should
never have another son! You was a fine fat baby, with a face as round as
an apple.”
Party spirit ran high at this time, and political articles were
acrimonious. Libel suits were brought against the publisher of the
“Argus,” which involved him in trouble and expense; and six years after
its establishment it was sold for four thousand dollars to the same
Francis Douglas who had come so near imposing his Christian name on the
infant Willis. At Portland Nathaniel Willis came under the ministrations
and influence of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D.,--on whose death, many
years after, his son composed some rather perfunctory verses,--and began
henceforth to devote himself to the cause of religion. From 1810 to 1812
he sought to establish a religious newspaper in Portland, but met with no
substantial encouragement. At the latter date he returned to Boston,
where, after years of effort, during which he supported himself by
publishing tracts and devotional books, he started, in January, 1816, the
“Boston Recorder,” which he asserted to be the first religious newspaper
in the world. It was in this periodical that the earliest lispings of
Willis’s muse reached the ear of the public. The “Recorder” was conducted
by his father down to 1844, in which year it was sold to the Rev. Martin
Moore. It still lives as the “Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.”
Nathaniel Willis also originated the idea of a religious paper for
children. “The Youth’s Companion,” which he commenced in 1827 and edited
for about thirty years, was the first, and remains one of the best,
publications of the kind in existence. In a letter to his son he gave the
following account of its inception: “He was in the habit of teaching his
children, statedly, the Assembly’s Catechism, and to encourage them to
commit to memory the answers, he rewarded them by telling them stories
from Scripture history without giving names. The result was that the
Catechism was all committed to memory by the children, and the idea
occurred of a children’s department in the ‘Recorder.’ This department
being much sought for by children, it suggested the experiment of having a
paper exclusively for children.” Around the fireplace where Mr. Willis sat
with his children were some old-fashioned Dutch tiles, representing scenes
from the New Testament, and it was in answer to their questions about
these that he began his narrations. One sees in this little domestic
picture the beginnings of the young Nathaniel’s literary training and the
germ of his “Scripture Sketches.” Years after, a college lad, when shaping
into smooth blank verse the story of the widow of Nain or the healing of
Jairus’s daughter, his memory must have gone back to their rude figures
about his father’s hearth, seeming to move and stir in the flickering
light of the wood fire; and the recollection of his father’s voice and the
listening group of brothers and sisters gave tenderness to the strain.
He was only six when the family removed from Portland to Boston, and he
appears to have kept little remembrance of his birthplace. The noble
harbor, with its islands, which were the Hesperides of Longfellow’s boyish
dreams, the old fort on the hill, the mystery of the ships, the Spanish
sailors with bearded lips, the noise of the sea fight far away, and the
faces of the dead captains as they lay in their coffins, did not enter
into Willis’s experience. Indeed, the period of childhood, which has been
to many poets so fruitful in precious memories, seems to have left few
deep traces on his mind, if we except its religious impressions. The life
of his father’s household, though rich in domestic affections, was
probably not stimulating to the imagination. It was the life of a Puritan
home, of what is called in England a “serious family,”--that life which
oppresses Matthew Arnold with its _ennui_; its interests divided between
“business and Bethels;” its round of long family devotions, strict Sabbath
observances, catechisms, and visiting missionaries. Dancing, card-playing,
and theatre-going were, of course, forbidden pleasures. The elder Willis,
though a thoroughly good man and good father, was a rather wooden person.
His youth and early manhood had been full of hardship; his education was
scanty, and he had the formal and narrow piety of the new evangelicals of
that day, revolting against the latitudinarianism of the Boston churches.
He was for twenty years deacon of Park Street Church, profanely nicknamed
by the Unitarians “Brimstone Corner.” “My recollection of a particular
occasion,” says an old member of that society, “when, at a conference
meeting in the church, he, as presider, was expounding John xv., is that I
regarded it as a memorable illustration of a man’s attempting to expound
without ideas. I hear him saying,--more than fifty years ago,--‘v. 4.
Abide in me. Abide is to dwell,’ in a most monotonous tone, and the rest
in the same manner of appreciation.” His rigidity was, perhaps, more in
his principles than in his character, and his austerity was tempered by
two qualities which have not seldom been found to consist with the
diaconate, namely, a sense of humor--“dry,” of course, to the correct
degree--and an admiration for pretty women, or, in the dialect of that
day, for “female loveliness.” These tastes he bequeathed to his son, as
also a certain tenacity of will, which, latent throughout the latter’s
career, came to the surface in an astonishing way during the trials of his
last years. This trait is amusingly illustrated in the senior Willis’s
correspondence with his son by his allusions to an interminable litigation
that he was carrying on in his eighty-fourth year. “I should have written
you sooner,” he says, “but that Irishman, Garbrey, has sued me the
_fourth_ time about that old drain which he dug up before my front door,
in Atkinson Street, that we never knew before was there. He has lost his
case in three different courts, and now sends to the Supreme Court a ‘Bill
of Exceptions,’ which all my friends think he cannot recover. It has been
a great trouble and expense to me. But I have carried the case in prayer
to God, constantly, and He has three times defeated the extortioner.”
Willis always retained a cordial affection and respect for his father, but
between two such different natures and divergent lives there could be
little genial sympathy or real intellectual intimacy. The tough old deacon
outlived the inheritor of his name and calling by some three years, and
died May 26, 1870, at the age of ninety.
For his mother Willis cherished, as boy and man, a devotion that may well
be called passionate, and which found utterance in many of his most
heartfelt poems, such as his “Birth-Day Verses,” “Lines on Leaving
Europe,” and “To my Mother from the Apennines.” Her maiden name was Hannah
Parker. She was born at Holliston, Massachusetts, and was two years
younger than her husband. She was a woman whose strong character and
fervent piety were mingled with a playful affectionateness which made her
to her children the object of that perfect love which casteth out fear.
Like many another poet’s mother,--like Goethe’s, for example,--she
supplied to her son those elements of gayety and softness which were
wanting in the stiffer composition of the father:--
“Von Mutterchen die Fröhnatur,
Die Lust zu fabuliren.”
He inherited from her the emotional, impulsive part of his nature as well
as his physical constitution, his light complexion, full face, and
tendency, in youth, to a plethoric habit. “My veins,” he wrote, “are
teeming with the quicksilver spirit which my mother gave me. Whatever I
accomplish must be gained by ardor, and not by patience.” She was his
confidant, his sympathizer, his elder sister. The testimony to her worth
and her sweetness is universal. The Rev. Dr. Storrs of Braintree, in an
obituary notice written on her death, in 1844, at the age of sixty-two,
spoke of her as “the light and joy of every circle in which she moved; the
idol of her family; the faithful companion, the tender mother, the
affectionate sister, the fast and assiduous friend.”
Willis was the second in a family of nine children, all of whom reached
maturity, and two of whom, besides himself, achieved literary reputation.
These were Sarah Payson Willis, afterwards famous, under the _nom de
plume_ of “Fanny Fern,” as a prolific and successful writer for children,
and Richard Storrs Willis, his youngest brother, formerly editor of the
“Musical World,” the author of “Our Church Music,” and known both as a
musical composer and a poet. Julia Willis, his favorite sister and
constant correspondent, was also a woman of remarkable talent, with a gift
of tongues and a sounder scholarship than her more showy brother. She
wrote many of the book reviews in the “Home Journal,” but always declined
to renounce her anonymity.
Such were the influences which surrounded Willis’s early years. And if, at
the first touch of the world, the youthful members of the household flew
off like the dry seeds of the _Impatiens_, it need not therefore be
hastily concluded that the home training, though perhaps too repressive
and severe, was without lasting effect for good. Among the children and
grandchildren of Nathaniel Willis are Catholics, Episcopalians,
Unitarians, and representatives of other shades of belief and unbelief.
But this is the history of many a New England Puritan family, and such are
the disintegrating forces of American life. In the case of the eldest
brother, it may be affirmed that, from a career which was certainly
worldly, and in some of its aspects by no means edifying, the light that
shone from his mother’s face uplifted in prayer for him never altogether
faded away.
Willis began school life under the tuition of the Rev. Dr. McFarland, of
Concord, New Hampshire. “I have forgotten every circumstance,” he wrote
long after, “of a year or two that I was at school at Concord, New
Hampshire, when a boy, except the natural scenery of the place. The faces
of my teacher and my playmates have long ago faded from my memory, while I
remember the rocks and eddies of the Merrimac, the forms of the trees on
the meadow opposite the town, and every bend of the river’s current.”
Later he was brought home and sent to the Boston Latin School, then under
“its well-remembered Pythagoras, Ben Gould.” A few reminiscences of his
slate-and-satchel days are scattered here and there through his writings.
Thus he vaguely recalled Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one of the boys whose
fathers were Unitarians,” and he was greatly impressed by Edward Everett,
then a young Harvard professor, whose stylishly dressed figure used to
appear occasionally in Atkinson Street, at No. 31, in which thoroughfare
the Willises dwelt. He remembered “the rousings before daylight,” on
May-day, “to go to Dorchester Heights, and the shivering search after
never found green leaves and flowers; the buttoning up of boy-jacket to
keep out the cold wind, and pulling out of penknife to cut off the bare
stems of the sweet-brier in search of the hidden odor of the belated
bud.” In “The Pharisee and the Barber,” one of the two or three stories of
Willis whose scenes are laid in Boston, the description of Sheafe Lane is
evidently from the life. The Pharisee of that tale, Mr. Flint, an “active
member of a church famed for its zeal,” who “dressed in black, as all
religious men must (in Boston),” was doubtless a sketch from memory of
some pious familiar of his father’s house, whose black eyes and formal
talk left upon the lad a mixed impression of awe and distrust.
Harvard was the natural destination of a Boston Latin School boy intending
college. But the line between the Orthodox and the Unitarians was drawn
more sharply in 1820 than in 1884. Even now stray youths from Boston are
found at other colleges than Harvard, attracted elsewhere by family ties
or theological affinities. But at that time the cleavage made by the
schism in Eastern Massachusetts was still raw, and Deacon Willis would
almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a
hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college.
“Larry’s father,” wrote Willis in “The Lunatic’s Skate,” “was a
disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon
zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands
of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds
that could resist a four years’ ordeal in either. A student was as
certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the
other; and in the New England States these two sects are bitterly
hostile. So to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett
went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the
sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn
Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of
‘election and free grace,’ whether or no.”
Of the two great fitting-schools founded by Samuel and John Phillips
respectively at Andover and at Exeter, the latter had been captured by the
Unitarians. But the Andover academy, under the sheltering wing of the
famed theological seminary in the same town, though barely thirty miles
from Boston, remained an insoluble lump of Calvinism, a wedge of defiant
Orthodoxy _in partibus infidelium_. To Andover, accordingly, young Willis
was sent, after a course in the Latin School, to complete his preparation
for Yale. The academy was then under the headship of that sound classical
master, John Adams, who was principal from 1810 to 1833. It gave an
excellent fit in the classics, insomuch that Willis, though the reverse of
diligent in college, was carried along a good way, with little study, by
the impetus acquired at Andover. At Andover, too, he began to give signs
of literary tastes and in particular to scribble verses, which had already
given him the reputation of a poet among his fellows before he came up to
college. A letter dated July 3, 1823, and addressed to his elder sister
Lucy, about a fortnight before her marriage, incloses a copy of verses
which is perhaps the earliest poem of Willis now extant. It has no merit,
but as containing hints of his later manner and the unformed germs of that
smooth, diffuse blank verse in which his “Scripture Sketches” were
written, the opening lines may be not without interest:--
“There was a bride, and she was beautiful
And fond, affectionate; her soul did love.
’Twas not the transient feeling of an hour,
That loves and hates, and loves and hates again,--
Oh, no; it was a purer, kindlier feeling,--
A something rooted, grafted on the soul,
That cannot help but live and bud and blossom.”
He also began to wreak thought upon expression in that common vent to the
_cacoethes scribendi_, of young writers,--keeping a diary, “a red morocco
volume, of very ornate slenderness and thinness, in which I recorded my
raptures at spring mornings and blue sashes, my unappreciated
sensibilities, my mysterious emotions by moonlight, and the charms of the
incognita whom I ran against at the corner. This precious record shared
in the final and glorious conflagration of Latin themes, grammars,
graduses, and old shirts, on leaving academy for college.”
“The Lunatic’s Skate” opens with some reminiscences of school life at
Andover:--
“In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen
(a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver
thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest
boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake
of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s
Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over
with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within
anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from
him), and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by
an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s
clearing and that by our own door. Out of school Larry and I were
inseparable. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our
tomahawks made in the same fashion, united our property in
fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each
other’s approbation.”
One of his school-fellows here was Isaac McLellan, who afterwards became a
contributor to Willis’s “American Monthly.” He published a long poem, “The
Fall of the Indian,” which Willis reviewed in the same periodical,
referring to the poet as “the very boy that has tracked the woods with
us, and called us by our nickname over a hedge, and cracked nuts with us
by the fire in the winter evenings. Which of us dreamed, as we read in our
blotted classic, ‘Quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum,’ that he
should ever be guilty of a book? How it would have swelled our idle veins,
as we lay half asleep, bobbing our lines over the bank of the Shawsheen on
those long Saturday afternoons, that we should ever play for each other
the gentle office of critic!”
In after years the rice fields of Georgia, with their embankments and
green surfaces, reminded Willis of “the gooseberry pies which formed part
of my early education at Andover, and which are among the warmest of my
recollections of that classic academy.” “We have fine times picking
berries here,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “Every kind grows in
profusion in Andover,--raspberries, black, blue, thimble, and whortle
berries. The woods are crowded with them. After tea we generally start,
and after we have eat enough go and bathe in the Shawsheen, our Andover
river.”
This Indian Ilyssus was the scene of an adventure recorded in certain
“Tête-à-tête Confessions” in the “American Monthly,” doubtless with some
exaggerations for literary effect and with a _dénoûment_ suspiciously
dramatic. The passage may be given, however, for what it is worth:--
“Cytherean Venus! How I did love Miss Polly D. Low, the pride of the
factory on the romantic Shawsheen! I saw her first in the tenderest
twilight of a Saturday evening, washing her feet in the river. I was
a lad of some impudence, and I sat down on a stone beside her, and
by the time it was dark we were the best friends possible. She was
beautiful. I think so _now_. She was about eighteen, and, though
four years older than I, my education had more than equalized us. At
least, if not the wiser of the two, I was the most skilled in the
subtlety of love, and practiced with great success _les petites
ruses_. She was a tall brunette, and I sometimes fancied, when her
eye exhibited more than ordinary feeling, that there was Indian
blood under that dark and glowing skin. The valley of the Shawsheen,
just below the village where I was at school, is a gem of solitary
and rich scenery, and the overhanging woods and long meadows
afforded the most picturesque and desirable haunts for ramblers who
did not care to be met. There on Sunday afternoons, when she was
released from her shuttle and I from my Schrevelius, did we meet and
stroll till the nine o’clock bell of the factory summoned her
unwillingly home. I could go without my supper in those days, though
I doubt if I would now on such slight occasion. By the time vacation
came, I found myself seriously in love, declared my passion, and
left her with my heart half broken. We were gone four weeks, and
when I returned the butcher’s boy was engaged to Miss Low, and I was
warned to avoid the factory at the peril of a flogging.”
In his last year at Andover Willis experienced religion and joined the
church. Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called
“revivals,” in some school or college needs no description of the kind of
pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young
consciences there assembled. At the first rumor of an unwonted
“seriousness” abroad, occasioned perhaps by the death of a fellow-student,
by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in a winter
term, the machinery is set in motion. Daily prayer-meetings are held, in
which the elders play part,--the movement at Andover was taken in hand by
the “Seminarians,” that is, the students of the Divinity School;--the
unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already
church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and
submit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of
stimulus there follows a great awakening. Many are “under conviction,” the
air becomes electric, and there is a strange spiritual tension which is
felt even by the resisting. Momentous choices are made in an instant and
under the stress of contagious emotions. The awful issues of eternity are
set before a roomful of boys in the midst of prayers and sobs and eloquent
words, exhorting the sinner not to let pass this opportunity of
salvation,--perhaps his last. And then the movement subsides, leaving an
impression which endures with some, and with others quickly wears off.
Those who believe that the Christian character and the Christian life are
the result of nurture and slow endeavor look with distrust upon these
sudden conversions. The hardened sinner may need some such violent call to
repentance, but there is a sort of indecency in this premature forcing
open of the simple and healthful heart of a boy, substituting morbid
self-questionings, exaggerated remorse, and the terrors of perdition for
his natural brave outlook on a world of hope and enjoyment. The story of
Willis’s conversion is fully told in his letters home, and it reads like a
chapter of “Doctor Johns.”
In 1821, being then fifteen years of age, he had written to his father:--
“I can plainly see an answer to prayer in the delay of my admission
to the church. I prayed that God would, if I was in danger of making
a hasty step, by some means or other prevent it. I doubted, till it
became almost a certainty, whether it was proper. I doubted myself,
my pretensions to a change of heart; and my very heart seemed to
sink under me every time I thought of the solemn engagement I was
unhappy, extremely unhappy, when in Boston, and have been, I might
say, miserable ever since.”
And again in 1822:--
“As to becoming a Christian, it is morally _beyond my power_. I have
not an objection against it that would weigh a feather, and yet I
feel no more solicitude than I ever did about my eternal welfare.”
In a letter of the same year to his mother, who had his conversion much at
heart, he says:--
“I do have times when the tears of regret flow, and I make the
resolution of attending to the subject of religion. But my light
head and still lighter heart dismisses the subject as soon as
another object arrests my attention, and my resolutions and regrets
are soon lost in the mazes of pleasure and folly.”
It is curious to reflect that these “mazes of pleasure and folly” meant
nothing more than innocent school-boy diversions, such as black-berrying
and swimming parties, or at worst a juvenile flirtation with some rural
belle. The oldness and gravity of the phrase, in contrast with the boyish
tone of other parts of his letters, illustrate well that moral
precocity--precocity of the conscience as distinguished from the
mind--developed in New England boys of the last generation by the Puritan
training.
In January, 1823, the great revival which had been in progress at Boston
struck the Andover academy. Mr. Willis made his son a visit, and urged him
to join the church. After his return to Boston he received the following
letter:--
ANDOVER, MASS., _January 12, 1823_.
Sunday afternoon.
DEAR FATHER,--I received your package last evening, with my
Testament, etc., inclosed. As the word of God I prize it, and as the
gift of my affectionate father I love it, and shall always look upon
it as a remembrance of an era in my feelings which I hope I shall
always be thankful for. You cannot imagine how much your visit and
advice strengthened me in my resolutions, and spurred me forward in
the good work I had begun. I hope I have now the assurance of being
an heir of life and a recipient of the protection which the wings of
a Saviour’s mercy must afford to those who are gathered under them.
My hope is sometimes shaken when I find my thoughts wandering to
other subjects while the ordinances of God are administering before
my eyes. But the moment that I get upon my knees and pray for
strength I feel my assurance renewed, and rise happier and happier
from every renewal of my supplications.… Saturday evening I attended
our usual meeting in the academy for the _first time_ since I have
been in Andover. It is conducted by the pious scholars of the
academy in succession, and is very interesting. This evening Dr.
Shedd preached the lecture, and after meeting there is to be another
at Mr. Adams’s house. So you see, pa, we are engaged here, and have
reason to hope that _many_ will be inquiring the way to the foot of
the cross.…--_Nine o’clock._ I have been to meeting at the chapel,
and after that attended a prayer-meeting at Mr. Adams’s. They were
both very solemn. Louis Dwight led the last.--_Monday evening, 12
o’clock._ I have truly spent an evening of happiness, and I thought
I must open my letter and tell you. At half-past six William Adams
and I had appointed a meeting, to be conducted wholly by ourselves.
We had invited only a few, but when we got there it was so crowded
that I could scarcely make my way through the room to the
Bible-stand. I believe nearly all our unconverted brethren were
there.… After it was dismissed, many seemed to linger, as if they
did not want to go, and we conversed with some of them. I then went
into Cutler’s room, and Allen and I stayed there till almost eleven
o’clock. There were several of the Seminarians there, and we prayed
and sung, _prayed and sung_, till it seemed a little heaven on
earth. The seriousness increases; many more are deeply impressed,
and the academy presents solemn countenances generally. It is late,
and my eyes smart badly.
Your affectionate son,
N. P. WILLIS.
The William Adams here mentioned was a son of the principal of the
academy, and was afterwards Willis’s classmate at Yale. Louis Dwight was a
theological student, who a year later was married to Willis’s second
sister, Louisa. The subsequent progress of the revival is related in the
following letter, written two or three days later:--
ANDOVER, MASS., _January 15_.
Wednesday evening, 12 o’clock.
MY DEAR FATHER,--My heart is so overflowing with joy and gratitude
and happiness that I could not rest till I had sat down and told you
_all_. We have had a meeting in Allen’s room to-night. Mr. Styles
was there, and talked so that I thought I could almost see a halo
round his head, and expected him to turn into St. Paul come down
again from heaven. After meeting Mr. S. told them the meeting was
closed, but if any wished to converse with him or the other
professors of religion in the room, they might tarry. The room was
crowded, body and all, so that you could not have got through, but
no one stirred. Sobbing and weeping was heard all round the room.
William Adams, Allen, Styles, and I then went round and conversed
with them. They all burst into tears immediately, and listened with
the greatest eagerness, and when I got up to go to the next one,
they held on to me as though salvation depended on my talking with
them. _Isaac Stuart_ sobbed aloud the whole meeting time. _Joseph
Jenkins was in tears_, and came down to my room after meeting and
asked me to pray for and with him. He said he _could not_ pray
himself; he _dared_ not. I gave him the best advice I could and
prayed with him, and he is now in his room, as I _hope praying for
himself_. I talked with little Joshua Huntingdon, and told him about
his father. He wept, and promised to go home and pray. J. C. Alvord,
a member of my class and a _fine fellow_, was in the greatest
misery. He could not sit upon his chair, and took me out of the
meeting to go to my room and pray with him. Jno. Tappan of Boston
was very deeply affected. I conversed with Darrach of Philadelphia,
Carter of Virginia, King of Convers, and several others. They all
seemed to feel very deeply, and all begged me earnestly to pray for
them. We could not get them away. They stood round weeping and
looking for some one to say something to them. Oh, my dear father,
what _can_ we render to God for all his mercies! Allen has been down
in my room several times to pray for some _particular one_. There
were so many to pray for that we have been on our knees from seven
o’clock till now almost all the time. Kennett, my room-mate, is very
much affected. He fears to delay repentance, but says his father
won’t like it when he goes back to Russia, and that there are no
Christians in Russia.… Prayer ascends continually, sinners are
repenting, and I am as proud as Lucifer. I feel as if I was going to
do all myself; as if I could convert a thousand without God, if I
only told them the truth. Oh, pray that I may have humility! It is
and must be the burden of my supplications.
Of the names mentioned in this letter, that of Isaac Stuart is not unknown
to fame. Joseph Jenkins afterwards became Willis’s brother-in-law,
marrying his sister Mary in 1831. He was from Boston, and was graduated at
Yale the year after Willis.