1823-1827.
COLLEGE LIFE.
In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in
September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more
enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer.
It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the
sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of
uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in
the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of
the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s
chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded
lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his
influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in
time the founder and first president of the University of California, and
a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the
Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph
H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and
“Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and
introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not
drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George
J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed
in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of
Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek.
Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of
1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same
hall--the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of
Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited
much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam
classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell
once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described
him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed,
athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both
blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly
not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common
between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong
farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after
years,--in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.
Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia--afterwards, with the titular embellishment
of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several
European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny
Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”--happened to be in New
Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which
he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of
sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,”
published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates
with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:--
“I also remember two men who graduated in the class of 1827, that
were frequently pointed out to me as its most conspicuous members.
One was the son of a very prominent statesman, which, in fact,
explained the notice he attracted; but there was enough of
individuality about John Van Buren to command attention. He had
already revealed the traits which distinguished him in after
life,--easy and careless in manner, bold in character, and of an
aggressive turn of mind. His rival in notoriety had no hereditary
claims to support him, but he was gifted with a rare poetical talent
that had already secured him distinction both in and out of college.
His tone and bearing were aristocratic, not unmixed with _hauteur_,
and though admired for his abilities he never commanded the
sympathies of his comrades. Such was N. P. Willis, and such he
remained to the end of his life. Neither of these graduates, if I
remember, bore off ‘honors;’ but Willis was requested by his class,
with the approval of the faculty, to deliver a poem at the
Commencement of 1827. I was too young to approach these Titans, as I
regarded them, and was content to gaze on them with deference as
they swept by me in the street. In after years I became intimate
with them both.”
The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince
John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of
’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a
great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman,
were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in
the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s
counsel, and Willis as a _particeps criminis_ and witness for the
plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his
marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere,
was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his
name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.
Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman,
Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among
the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards
sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church.
Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in
the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of
to-day such a stirring microcosm,--with its athletic and social clubs, its
regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate
newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls,
boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.,--was all undreamed of. Far from owning a
yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or
a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his
room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten
sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He
visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown,
to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues
indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your
spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on
“necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That
paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred
a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of
his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not
only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and
gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint
the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the
belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had
been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at
Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan
college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.
“The day,” wrote Willis in a freshman letter to his father, “is the
greatest of the year at the South, and our Southern students seem
disposed to be restless under the restriction of a lesson on
playday. There were many of them drunk last evening, and still more
to-day. Christmas has always been, ever since the establishment of
the college, emphatically a _day of tricks_: windows broken,
bell-rope cut, freshmen squirted, and every imaginable scene of
dissipation acted out in full. Last night they barred the entry
doors of the South College, to exclude the government, and then
illuminated the building. This morning the recitation-room doors
were locked and the key stolen, and we were obliged to knock down
the doors to get in; and then we were not much better off, for the
lamps were full of water and the wicks gone. However, we procured
others, and went on with the lesson.”
Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used,
between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another
Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at
the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a
member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.
New Haven in 1823-27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of
to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of
the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the
Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with
grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia”
or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor of Rhetoric, used
to go to “explode the elements.” Down by the bay, in a region now occupied
by great factories, stood the old “Pavilion,” a famous seaside hotel much
resorted to by Southern families. The first railroad from New Haven was
laid in 1839. As yet even the Farmington Canal was only projected. Willis
and the Boston contingent used to come all the way by stage-coach, passing
through Framingham, Worcester, and Hartford,--in which last he had
acquaintances, with whom he sometimes spent a day _en route_. Anthracite
coal was not in use in New Haven before 1827. Citizens and students alike
depended on wood, the latter buying theirs at the regular wood-stand near
South College, and having it _cut_ in the yard behind the colleges,
wood-saws not being in general vogue. The habits of the collegians, from a
hygienic point of view, were usually bad. They sat up late drinking strong
coffee in their rooms, rose very early perforce, prayed and recited on an
empty stomach, and took little regular exercise. Dyspepsia was naturally
rife.
But _en revanche_ New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a
homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some
respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already,
thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and
it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a
regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith
Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets,--a dream-city
of shaded squares and white--piazzaed mansions shining among cool green
gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager
impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and
looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of
the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known,--that class of
freshmen. It was a fair arena.… Of the feelings that stir the heart in our
youth,--of the few, the _very_ few, that have no recoil and leave no
repentance,--this leaping from the starting post of mind, this first
spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge,
is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most
unmingled.”
This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823.
His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman,
simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home,
thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts
and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the
prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its
twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor,
who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the
dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards _if you wish_, but
it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the
college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make
pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we
can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest
generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his
piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the
morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At
recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York
on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his
history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of
Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours
there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is
not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last
have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the
entry,”--a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way
five or six dollars, and had a scrape upon it, and the conclusion of the
matter was their getting so intoxicated as to be unable to reach home.”
The freshmen have likewise had their windows broken, and Willis’s chum has
been smoked out, during the former’s absence from his room, by cigars
inserted in the keyhole. A somewhat distant and impersonal form of the
persecution this will seem to modern freshmen. But Sophomore Kneeland,
from Georgia, having been collared by Tutor Stoddard, red-handed, in the
act of breaking windows, and having knocked down the tutor and run, has
been publicly expelled, the president reading out his mittimus in chapel
to the whole college. Willis has joined the Linonian Society,--“Calhoun,
the candidate for the presidency, was once a member of it” (an ancient
“campaign” argument); also a freshman debating club, the officers of which
“are almost all professors of religion,” and in which he has been chosen,
in his absence, “critic on composition and speaking.” He has drunk tea at
Miss Dunning’s. He has called upon Mrs. Daggett and Mrs. T. Dwight,
finding the former of these two ladies to be “a very pious woman, and a
woman of uncommon understanding,” and the latter “a woman of noble mind,
though plain in person.” He has taken a walk to the Cave of the Regicides
on West Rock,--time out of mind the goal of the freshman’s first
pilgrimage. He has been appointed one of the committee to solicit
subscriptions in his own class for the Greeks, and is also one of the
managers of the Bible Society, and active at the Friday evening
prayer-meetings, there being just at present considerable “engagedness”
among “professors” in the several classes. Meanwhile Tutor Twining has
been hissed and scraped at while conducting services in chapel. The
government “are growing more and more rigorous. Almost every member of the
freshman class is called up and questioned. Many are dismissed, and an
examination is made of everything, from the stealing of a sugar-bowl out
of the hall to the prostration of a tutor. Tutor Woolsey was smoked the
other evening by two fellows who were too drunk to make their escape, and
were caught without any difficulty. They did it at twelve o’clock at
night, wrapped in sheets, and are both dismissed.” The disturbances
between the sophomores and freshmen culminated for Willis in a short
suspension in the winter of 1823-24 for honorably refusing to disclose the
names of sophomores by whom he had been smoked and squirted, or the names
of persons in whose rooms he had seen a squirt,--an instrument of torture
whose possession involved expulsion. The letter in which he announced his
suspension is very long and filled with heroic sentiments.
“All my friends have been to see me, and justify me in my conduct.
There are two professors of religion in the sophomore class who have
done exactly so, and will be treated accordingly. And though it is a
matter of policy with the government to pursue this course, it is
said, and justly, that they despise an informer. My meeting with
this squirt was entirely unavoidable, not originating (as perhaps
you may suppose) from being in company where I ought not to be.”
Willis suffered frequently from homesickness and low spirits during the
winter of his freshman year. He had the poetic temperament, and was
subject to his moods, easily elated and easily depressed. His chum was
away somewhere teaching, and Willis, in his loneliness, had recourse to
his pen.
“I find but few among the students,” he wrote to his father, “whom I
should choose as companions. Most of them are profane and
dissipated, and their highest ambition seems to be to show off as a
high fellow, and one who can overreach the government and laugh at
its officers. The pious students in my class are mostly _men_,
without any refinement either of manners or feeling,--fresh from
the country,--whose piety renders them respectable, and who without
it would be but boors. But there are a few students who have both
piety and refinement, and some who, though not professors of
religion, respect it, and who are moral in their outward conduct,
whatever be the state of their hearts. These I can generally
associate with, but when they are _all_ out of the way, and I am in
need of something to brighten my feelings, I can find in the flow of
fancy a forgetfulness of the darker side. I have written a great
deal in this way since my college life commenced, and my writing
will _always_ depend on the thermometer of my feelings.”
As the youthful scribe gained readier power of expression his home
correspondence became fuller and more effusive. He wrote with much
minuteness a narrative of an evening spent at a country parsonage in West
Haven, of a walk to the light-house, a visit to the cave of the hermit of
East Rock, and of a trip by steamboat to New York. He dwelt at length upon
all the impressions which the varying seasons and his daily experiences
made upon his mind. There is, of course, no literary art in most of these
juvenile confidences. The language is apt to be sophomorical, and the
letters, as a whole, will seldom repay quotation, but an extract may be
given here and there as a specimen of his epistolary style. The following
is from a letter of July 11, 1824, to his sister Julia, with whom he was
always particularly unreserved:--
“I wish you were here to walk with me these beautiful moonlight
evenings. I have seldom gone to bed and left the mild Queen of the
Night riding in the heavens, for it seems a waste of noble feelings.
When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past,
and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and
softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I
have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in
sleep without reluctance. I really think we had better lay it down
as a rule never to go to sleep while the moon is shining. In fact,
Julia, I suspect (for I find no one who sympathizes with me in this
feeling) that I am something of a lunatic,--affected by the rays of
that beautiful planet with a kind of happiness which is the result
of a heated imagination, and which is not felt by the generality of
the common-sense people of the world. Last Friday evening, you know,
was beautiful. I attended a meeting of the professors of religion,
statedly held on that evening in the theological chamber, and when
it was out went alone to walk. I strolled along upon the shore of
the bay towards the light-house a mile or more, and never did I meet
with so delightful a scene. There was no wind stirring, or not
enough to make a ripple on the wave, and the hardly perceptible
swell of the tide cast its waters upon the pebbles without a sound.
You know the appearance of a bay when the light is shed obliquely
upon it--looking like one immense sheet of liquid silver, and if
you have ever seen a boat pass across it at such a moment, and seen
that beautiful phenomena of the phosphorus dripping like fire from
the oars and gilding the foam before the prow, you can have some
idea of the scene I then witnessed. Now and then a sloop stole
languidly across the bay, hardly appearing to move, and presenting
an alternate light and shade as the moon struck upon the flapping
sail or the helmsman tacked to take advantage of the hardly
perceptible breeze which swept him slowly from the land. I declare
it did seem like enchantment. The clock struck one, but I felt no
disposition to go home, and, as the air was pure and balmy, the
thought struck me that it would be a pleasant hour to bathe.
Accordingly I undressed, and swam along the shore slowly for about
half a mile in the cool, refreshing waters, with sensations which
must be felt to be understood. After this delightful exercise I
walked home, and, seating myself by the window where I could look at
the moon, fell asleep, and did not wake till near morning.”
This fancy, that he was peculiarly affected by the light of the moon, was
the first suggestion of his wild tale, “The Lunatic’s Skate,” one of his
most imaginative stories, and not unworthy of comparison with the weird
fictions of Edgar Poe.
In the summer term of his sophomore year Willis was again suspended for a
few weeks, this time in common with a majority of his class and in
consequence of what was known as “the Conic Sections Rebellion.” The class
had been assured by the tutors that they would not have to learn the
corollaries to the propositions in that branch of mathematics, and when
the objectionable corollaries were, notwithstanding, imposed upon them,
the mercury then standing at 90° and the annual examinations at hand,
eighty-four members bound themselves by a solemn pledge not to recite
them. The government were firm, and the recalcitrant sophomores were
suspended in platoons, day after day. Horace Bushnell was a ring-leader in
this revolt, which included the “professors” equally with the worldly. All
the suspended men were taken back at the end of the term.
In some recollections of Willis by his classmate, Hugh Blair Grigsby,
published in the latter’s journal, the “Norfolk Beacon,” in the autumn of
1834, he says:--
“The first notice that the public had of his budding genius was a
little poem in six verses, the two first lines of the first verse
being,--
‘The leaf floats by upon the stream
Unheeded in its silent way,’
We cannot recall the whole stanza; but our fair readers may remember
that their albums contained, some time since, a beautiful vignette
representing a lady resting in her bower, listening to the notes of
a pretty songster perched above her. This engraving was taken from
these lines in this poem:--
‘The bird that sings in lady’s bower,
To-morrow will she think of him?’”
Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York
Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous
character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824-25, about an old man
planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in
the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural
subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,”
where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions
from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of
these _juvenilia_ were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never
put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,”
and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They
were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted
in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his
memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the
“Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,”
“The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.”
It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who
ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant
muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best
poem printed in their columns during the year,--a device now relegated to
the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s
share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid
him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his
“Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the
‘Christian Watchman,’” as announced in the issue of that paper for March
30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the
judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for
the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,”
and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a
paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of
Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode
Island,” and other publications.
All this literary glory gave the young undergraduate great _éclat_ in New
Haven. He received many invitations out, and was teased for verses by the
owners of countless albums. He began to frequent the society of the town,
where his rapidly developing social gifts soon made him a favorite. He was
at this time a tall, handsome stripling, with an easy assurance of manner
and a good deal of the dandy in his dress. His portrait, painted by Miss
Stuart of Boston, a daughter of the famous portrait-painter, Gilbert
Stuart, shows him with a rosy face, very fair hair hanging in natural
curls over the forehead, a _retroussé_ nose, long upper lip, pale gray eye
with uncommonly full lid (a family trait), and a confident and joyous
expression. He carried himself with an airy, jaunty grace, and there was
something particularly spirited and _vif_ about the poise and movement of
his head,--a something which no portrait could reproduce. With naturally
elegant tastes, an expansive temper, and an eagerness to see the more
brilliant side of life, Willis could at all times make himself agreeable
to those whom he cared to please. But he was quick to feel the chill of a
hostile presence, and toward any one, in especial, who seemed to
disapprove of him he could be curt and defiant. He had a winning way with
women, who were flattered by his recognition of their influence over him
and grateful for _les petits soins_ which he never neglected.
Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply
himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in
the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste
and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet
aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a
liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like
Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to
the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly
before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to
literature.
Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the
choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and
preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia,
that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to
returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial
question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a
comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without
scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of
many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee
Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:--
“I sunk some pocket money in a blank book on reading Wilson’s
‘Noctes.’ Celestial nights I thought _we_ had of it, at old black
Stanley’s forbidden oyster house in New Haven; and it struck me it
was robbery of posterity (no less!) not to record the brilliant
efflorescence of our conviviality. Regularly on reaching my chambers
(or as soon after morning prayers as my head became pellucid), I
attempted to reduce to dialogue the wit of our Christopher North,
‘Shepherd’ and ‘Tickler;’ but alas! it became what may be called
‘productive labor.’ Either my memory did not serve me, or wit (I
shouldn’t be surprised) reads cold by repentant daylight. It was
heavy work, as reluctant as a college exercise, and after using up
for cigar-lighters the short-lived ‘Noctes,’ I devoted the remainder
of the book to outlines of the antique (that is to say, of old
shoes), my passion just then being a collection of French slippers
from the prettiest feet in the known world (‘known,’ to me).”
Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly
Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that
the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced
by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines
have gone through this species of measles.
“I do not hate, but I have felt
Indifferent to woman long:
I bow not where I once have knelt,
I lisp not what I poured in song.
They are too beautifully made
For their tame earthliness of thought;
Ay, their immortal minds degrade
The meaner work His hands have wrought.”
The specifications of this painful charge were several. He had been
walking with a beautiful girl one glorious night, with his soul uplifted
by the influences of the hour, when she rudely jarred upon his mood by
remarking that “their kitchen chimney smoked again.” Another young woman,
with whom he was viewing a Crucifixion in a picture gallery, had “coldly
curled her lip and praised the high priest’s garment.” A third had
profaned one of his religious hours.
“I turned me at the slow Amen
And wiped my drowning eyes, and met
A trifling smile! Think ye of _men_?
I tell you _man_ hath heart:--no, no,
It was a woman’s smile. They tell
Of her bright ruby lip, and eye
That shames the Arabic gazelle;
They tell of her cheek’s glowing dye,
Of her arch look and witching spell:
But there is not that man on earth
Who at that hour had felt like mirth.”
Worse than all, he had been watching by a corpse, in company with a young
lady of his acquaintance, when
“She trifled, ay, that _angel_ maid,
She _trifled_ where the dead was laid!”
These misogynistic musings called forth a remonstrance,--“Woman--to
Roy,”--by one of the “Recorder’s” poetesses, who signed herself “Rob.” “Ye
know her not,” she sang,
“An idle name
Ye give to toys of fashion’s mould,
And well ye scorn those guilty ones
Who curl their smiles of pride to heaven.
Oh, seek her not in halls of mirth,
But in those calm dwellings of earth,” etc.
Meanwhile, rumors of his idleness and dissipation began to reach Boston,
and caused his family much distress. These reports were absurdly
exaggerated, and were warmly denied by his friends, who asserted that the
head and front of his offending were an occasional moonlight drive to “the
Lake” and a supper, with a glass of ale at “Barney’s.” Willis was gay in
college, but very far from dissipated. In the select circles where he was
made at home nothing like dissipation was tolerated. The society of the
little university town was as simple as it was refined. He was cordially
welcomed in such families as the Whitings, the Bishops, the Hubbards, and
the entire Woolsey, Devereux, and Johnson connection in New Haven,
Stratford, and New York. His winter holidays were spent partly at New York
with his classmates Rankin and Richards, partly at Stratford with the
Johnsons, once at New London among the kinsfolk of his grandmother, Lucy
Douglas; and once he traveled as far as Philadelphia. His “dissipations”
in New Haven were picnics to East Rock, rehearsals of “The Lady of the
Lake” at a seminary for young ladies, pie-banquets in Thanksgiving
week,--paid for with verses,--and New Year’s calls with their
accompaniments of a cooky and a glass of wine.
That his head was a little turned by his literary and social successes is
not wonderful. He had his share of vanity, and in his confidential letters
to his parents and sisters he made no effort to conceal his elation. A
passage from one of these, dated January 7, 1827, will give a good idea of
his occupations and his frame of mind at this point in his senior year:--
“I stayed in Stratford till Friday, and then the Johnsons offered me
a seat in the carriage to New York. This, of course, was
irresistible; and Friday night at ten o’clock I was presented to the
mayor of the city, at a splendid levee. It was his last before
leaving his office, and I never saw such magnificence. The fashion
and beauty and talent of the city were all there, crowding his
immense rooms to show their respect for his services.… I found many
old acquaintances there and made some new ones,--among the latter, a
Mrs. Brunson, as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and her sister,
Miss Catherine Bailey, also a most beautiful woman. I met the very
accomplished Adelaide Richards there, who patronized me and played
my dictionary, and from whose father and mother I received an
invitation to dine on New Year’s day. At two or three o’clock I went
_home_ to Mr. William Johnson’s (who married Miss Woolsey’s sister),
and in a glorious bed, with a good coal fire by my side, slept off
the fatigues of a sixty miles’ ride and four hours’ dissipation.
“On Saturday evening I went to a genuine _soirée_ at the great Dr.
Hosack’s. This man is the most luxurious liver in the city, and his
house is a perfect palace. You could not lay your hand on the wall
for costly paintings, and the furniture exceeds everything I have
seen. I met all the literary characters of the day there, and
Halleck, the poet, among them. With him I became quite acquainted,
and he is a most glorious fellow. More of him when we meet.… You
know on New Year’s day in New York all the gentlemen call on all
their acquaintances. I began at twelve o’clock at the Battery, and
went up to St. John’s Park, merely running in and right out again
till four, the dinner hour. I called on everybody. William Woolsey
went with me, and, by appointing a rendezvous in every street, we
kept along together. At four I went to Mr. George Richards’s to
dine. He is no relative of Robert’s, and lives in the best style in
a large house on St. John’s Park. We sat down to dinner between five
and six, and sat several hours with a very large party. I got a seat
next to the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed it much. They live
in the French style, and the last course was sugar-plums!”
In another letter he says:--
“I was much flattered in vacation by the attentions of literary men
and women; the latter more particularly, who seemed to consider it
quite the thing to find a poet who was not a bear, and who could
stoop so much from the _excelsa_ of his profession as to dress
fashionably and pay compliments like a lawyer. I heard of a very
_blue_ young lady who said, ‘La, how I should love to see Mr.
Willis! I am sure I should fall in love with a man who writes such
sweet poetry.’ She is both belle and bluestocking, they say.”
One of the families in which Willis was an _habitué_ was the household of
Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the
seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the
original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis
was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description
of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that
“in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely
found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were
assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His
lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the
death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W----,
Two Years of Age”--one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s
“Parnassus”--were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and
biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De
Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune,
who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave
fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters,
Julia and Pastora--_matre pulchra filiæ pulchriores_--were great belles
among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as
a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.”
The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the
Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of
undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and
remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the
state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon
him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father
during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the
eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:--
“My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy
of the hopes which are experienced in revivals. I understand your
anxiety for me, and I understand the feelings which prompted
mother’s most tender and affectionate addition to your letter. If I
perish it will not be because I do not _know_ my duty, for there are
few who have been better instructed. But my feelings are most
peculiar and most trying. I am under one ceaseless and enduring
conviction of sin; one wearing anxiety about my soul, without making
any visible progress. I know what you will write about it. I could
anticipate every word you can say upon the point. But so it is, and
I have done with _all_ discussion of it.”
At the completion of the senior examinations Willis delivered the
valedictory poem to his class, “with a simplicity and feeling which
thrilled the audience,” says one who was present. Portions of this were
printed in his “Sketches” and in subsequent editions of his poems. It is
one of the hardest things in the world to write a good occasional poem,
and Willis’s Class Day address does not differ much from other
performances of the kind. It is in blank verse, laboriously didactic, and
expresses the usual conventional sentiments and noble moral reflections
proper to the occasion. It is by no means as good as another occasional
poem of his, “The Death of Arnold,” written upon the burial of the class
champion, and first printed in the “Connecticut Journal.”
Willis spent the senior vacation--a halcyon period of six weeks that
formerly intervened between Class Day and Commencement--in a trip through
New York State and Canada; taking what is now known as the grand tour, and
gathering impressions which he ultimately worked into the texture of his
vivid sketches of “Niagara, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence.” He
traveled by the Erie Canal, then newly opened through an almost unbroken
wilderness, dotted here and there with stripling cities, Utica, Palmyra,
Rochester,--the last only a few years old.
“The burnt stumps of the first settlers are all over the town: you
find them close by the doors and in the yards of the people, and you
may look between elegant blocks of stone and brick buildings and see
the _natural forest_ within five minutes’ walk. It is complete
mushroom. We saw Colonel Rochester, who first settled it. He and his
wife were sitting at their front door, enjoying the evening under
trees which twelve years ago were the depth of the wilderness.”
There was a perpetual novelty in these contrasts. He saw the country, as
it were, in the making. The canal-boat went only four miles an hour, and
the voyager could get out, when so minded, to stretch his legs and pick
the wild flowers along the tow-path. Odd experiences relieved the
monotony of this quiet sail along the amber Mohawk, “bonniest stream that
ever dimpled.” One Sunday, at the request of old General Wadsworth of
Geneseo, who happened to be aboard and took a great fancy to Willis, the
latter preached a sermon to the passengers assembled in the cabin, and
passed among them, in consequence, as a young minister who “had geten him
yet no benefice.” And here is a little idyl perhaps worth recording:--
“On Sunday morning I saw a girl on a hillside in the wildest part of
the Mohawk Valley, milking. So I leaped ashore, to the great
amusement of the passengers, and ran up to give her a lecture. She
was quite pretty, and blushed when I asked her if she knew it was
wicked to milk on Sunday. She had a pretty little clean foot,
probably washed by the wet grass, and held up the milking-pail for
me to drink with considerable grace. I should have begged a kiss if
the boat had not been in sight. I have just been called up to look
at Palmyra. It is curious to sail through the centre of a town, and
see people in the windows above you and on the steps of the houses,
crowding to see the strange faces on board. They look so much at
home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall
be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”
At Utica he found a host of friends, was received with Western
hospitality, and had twenty or thirty invitations to dinners and parties.
A Utica belle whom he had known in New Haven made up a picnic in his
behoof to Trenton Falls, the scenery of which he described so admirably in
“Edith Linsey.” It was his hap to visit Trenton on the very day when a
Miss Suydam, a young lady from New York, fell over the falls and was
killed. From Auburn he drove out on a visit to another fair acquaintance,
Miss Adele Livingston, whose country house on Skaneateles Lake he found to
be a “little palace of cultivation and refinement” dropped down
unexpectedly in the wilderness. This was “Fleming Farm” in “Edith Linsey,”
though it would probably be a mistake to identify the heroine of that tale
with Willis’s hostess. With her he took a horseback ride round the head of
the lake, and then he returned to his canal. At Niagara he encountered a
pleasant party of Boston and Salem people, and was asked to attach himself
to their train on the way up Ontario and down the St. Lawrence. Among them
was a “Miss E. M----” (Emily Marshall?), a famous beauty, who figures in
Willis’s “Niagara” sketch in a romantic and perilous adventure behind the
fall. “I am sorry I may not mention her name,” he says, “for in more
chivalrous times she would have been a character of history. Everybody
who has been in America, however, will know whom I am describing.” At
Montreal he fell in with Chester Harding, the artist, with whom he
afterwards became intimate at Boston, and who painted an excellent
portrait of Willis, now owned by Mr. Charles A. Dana. In September he went
back to New Haven to take his degree and say good-by, and then college
life was over and the world before him.
Willis always looked back with tenderness to his college days. Years
after, in his “Slingsby” papers, contributed to an English magazine, he
made New Haven and the university the scene or background of some of his
best stories and sketches of American life, such as “Edith Linsey,” “F.
Smith,” “Scenes of Fear,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “The Cherokee’s
Threat.” These, however, are not college stories in the common meaning of
the term. The heroes of these amusing and often incredible adventures are
undergraduates, but they have the easy _savoir faire_ of men of the world,
and the incidents of the narrative are mainly enacted outside the college
fence, and consist for the most part of love-making, driving stanhope, and
touring about the country in an independent manner. The academic life of
the time offered but a meagre field to the romancer, nor indeed is the
case much altered since. There have been loud calls, at present
subsiding, for an “American Tom Brown.” A few patriotic Harvard graduates
have responded, but their success has been such that the alumni of other
colleges have congratulated themselves that no one has been moved to
perform the same office for their own _Almæ Matres_. It may be doubted
whether the four years of a college course are a broad enough base to
support a full-length novel. A man is not born in college, and he seldom
dies or marries there. The struggle which decides his final success or
failure is fought on other fields. As to the life itself, though
engrossing enough to those who lead it, as stuff for fiction it is
scant,--a life of pleasant monotony, varied by contests for honors and
prizes which seem paltry to the man, and made exciting by that most
fatuous of pursuits, college “politics.” Nevertheless, it has unique
features of its own, peculiar developments of sentiment and humor which
appeal to the imagination. To these, the man who has lived it and found it
sweet will often attempt to give shape, as he looks back upon it in less
happy years, even though he may understand well enough that such
fragmentary experiences want the unity and importance required in a
continuous fiction. As experiments of this nature, Willis’s college
stories should be regarded. It must be confessed that he idealized a good
deal. His geese were always swans, and he practiced an airy exaggeration
provoking to the statistician or the literal minded. He speaks, for
example, in an off-hand way of “the thousand students of the university,”
though the number never reached half a thousand at any time when he was a
student. But in the incidental glimpses of the life which he described, in
the atmosphere which he flung around it, he was true to the spirit of that
life,--the gay, irresponsible existence of half-idle, half-earnest youth,
whose friendships are warm and unquestioning, to whom the world is new,
the future full of promise, and every girl a Venus. There is a glamour
over it all--“the golden exhalations of the dawn”--and romance is the
proper medium in which to present it.
“Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater, however,” wrote
Willis in “Edith Linsey,” “and gayly as I describe it, it is to me a
picture of memory, glazed and put away; if I see it ever again it
will be but to walk through its embowered streets by a midnight
moon. It is vain and heartbreaking to go back after absence to any
spot of earth, of which the interest was the human love whose home
and cradle it had been. There is nothing on earth so mournful and
unavailing, as to return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look
to return to ourselves and others as we were when we thus knew
them.”
On leaving college, Willis signalized his entrance upon a literary career
of forty years by collecting and publishing a score of his juvenile poems,
in a thin volume entitled “Sketches,” and dedicated to his father. It
contained, among other things, four of the scriptural pieces which had
done more than anything else to give him reputation. This vein he
continued to cultivate, and added others in later volumes till they
reached the number of eighteen. Even in his last years he wrote one more
scriptural poem for the “New York Ledger,” at the persuasion of the
enterprising Mr. Bonner, reinforced by the proffer of a hundred dollars.
As there is little difference in value between the earliest and latest of
these, it may be well to speak of them here collectively. It is not hard
to explain the vogue which they obtained, or the reason why many people at
this day, who know nothing else of Willis, have read his Scripture poems.
One still encounters, here and there, a good old country lady who reads
little poetry, but who can quote from “Absalom” or “Jephthah’s Daughter”
and thinks them quite the best product of the American Parnassus. They
made good Sunday reading. They appealed to an intensely biblical and not
very literary constituency; to a public familiar with the Old and New
Testaments alike, and familiarized also with the life and scenery of the
East through Bible commentaries and the lectures of missionaries who had
traveled in Palestine. They were pleased to meet again the most striking
episodes and affecting situations in the sacred narratives, set forth in
easy verse, embroidered prettily, and with the sentiments and reflections
proper to the subject all duly marshaled before them. It lent concreteness
to the story to learn that in the room of Jairus’s daughter,
“The spice lamps in the alabaster urns
Burned dimly and the white and fragrant smoke
Curled indolently on the chamber walls;”
or that the Shunamite’s little son, on his way to the field, passed
“Through the light green hollows where the lambs
Go for the tender grass;”
or that the scene of Christ’s baptism
“Was a green spot in the wilderness
Touched by the river Jordan. The dark pine
Never had dropped its tassels on the moss
Tufting the leaning bank, nor on the grass
Of the broad circle stretching evenly
To the straight larches had a heavier foot
Than the wild heron’s trodden. Softly in
Through a long aisle of willows, dim and cool,
Stole the clear waters with their muffled feet,
And, hushing as they spread into the light,
Circled the edges of the pebbled tank
Slowly, then rippled through the woods away.”
For the merely literary quality of these poems, independent of their
sacred associations, not very much can be said. They were certainly
remarkably mature work for a college boy, pure in taste, delicate and
correct in execution. But there is a slightly hollow ring to them, as of
verse exercises on set themes. The inspiration is at second hand, from
books and not from life. As other juvenile poets have gone to their
classics for a subject, Willis went to his Bible. He drank at Siloa’s
fount instead of Helicon, and tuned the psaltery instead of the lyre. We
have evidently not reached the real Willis yet. In general the experiment
of paraphrasing the narrative portions of the Scriptures has not been
successful. Something is lost when the impressive simplicity of the
original is blown out into wordy and sentimental verse. This process of
spinning rhetorical commonplaces from brief texts is well illustrated in
the following passage from “Lazarus and Mary:”--
“But to the mighty heart
That in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood,
Taking for us the cup that might not pass--
The heart whose breaking chord upon the cross
Made the earth tremble and the sun afraid
To look upon his agony--the heart
Of a lost world’s Redeemer--overflowed,
Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”
This is what Lowell called “inspiration and water.” Alfred de Vigny, a
fine spirit and good poet, has tried the same thing in French and
succeeded little, if at all, better than the Yankee collegian. The
inadequacy of Willis’s Scripture renderings is made more apparent by the
fact that his blank verse is not a good vehicle for strong feeling. It is
correct and flowing, sometimes musical, but seldom energetic. It favored
his tendency to diffuseness and it often degenerates into a kind of
accentless _oratio soluta_, which is only verse because it scans, and only
blank verse because it does not rhyme.
Upon the whole the most genuine expression of Willis’s talent in this
early volume was in the piece entitled “Better Moments,” which remains one
of his best, because one of his most spontaneous poems.
It makes one realize the startling growth of the United States in the last
fifty years, to remember that Willis had already won a “national
reputation” by his poetry when he left college. The air was much thinner
then, American literature much scantier, the population so small and so
comparatively homogeneous, that the suffrages of a few hundreds of readers
in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia, and the praises of a few
dozen journals were enough to bestow fame. What undergraduate nowadays,
however clever or precocious, could hope to make his voice heard beyond
the limits of the college yard?
It remains only to mention that the presence in New Haven of the two poets
Percival and Hillhouse, when Willis was a student there, was not without
influence on his literary development. Percival went to West Point as
Professor of Chemistry in 1824 and did not come back to New Haven until
1827, but Hillhouse resided constantly at his beautiful home in the
outskirts of the city, “Sachem’s Wood.” His Master’s Oration, “The
Education of a Poet,” and his Phi Beta Kappa poem, “The Judgment,” had
given him great fame in the university as an orator and poet. “‘Hadad’ was
published in 1825,” wrote Willis, “during my second year in college, and
to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading
characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious
language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.” Of its author he
said, “In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished
mien.… Though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me, in a
casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he
had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and
leisure he could command.”