CHAPTER VI.

1836-1845.

GLENMARY--THE CORSAIR--THE NEW MIRROR.

Willis was now fully committed to the profession of letters, but he wished

to connect it with foreign residence, if possible. His sojourn abroad had

been pleasant and successful, and when he sailed for home it was with a

strong expectation of returning before long to the Old World in some

diplomatic capacity. This hope he did not cease to entertain for several

years. In a letter to Mrs. Skinner, written from Niagara October 12, 1836,

he said that he had missed the secretaryship to France by a

hand’s-breadth, and that he wanted the next diplomatic mission that turned

up; that the climate of the United States did not agree either with him or

with Mrs. Willis; that he was constantly subject to the rheumatism, etc.

During the winter of 1836-37, while in Washington, he made interest to

secure the post of secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, with the view

of writing a book on Russia, but Mr. Dallas, the newly-appointed minister

to that country, had promised the place to a kinsman. Later, in a letter

to Mrs. Willis at Glenmary, written from Boston, where he had just met

Sumner and Longfellow and was about to dine with the latter, he speaks of

a letter from a friend who says that the President had told him that “no

young man in Washington had impressed him so favorably. It _looks_ like

going abroad,” he adds, “and not for six or nine months merely.” This

letter is dated simply “February,” but was written, probably, in 1842,

during Tyler’s administration. To the same year, doubtless, may be

referred another, dated at New York, July 9th, in which he speaks of

having made the rounds of the men-of-war in the harbor with John Tyler,

the President’s son, “who seems very much my friend,” and of being invited

to dinner by Dakin, to meet Tyler, Halleck, and Bryant. “A politician,” he

says, tells him that he will be appointed abroad soon. These hopes were

all doomed to disappointment, and to the end of his career his pen was

destined to be his best reliance.

The first few months after his return to America were spent in visiting

his home and friends, and in presenting his young English bride to her new

relatives. He stayed some time at the Astor House, in New York, then newly

opened under the hosting of the genial Stetson, and regarded as the

greatest wonder on the continent in the way of metropolitan caravansaries.

On September 20th he signed an agreement with the agent of George Virtue,

the London publisher, to furnish the letterpress for a big illustrated

work on American scenery, the drawings for which were to be supplied by

Bartlett, the English artist, who was then in America for the purpose. The

work was to come out in monthly numbers, each containing four plates and

eight pages of letterpress, and Willis was to receive fifteen guineas a

number. The first installment, containing descriptions of twenty drawings,

was to be ready November 1st. It was in pursuance of this agreement that

Willis went to Niagara in the autumn of 1836, retracing ground which he

had visited eight years before. A part of the winter of 1836-37 and the

early spring of 1837 he passed in Washington, whence he contributed to the

“Mirror” the four letters afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.” He

found Washington society agreeable, and Mrs. Willis was greatly admired

and became an especial favorite with Henry Clay. But the national capital

was then a raw, straggling town, built, said Willis, “to please nobody on

earth but a hackney coachman.” It had not begun to grow up to the

ambitious plan on which it was projected, and there was a ludicrous

contrast between the wide, radiating avenues, with their imposing public

buildings scattered here and there, and the wastes between, dotted at

intervals with naked brick houses or mean negro cabins. The large shifting

population, which fled as soon as Congress rose, lodged uncomfortably in

hotels and boarding-houses. In short, Washington was a dismal place to

live in. Willis set his practiced observation at work to describe the

picturesque and humorous social aspects of this unfinished city. He never

took more than the most casual interest in politics, but he lounged about

the rotunda and lobbies of the Capitol, climbed up into the stifling

galleries of the old House and Senate chambers, whence the ladies’ toilets

could be observed, though the voices of speakers on the floor, owing to

the acoustic defects in the building, reached the ear “as articulate as

water from a narrow-necked bottle.” He was present at Van Buren’s

inauguration, went to a levee at the White House, and to a dinner with

Power the comedian, at which several Indian chiefs were present who

behaved in an extraordinary manner. In the summer of 1837 he traveled

about with Bartlett, who was making his sketches for “American Scenery.”

In the course of these peregrinations he found a lovely spot on the banks

of Owego Creek near its junction with the Susquehanna, which so took his

fancy that he decided to pitch his tent there. He bought from his college

friend Pumpelly, who lived near by, a domain of some two hundred acres,

which he named Glenmary, in honor of his wife, and there in the fall of

1837 he set up his household gods. In his paper on “The Four Rivers,”

contributed to one of the September “Mirrors” of that year, he thus

announces his discovery:--

“Owego Creek should have a prettier name, for its small vale is the

soul and essence of loveliness. A meadow of a mile in breadth,

fertile, soft, and sprinkled with stately trees, furnishes a bed for

its swift windings; and from the edge of this new Tempé, on the

southern side, rise three steppes or natural terraces, over the

highest of which the forest rears its head, and looks in upon the

meeting of the rivers; while down the sides, terrace by terrace,

leap the small streamlets from the mountain springs, forming each

again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of Nature.… Here

would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of these shining

streamlets, upon one of these terraces that seem steps to Olympus,

and let me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are

growing and my head silvering in tranquil happiness.”

In this secluded Arcadia his Penates had rest for five years, and hence he

wrote his “À l’Abri, or the Tent Pitched,” contributed to the “Mirror” as

“Letters from under a Bridge,” the first one appearing July 7, 1838. This

is Willis’s happiest book, and reflects the happiest part of his life.

There was a side of him which turned gladly to rural repose and simple

household pleasures. He imagined it to be “the kind of life best suited to

his disposition as well as to his better nature,” and it had at the time

the zest of novelty. For the last five years he had been a vagabond “in

the gayest circles of the gayest cities in the world.”

“There is a curious fact,” he writes, “I have learned for the first

time in this wild country; that, as the forest is cleared, new

springs rise to the surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the

sunshine.… You have yourself been in your day, dear doctor, ‘a

warped slip of wilderness,’ and will see at once that there lies in

this ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain moral

changes that come in upon the heels of more cultivated and

thoughtful manhood. There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us

at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.… You can scarce

understand with what pleasure I find this new spring in my path, the

content with which I admit the conviction that, without effort or

self-denial, the mind will slake its thirst and the heart be

satisfied with but the waste of what lies so near us.”

The “dear doctor” to whom these letters were addressed was Dr. T. O.

Porter, with whom their author afterwards formed a literary partnership.

The little bridge under which they were written, with its stone seat, its

“floor of running water,” its nest of swallows, and its diminutive

fresh-water lobster--which reminded Willis of Talleyrand--deserves

remembering with Pope’s famous grotto at Twickenham. Like Cowley, Willis

acknowledged himself fond of little things. He disliked the ocean and

great rivers,--though he finally came to live on the banks of one. He

loved small streams and narrow valleys. The lawny, homelike scenery of the

Owego was just suited to his taste. Above all things in nature, he

delighted in running water, which had an affinity with his own lively and

sparkling temper. “À l’Abri” was, and remains, a thoroughly enjoyable

book, chatty, pleasantly digressive, and filled with sunshine and the air

of out-doors. It must be confessed that Willis was something of a cockney

in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape

gardener than as a naturalist. He had not the intense passion for her, the

rapt communion with her, of elect spirits like Wordsworth and Thoreau. She

furnished him rather with a hundred pretty and playful analogies, a

hundred texts for little sermons on cheerfulness and content, in which he

rode his fancy sometimes too far and let his sentiment answer too quickly

to trifling provocations. He must have been but an amateurish farmer, too,

ordering his breakfast served under a balsam fir, and selling his crops

“for the oddity of the sensation.” Naturally, except in literary harvests,

his farm did not pay, though he was always exclaiming with grateful

surprise at the bounty of nature in yielding him actual buckwheat, in

addition to the health, amusement, and moral lessons derived in the

process of cultivating that interesting grain. One suspects that he grew

more flowers of speech than any grosser product from his two hundred

acres. If the crows ate his corn in the blade, he merely philosophized,

“Think what times we live in, when even the crows are obliged to

anticipate their income!” If the red heifer chewed up a lace cape

bleaching on the lawn, he humorously excused the heifer on account of the

drought. If the boys reported that the deer were browsing in troops on his

buckwheat, by the light of the moon, he answered, “Let them!” One is

reminded by this last discouragement to agriculture that Owego was still

in the backwoods. Some of the most interesting passages in the letters

describe the wild life of the lumbermen, whose rafts glided past the

Glenmary meadows “like a singing and swearing phantom of an unfinished

barn,” and whose fires by night lit up the bends of the Susquehanna,

where their huge flotillas lay moored. Willis once descended the river on

the top of a freshet in a steamboat of light draught, but his usual way of

coming and going was by stage over very rough roads, the Erie railway

having not as yet penetrated those solitudes. Another picturesque feature

of the neighborhood were the forest fires, the “blazing and innumerable

pillars swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness,

while the eye could see far into their depths.” This phenomenon furnished

a vivid description for his story, “The Picker and Piler,” contributed to

the “Corsair” of March 16, 1839, and to the April number of the “New

Monthly” for the same year, the plot of which seems to have been furnished

him by Rand, the portrait painter, to whom Willis sat in London in 1835,

and who regaled him during the sittings with stories of wild adventure.

Willis kept up communication with the great world by frequent trips to New

York, and by frequent visits from his metropolitan friends to Glenmary.

Neither was he by any means cut off from civilization at home. He explains

to the doctor in one of his letters that Owego, two miles away, and even

the village of Canewana, a mile nearer, are within the latitude of silver

forks and their accompanying vanities, morning calls, cards, dinner

giving, champagne, and French bonnets. R. H. Stoddard, the poet, who

visited Glenmary in the fall of 1841, with Mr. Mackay, a congressman from

New York, has given a pleasant reminiscence of his pilgrimage, from which

I quote the following interior:--

“The cottage,” he says, “had within it and about it the evidences of

a subtle, nice, clear refinement; of a thought that, even out of the

solitude of a rural life, could frame the pleasant things that make

the four and twenty hours turn to soft and kindly ways.… Mr. Willis

opened the door, received us cordially; and we found, in his

conversation and in such observation of all around us as a guest

might in propriety make, the hours of the evening as brilliant

in-doors as without. That thoroughly well-bred lady, so unpretending

and gentle, was at the table; at her feet, a large greyhound. On the

side table stood a large tulip-shaped vase of stained glass, whose

burden was, of course, bright flowers. There was everywhere copious

evidence that it was a home for literature. The books were abundant

and were gayly set.… And there was a miniature of lovely Mrs.

Willis. It was painted by Saunders, who had been a pet of the King

of Hanover. His exquisite work deserved the smile of royalty and,

what is better, of beauty. Amidst such scenes and the conversation

which came of such associations, our night went on. We left the lawn

of Glenmary with the memories of a night of romance.… Mr. Willis

belonged to a past school of men. He had the ways and tastes of a

more isolated and restricted society than belongs to our day, when

fortunes are fusing men and manners into one great glittering ball

that rolls through the year, before us and over us; but Mr.

Willis--whether in his early days, when the prince regent ruled, or

in our day, when we all rule, monarchs of ephemera--was an author

whose writings have added to what Doctor Johnson calls ‘the gayety

of mankind.’ He believed them better and higher and more

philosophical than this; and I believe there was truth and right in

his thought.”

The “Letters from Under a Bridge” are so heartsome in feeling and so much

mellower and more leisurely in style than Willis’s later work, that one

naturally speculates, in reading them, as to what might have been the

effect upon his literary product had fortune granted his wish, to be

allowed to end his days at Glenmary. Would study and the quiet of nature

have ripened it to something deeper and richer than anything that he has

left? Or would he have grown rusty with absence from the stir of cities

and the gay society that had hitherto seemed his congenial element? It is

impossible to answer this question with confidence. Undoubtedly his later

work would have been other and better than it was if he had had the time

to select and condense. He would have written more and scribbled less.

But whether he would ever have excelled the best parts of his earlier

writings is doubtful. His talent was of the kind which discipline does not

always improve. It was the expression of his temperament, fresh, facile,

spontaneous, but impatient of continuance. He was best at a dash--a

sketch, or a short tale. His gift was of the sort that shows more

gracefully in youth than age. _Idem manebat neque idem decebat._ It is not

improbable that, even under the most favoring conditions, he would have

kept on writing Jottings, Loiterings, Hurrygraphs, etc., lacking, as he

evidently did, the power of construction required for a large and serious

work. But this speculation is perhaps an idle one. Whether or not it lay

in his nature to sing or to say that “something” of which Ben Jonson

tells, “that must and shall be sung high and aloof,” fate denied him the

proof. His necessities drove him back to the city and the editor’s chair,

to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. Possibly the finer work

might have shaped itself in silence, but “not in these noises.” Meanwhile

his present content found utterance in his “Reverie at Glenmary,”--a

single breath of gratitude to God,--the most sincerely devout of all his

religious poems, and pathetic when one reflects how soon the sheltered

happiness for which it gives thanks was to pass away.

Not long after his return to America, he had begun to try his hand at play

writing. The “Mirror” of August 19, 1837, gave passages from a five act

tragedy that he had lately completed, “Bianca Visconti, or the Heart

Overtasked,” with the announcement that it was to be acted at the Park

Theatre on the 24th instant. It was founded upon the life of Francesco

Sforza, a soldier of fortune in the fourteenth century, who obtained the

hand of Bianca, daughter to the Duke of Milan, and thereby succeeded to

the duchy. The play was composed expressly for Josephine Clifton, a

popular actress of some talent, and of great physical force and beauty of

the large, queenly type, who took the part of the heroine. The _rôle_ of

Pasquali, “a whimsical poet,” was written for Harry Placide, a favorite

player in his generation, whose “Grandfather Whitehead” and other

impersonations, humorous or pathetic, are still affectionately remembered

by old play-goers. When this tragedy was published in the spring of 1839,

with some changes in the fifth act, the “Mirror” declared that its success

upon the stage had been complete. This was an overstatement, but whatever

partial success or qualified failure it may have met with on its first

representation, Willis felt sufficiently encouraged to persevere in his

dramatic experiments. In a private letter from New York, December 15,

1838, he said that Colman had just given him $300 for an edition of

“Bianca,” which he considered a good price, as Epes Sargent had sold his

“Velasco” for $60. Wallack, he continues, who managed the National, the

rival theatre to the Park, was full of admiration of it, and was coming to

see the whole play rehearsed. Willis was going to charge him $1,000 for

the use of it, and a benefit which, he calculated, would be equal to from

$500 to $700 more. On the 1st of September, 1837, just after the first

representation of “Bianca” at the Park, Willis entered into an agreement

with its manager, Turner Merritt, by which the latter agreed to pay him

$1,000, one year from date, provided he should write a comedy for Miss

Clifton, pronounced successful by her after three months’ acting. In

pursuance of this agreement, he had ready in two months “The Betrothal,” a

comedy, which was announced in the “Mirror” of November 25th as to be

acted at the Park on the Monday following. The notice added that the play

would probably take with the public, as it had pleased the actors,--a good

criterion. “The Betrothal,” however, was unequivocally damned, much to

Willis’s mortification, though not to his permanent discouragement. The

text of this play was never published, nor was that of another comedy,

“Imei, the Jew,” with which he was busy in January, 1839, and of which he

seems to have finished only a few scenes. Rumors were in circulation that

Willis had sued Miss Clifton for failing to complete the engagement in the

matter of “The Betrothal,” but these were officially contradicted in the

“Mirror.” He had better luck with another comedy, successively entitled

“Dying for Him,” “The Usurer Matched,” and “Tortesa the Usurer,” based on

the Florentine story of Genevra d’Amori and written with more care than

his two previous attempts. He prepared the way for its representation by

printing four installments of it in the “Mirror;” and about a year after

the first of these appeared it was put on at the National, April 8, 1839,

with Wallack cast for Tortesa, the principal character. It ran four times

the first week, and kept the stage to the 20th, “being received,” said the

“Mirror,” “with acclamations by one of the most crowded and fashionable

audiences ever assembled within the walls of a theatre.” In spite of this

glowing language, “Tortesa” seems to have had a _succès d’estime_ merely.

Wallack had agreed to pay the author one half the proceeds of the fourth,

ninth, thirteenth, and eighteenth nights, after deducting $300 each night

for expenses. If it was produced in England, Willis was to have one third

of the proceeds of the fourth, eighth, and twelfth performances there.

Wallack did bring it out at the Surrey Theatre in London, in August of

this same year. Willis was in England at the time and wrote to Dr. Porter

that it had had “a splendid run--crammed houses every night.” It shared

the honors of the “first night” with Willis’s old adversary, Captain

Marryat, whose “Phantom Ship” was the afterpiece. All this brought the

author nothing but empty glory, as Wallack was distressed for money and

could not afford to pay him his one third share of the profits. “So I gave

it up,” wrote Willis, “and he pocketed the whole. By the way,” he adds, “I

have two more nights at the National which I authorize you to look after

and receive for me. The thirteenth and eighteenth representations remain

for me. Will you see if you can get Kean or Vandenhoff in for Angelo on

those nights? I have seen a great deal of Kean since I have been here, and

he is truly a good fellow and a great actor. He breakfasted with us a day

or two ago and Mary was very much interested that he should do well in

America. I have given Vandenhoff ‘Bianca’ for himself and daughter to

play in America. She is a fine, handsome girl, but I have not seen her

play.”

These two plays of Willis did not add many leaves to his laurels. His

genius was undramatic; in his stories the dramatic element is not the most

pronounced. Both “Bianca” and “Tortesa” have passages which are good as

poetry or declamation, and here and there occur bits of spirited dialogue;

but in general the characters are only half vitalized, the situations are

not firmly grasped and presented, and the language is stilted. In short,

they are book plays merely, with nothing to distinguish them from the

numerous experiments of other American literary gentlemen who have essayed

to feed the stage with manuscripts from their library tables. In “Bianca

Visconti” the main situation--the heroine’s connivance at her brother’s

murder, in order that her husband might become Duke of Milan--is strongly

imagined but feebly carried out. One cannot help thinking how Victor Hugo,

for instance, would have dealt with this motive. “Tortesa the Usurer”

seems to be made up of hints from Shakespeare. The hero has some slight

resemblance to Shylock; the heroine drinks a sleeping potion, like Juliet,

to escape an odious marriage; and in the last act, which is constructed

with some skill, she stands in the frame of a picture, like Hermione in

“Winter’s Tale,” though with a different purpose.

Willis’s official connection with the “New York Mirror” had stopped with

the termination of his “Pencillings,” and after January 16, 1836, his name

ceased to appear at the head of the editorial column. His contributions,

however, as we have seen, went on, and included not only “Letters from

Under a Bridge,” but poems and miscellaneous correspondence, besides a

half dozen of stories, afterwards collected in “Romance of Travel.” The

verse contributions were added to the American edition of “Melanie,” 1837,

which contained a number of things written since the appearance of the

English edition two years previous. Notable among these were “Lines on

Leaving Europe,” “To a Face Beloved,”--both of which have been

mentioned,--“To Ermengarde,” and a song-like little piece entitled

“Spring,” the opening lines of which are especially Willisy:--

“The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May,

With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers;

And with it comes a thirst to be away,

Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours.”

There are evidences in Willis’s private correspondence, about this time,

of some coolness between himself and General Morris, which appears to have

originated, or perhaps to have found expression in a series of three

letters signed “Veritas,” written from London and printed in the “Mirror,”

in the fall of 1838. These letters, after taking the “Mirror” to task for

misleading the American public by the false pictures of London society

given in the “Pencillings,” proceeded to set its readers right, in a

series of the coarsest and most slanderous little biographies of English

men and women of letters, retailing with unction all the gossip of the

clubs about Lady Blessington, Count d’Orsay, the Bulwers, Disraeli, Mrs.

Norton, Miss Landon, Fraser, and many others. Some of these had been

Willis’s friends; others he had never met; but he wrote an indignant

rejoinder to the “Mirror” of November 10th, denying, out and out, many of

the lies in “Veritas’s” communication, and explaining away some of the

misrepresentations and exaggerations. This letter Morris prefaced with an

editorial note in which he said that he had been much censured on account

of the “Pencillings,” and, therefore, “the object of these letters was to

disabuse the public mind in this country of what seemed to the author a

wrong and injurious impression with regard to the position in English

society of certain distinguished but unworthy characters, whose example

and many of whose writings are of a pernicious tendency. With one or two

exceptions, we believe that our correspondent has merely stated well

attested facts.” One of these exceptions was the slander upon Miss Landon,

for printing which Morris apologized. This partial indorsement of

“Veritas” by the editor naturally displeased Willis; and naturally, too,

he was pleased by an answer to it by Dr. Porter, in the “Spirit of the

Times,” which was then edited by his brother, William T. Porter, “the tall

son of York,” and with which Dr. Porter himself was editorially connected.

“The Skylight letter,” Willis writes to the latter, “was capitally done,

and the ‘Mirror’ was touched on all its sore places to a charm. My brother

was in New York just after and called at the office, and the fury the

General was in will amuse him for the next six months. Morris called you a

gallipot, said it was a poor article, and will hurt your paper, and all

that; but sits down and writes _me_ a most affectionate letter of four

foolscap pages, denying all possible thought of me in the London matter,

and swearing he was my defender and best friend.” Elsewhere in his

correspondence with Dr. Porter, Willis expresses some doubts as to the

sincerity of Morris’s friendship, and seems to suspect that it was more

than half policy and a desire to exploit him. It does not appear that this

little misunderstanding ever came to a breach. The “Mirror” continued

most courteous in its tone towards Willis, and its editor became and

remained, till his death, one of his closest friends. But for a time

Willis felt inclined to draw off, and to find some other avenue through

which to address his public. This feeling took shape in December, 1838, in

his acceptance of a proposal from Dr. Porter to join him in establishing a

weekly paper. The “Corsair,” which was the outcome of this arrangement,

was, like “Brother Jonathan” and the “New World,” one of the crop of

weeklies which sprang up in the wake of the first transatlantic steamers.

On May 19, 1838, the Great Western, the first steam vessel that had

crossed the ocean, weighed anchor in New York harbor for her return trip.

A company of gentlemen, among whom were Chevalier Wikoff and General

Morris, were on board by invitation and accompanied the ship as far as

Sandy Hook, where they were taken off by a pilot. It may perhaps have

occurred to the general at the time, that here was what would work a

change in the conditions of American journalism. It was now possible to

get the freshest supply from the London literary market within a

fortnight, and the news of Europe before it was cold. Willis and Porter

proposed frankly to live on the plunder of this foreign harvest; and since

there was no international copyright, to raise the black flag, and take

reprisals wherever they could find them. In a letter to his intending

partner, dated at Owego, Christmas eve, 1838, he proposed to call their

venture the “Pirate,” and sent the following draft of a prospectus:--

THE PIRATE,

A GAZETTE OF LITERATURE, FASHION, AND NOVELTY.

T. O. Porter and N. P. Willis propose to issue weekly, in the city

of New York, a paper of the above designation and character. It is

their design, as editors, to present as amusing a paper as can be

made from the current wit, humor, and literature of the world; to

give dramatic criticisms without fear or favor; to hold up the age

in its fashions, its eccentricities, and its amusements; to take

advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical

law of copyright; and in the name of American authors (for our own

benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers,

the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in France,

England, and Germany. As to original American productions, we shall,

as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing (that is

good), holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and

Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for

Halleck and Irving.

“If anybody says the name is undignified,” writes Willis,

“tell them there are very few dignified people in the world,

and still _fewer lovers_ of dignity, and by the Lord, we

must live by the _many_. Then again we want a root, a

reason, a rail, a runner to start upon, and this bloody

copyright will answer the purpose. People will say, ‘Why,

damme, Willis can’t get paid for his books because the law

won’t protect him, so he has hauled his wind, and joined the

people that robbed him.’”

Willis felt very bitterly the absence of an international copyright. By

the act of 1838, the English Parliament, acting in self-defense, had

refused to protect any longer the literary property of American authors,

until America should have the decency to reciprocate. This cut double upon

the American author. It deprived him of any gain from the circulation of

his writings in England, and it discouraged native literature by flooding

this country with cheap reprints of English books, for the copy of which

the American publisher paid nothing. The former loss would not have been

serious to many American writers at that date, possibly not to so very

many even now. But England had been Willis’s best market, literary work in

America was wretchedly paid, and he saw starvation staring him in the

face.

The “Pirate” was finally toned down into the “Corsair,” and a prospectus

which was a modification of the one drafted by Willis in the above letter

was printed and circulated in January, 1839. He sent one to Henry Clay,

and begged him to mention the “Corsair” in his argument on the copyright,

as a good comment on the state of the law. Mr. Clay replied in a very

polite letter, giving his views upon the copyright question, and inclosing

his subscription. The office of the “Corsair” was in the Astor House, No.

8 Barclay Street. The first number was published March 15, 1839, and the

last (No. 52) March 7, 1840. At the head of the sheet was a rakish looking

craft under full sail, and Willis led off with a truculent editorial, “The

Quarter Deck” proclaiming the policy of the new paper. To the earlier

numbers he contributed art notes and miscellaneous chat, “The Pencil,”

“The Gallery,” “The Divan,” etc.; two papers on autographs; a “Letter from

Under a Bridge,” a generic name that he gave to much correspondence about

this time, not comprised in the original “Letters”; some reminiscences of

Miss Landon as “The Departed Improvisatrice,” and a very harsh review,

“Paulding the Author Disinterred.” This last was unlike Willis, who was

almost always kind in his notices of brother authors, and it provoked much

unfavorable comment, particularly a rejoinder in the “Courier and

Enquirer,” by Colonel James Watson Webb, a gentleman who afterwards fell

foul of Willis in various ways. In this article he held him up to scorn

as a writer “who revels on the cut of a coat or the ottomans of a lady’s

boudoir, and delights in the soft shades of a glen;” and whose works were

only fit to “make the papillotes of ladies’ chambermaids.” Willis had an

unaffected disrelish for Paulding’s writings, which he thought coarse and

pointless. But the Secretary of the Navy was an old man, whose books

belonged already to the past, and it was ungracious to disturb his age

with taunts about their obsoleteness. One suspects, in reading this

review, that its writer had some personal grudge against the author of

“The Dutchman’s Fireside.”

Willis also contributed to the “Corsair” “A Story Writ for the Beautiful,”

which he described as a “gay, off-hand tale,” and never reprinted. It is a

rather nonsensical yarn, but has one pretty passage in it descriptive of

the end of a ball,--perhaps at Devonshire House?--where the servants raise

the balcony awnings to let in the dawn, and the ladies walk in the garden,

“sprinkling their gloves with picking wet roses.”

On May 20, 1839, Willis sailed for England on the packet ship Gladiator.

His wife accompanied him, and, on landing, they were met by the news that

her father, General Stace, had died a week before their arrival. This

made their stay in England, which was protracted to April, 1840, a sad

one in many respects, and of course a quiet one. They passed most of the

time with relatives of Mrs. Willis at Old Charlton, Kent, after a short

visit to her sister Anne, who was married to the Rev. William Vincent, son

of the vicar of Bolney Priory, in Sussex. Willis had his hands full of

literary business which required his presence frequently in London,

Ireland, and elsewhere. Among other things, he had contracted with Virtue

to furnish the letterpress for an illustrated work on Canada, and another

on Ireland, uniform with the “American Scenery.” He was to write 240 pages

for each, and to be paid in all £950. By some five or six weeks of hard

work he finished the Canadian book in August, and then started for a tour

in Ireland preparatory to writing up its scenery. He left Mrs. Willis at

Dublin, while he recrossed to Scotland, and took in the famous tournament

at Eglintoun Castle, which filled the land for months with its noise of

preparation, and ended in fizzle and rain-water. Of this he gave a capital

description in his letter to the “Corsair,” “My Adventures at the

Tournament.” Mrs. Willis remained with some kinsfolk of her mother, at

Borrmount Lodge, near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while her husband spent

a fortnight in doing the Lakes of Killarney and other show places in the

south of the island. He wrote to her there from Tarbert-on-the-Shannon,

September 13th:--

“The poverty on this side Ireland makes me sick at the stomach. Such

a God-and-man-abandoned collection of disease and misery I never

believed possible. Death and disease seem clutching their victims

away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through

their last agony in the streets--unpitied. How people can ride in

carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this

great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak

pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their

skinny hands,--poor devils!”

Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of

Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know

anything about it? Fourteen days! All the knowledge he possesses of

Ireland might have been acquired in fourteen hours.” Willis might have

retorted by asking what a Scotchman could know about the Valley of

Wyoming. Or he might have pointed out that, even as early as 1839,

Americans had fuller sources of information about Ireland than they found

altogether comfortable. After three weeks more of touring in that ragged

commonwealth, he returned with his wife to England.

Bolney was but twelve miles from Brighton, where the Wallacks were

staying, and while visiting at the former place Willis had run across

country and taken dinner with them. In November he spent a few days at

Brighton, where he lodged at the Ship Hotel, found several old

acquaintances,--Lady Stepney and Lady Georgiana Fane among them,--and made

some new ones. At a dinner at Lady Macdonald’s he met Charles Kemble, the

actor, and Horace Smith, of the “Rejected Addresses,” whose brother James

he had known at Lady Blessington’s four years ago. One of Willis’s

cherished plans had been to spend the winter in Spain, a country rich in

matter for future pencillings, but this scheme he had to forego, Ireland

proving a longer job than he had anticipated. The last day of 1839 found

him still at Charlton, working four hours a day on the book, and in

January and February he had to make another trip to Ireland, visiting the

Giant’s Causeway and other celebrated bits of scenery in the north. Lady

Georgiana Fane had procured him a letter from her father, the old Earl of

Westmoreland, to Lord Ebrington, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which

Willis was described as “a gentleman of fortune, likely to attain to the

presidency”! He dined with Lord Ebrington at Dublin, and, happening to be

there at the time of the ball given in honor of the queen’s wedding, he

made a letter of it for the “Corsair,” afterwards included in “Sketches of

Travel.”

The three books on American, Canadian, and Irish scenery were hack work,

and there is, of course, little of personal or purely literary interest in

them. They were written, however, with more taste and animation than the

run of subscription books of the kind. Willis was a natural traveler, with

a good eye for landscape effects, and the best chapters are those

descriptive of spots with which he was already familiar, Niagara, the

Hudson, Trenton Falls, Saratoga, and the like. Here he occasionally drew

on his “Inklings.” For places that he had not visited he trusted to the

narratives of former travelers, such as President Dwight, John Bartram,

and Peter Kalm. The description of the White Mountains was taken mainly

from a friend’s manuscript diary; and for statistics and local legends he

went to the authorities. The American book contained, among its two

hundred and forty-two engravings, a view from Glenmary lawn and another of

Undercliff, General Morris’s place on the Hudson. The last gave Willis

opportunity for a eulogy on his former partner, and quotations from his

songs. “Canadian Scenery” was “lifted,” almost entire, from the narratives

of Charlevoix, Adair, Heriot, Hodgson, Murray, Talbot, Cockburn, and

other travelers and historians--of course with ample acknowledgments. It

was not so purely descriptive as the American book, but contained chapters

on the native Indians, the history of the settlement of the country, the

present condition of the inhabitants, sporting, immigration, etc. In fact,

there is very little of Willis in the book. In “The Scenery and

Antiquities of Ireland” he had the assistance of Mr. J. Sterling Coyne,

who prepared the whole of the second volume and a part of the first,

Willis’s share consisting only of descriptions of the North of Ireland, a

portion of Connemara, the Shannon, Limerick, and Waterford.

Before leaving America he had arranged with Colman for the publication of

“The Tent Pitched” (“À l’Abri”), “Tales of Five Lands” (“Romance of

Travel”), and “The Usurer Matched.” He was to have twenty per cent. on

sales, and received $2,000 on account in advance. Meanwhile the Longmans

offered him £200 for “Romance of Travel,” if published in advance of the

American edition. Willis wrote to Dr. Porter, July 26, 1839, to delay the

Colman publication. “If it is printed in America before I get the sheets

here, I lose exactly $1,000. I trust in Heaven you have not forgotten my

earnest injunctions on this subject. A London publisher will buy it if a

published copy has not come over, else he may have it for nothing.” The

book was accordingly published first in London, in January, 1840, in three

volumes, with the title “Loiterings of Travel,” and, later in the same

year, in America, as “Romance of Travel,” in a single volume, very

shabbily printed. Virtue also paid him £50 for an English edition of “À

l’Abri,” with illustrations by Bartlett. A fourth London edition of

“Pencillings,” with four illustrations, was coming out, and, finally,

Cunningham, Macrone’s successor, printed an English edition of “Bianca

Visconti” and “Tortesa” as “Two Ways of Dying for a Husband.” This was

published on half profits, and Willis expected to make about £50 from it.

Serjeant Talfourd, the author of “Ion,” wrote him a complimentary letter

on its appearance. “My literary receipts in England this year,” wrote

Willis to Dr. Porter, on the last day of 1839, “will amount to $7,500, all

gone for expenses, back debts, etc.”

“Romance of Travel” was a collection of seven stories contributed to the

“Mirror,” the “New Monthly,” and the “Corsair.” They were crowded with

duels, intrigues, disguises, escapades, assassinations, masked balls, lost

heirs, and all the stock properties of the romancer’s art. The view of

life which they presented was unreal to the verge of the fantastic, but

they abounded in descriptions of great elegance and even beauty, and the

narrative went trippingly along. Willis had many of the gifts of the born

_raconteur_. He lacked a large constructiveness, but in the minor graces

of the story-teller he was always happy. He was skillful in managing the

_callida junctura_, good at a start, a transition, or a finish. One must

not look in these artificial fictions for truthful delineation of

character, or expect to have his emotions deeply stirred. The tragic

incidents, especially, fail in the time-honored Aristotelian requirement.

They are exciting enough, in a way, but move neither pity nor terror. The

high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the

bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness.

Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the

extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air of

_vraisemblance_. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta

Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have

been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by

digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a

portrait of the author.” From this defect and from the author’s light way

of telling his stories, it followed that the more serious of these carried

no conviction of reality to the reader’s mind. “Violanta Cesarini” is the

history of a humpbacked artist, who turns out to be the heir to the

estates of a Roman noble, thereby supplanting his sister, but enabling her

to marry his chum, a poor artist, with whom she was secretly in love. The

outlines of the plot were from a true story told him by Lady Blessington,

but he added the love passages and, of course, all the particulars in the

development of the tale. “Paletto’s Bride” was the legend of a Venetian

gondolier, who made--and as suddenly lost--a fortune in a single night’s

play, figured as a mysterious unknown in the high society of Florence, and

carried off a titled beauty to share his home among the lagoons. “The

Bandit of Austria” was a modification of a story related to Willis by

D’Orsay. The heroine was a Hungarian countess, who had run off with a

famous outlaw. The latter having been killed by the Austrian police, the

lady, without wasting much time in unavailing regrets, falls in love with

the narrator’s handsome English page (a glorified William Michell?), and

is wedded to him after a series of extraordinary adventures. Willis worked

in here a striking description of the grotto of Adelsberg, in which the

most effective scene of the story takes place. “Lady Ravelgold” is a tale

of English high life. The hero is a young London banker, who proves in the

end to be a count of the Russian Empire, and the inheritor of vast

possessions in that conveniently indefinite country. Three high-born

beauties are desperately enamored of him, among them a mother and

daughter, the latter of whom ultimately gets him. As in “Ernest Clay,”

and, in fact, in nearly all Willis’s stories of high life, it is the women

who make love to the men. The scene of the garden party at “Rose Eden” was

suggested by a _fête champêtre_ at Gore House, and the delicious picture

of Lady Ravelgold’s boudoir was doubtless borrowed from the same mansion.

The high-piled luxuriance of the upholstery in these “Romances of Travel,”

their _nonchalant_ young heroes, their jeweled and embroidered heroines,

with Aladdin-like resources in the way of palaces, gardens, retainers, and

stalactite caverns, point to “Vivian Grey” and the other expensive

fictions of the youthful Disraeli as Willis’s nearest models. Upon the

whole, the best story in the book is “Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice,”

which was more within the natural compass of Willis’s talent. It has a

malicious irony that reminds one of “Beppo” and the “Decameron,” and it is

not without an undercurrent of pathos.

In spite of his other literary preoccupations he found time to write a

series of weekly or fortnightly letters to the “Corsair,”--“Jottings down

in London,”--a portion of which stand in his collected writings as

“Passages from an Epistolary Journal.” They are naturally not as fresh as

the earlier “Pencillings,” though very good foreign correspondence of an

ephemeral sort. In search of matter for these letters, Willis went about a

good deal in London. He visited the theatres and the House of Commons,

looked up his old acquaintances of 1835, was present at a reception to the

Persian ambassadors at Lady Morgan’s,--where he saw Mrs. Norton

again,--dined with the Nawaub of Oude, went to a public dinner given to

Macready at the Freemasons’ Tavern,--where he sat next Samuel Lover,--to a

ball at Almack’s, and a tournament in St. John’s Wood. Disraeli walked

home with him from a ball and said he was going to Niagara on his wedding

trip. Willis noted some changes in England since his first visit. Among

other things William IV. was dead and Victoria on the throne, and the

London shops had increased greatly in splendor.

One of the most interesting results of this second stay in England was his

meeting with Thackeray--then a young and comparatively unknown writer--and

his engaging him as a contributor to the “Corsair,” a stroke of

journalistic enterprise which ought to have prolonged the life of that

piratical journal, but did not. In a private letter to Dr. Porter, dated

July 26th, Willis wrote:--

“I have engaged a contributor to the ‘Corsair.’ Who do you think?

The author of ‘Yellowplush’ and ‘Major Gahagan.’ I have mentioned it

in my jottings, that our readers may know all about it. He has gone

to Paris, and will write letters from there, and afterwards from

London, for a guinea a _close column_ of the ‘Corsair’--cheaper than

I ever did anything in my life. I will see that he is paid for a

while to see how you like him. For myself, I think him the very best

periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature, too.

I take the responsibility of it. You will hear from him soon.”

The mention in the jottings here referred to appeared in the “Corsair” of

August 24th.

“One of my first inquiries in London was touching the authorship of

‘The Yellowplush Papers’ and the ‘Reminiscences of Major

Gahagan,’--the only things in periodical literature, except the

‘Pickwick Papers,’ for which I looked with any interest or

eagerness. The author, Mr. Thackeray, breakfasted with me yesterday,

and the ‘Corsair’ will be delighted, I am sure, to hear that I have

engaged this cleverest and most gifted of the magazine-writers of

London to become _a regular correspondent of the ‘Corsair.’_ He

left London for Paris the day after, and having resided in that city

for many years, his letters thence will be pictures of life in

France, done with a bolder and more trenchant pen than has yet

attempted the subject. He will present a long letter every week, and

you will agree with me that he is no common acquisition. Thackeray

is a tall, athletic man of about thirty-five, with a look of talent

that could never be mistaken. He has taken to literature after

having spent a very large inheritance; but in throwing away the

gifts of fortune, he has cultivated his natural talents very highly,

and is one of the most accomplished draftsmen in England, as well as

the cleverest and most brilliant of periodical writers. He has been

the principal critic for the ‘Times,’ and writes for ‘Fraser’ and

‘Blackwood.’ You will hear from him by the first steamer after his

arrival in Paris, and thenceforward regularly.”

The same number contained Thackeray’s first letter, dated at Paris, Hôtel

Mirabeau, July 25, 1839, and concluding with a characteristic little

address to the editor, in which he speaks of his feelings “in finding good

friends and listeners among strangers far, far away--in receiving from

beyond seas kind crumbs of comfort for our hungry vanities.” These letters

were signed T. T. (Timothy Titcomb), and eight of them in all were

published in the “Corsair.” A few appear in Thackeray’s collected works in

a volume entitled “The Paris Sketch Book,” and all of them, with a few

changes, in “The Student’s Quarter; or Paris Five and Thirty Years since,”

published by Hotten after Thackeray’s death. Thackeray humorously alludes

to this episode in his early literary struggles in his novel of “Philip,”

the hero of which contributes a weekly letter, signed “Philalethes,” to a

fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten

Thousand.” “Political treatises,” writes the excellent Dr. Firmin to his

son, “are not so much wanted as personal news, regarding the notabilities

of London.” This description of the “Mirror” pointed, of course, at

Willis’s authorship of the phrase, “The Upper Ten Thousand.”

It may be not uninteresting to compare Thackeray’s opinion of Willis with

Willis’s impressions of Thackeray. The author of the “Book of Snobs” paid

his respects twice, at least, in print to the author of “Pencillings by

the Way:” once in a review of “Dashes at Life” in the “Edinburgh” for

October, 1845, and again in an article “On an American Traveler,” being

the sixth number of “The Proser,” contributed to the nineteenth volume of

“Punch” (1850), and occasioned by Willis’s “People I have Met.” In both of

these papers he quizzes Willis, though not unkindly. He laughs especially

at his fashion in “Ernest Clay,” of representing the aristocratic English

dames as all throwing themselves at the head of the conquering young

genius who writes for the magazines.

“The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis

assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of

free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces

with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a

man by being a famous _Free Pencil_ may achieve a similar

distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost

every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”

“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose

reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one

is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes

it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant

descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes

it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own

expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of

us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the

duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the

strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the

odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other,

a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have

whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn

memories of England’s fairest daughters. When the female English

aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the

whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the

melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the

heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and

asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster

going to show up _me_?’”

Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the

Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove

with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt

British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian

person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and

by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for

Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and

her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the

cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest

mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”--

“There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by

the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not

content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne--not

for a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it

and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom

Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger

and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but

isn’t this _un peu fort_, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described

as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M.

for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her

husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your

part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little

prejudices?”

In April, 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Willis sailed for America, taking with them

Miss Bessie Stace, a younger sister of Mrs. Willis, who was to make them a

visit at Owego. The “Corsair” had not been a success financially, and Dr.

Porter had become discouraged and discontinued publication in March,

transferring his subscription list to the “Albion.” Since the

establishment of the paper, a year before, Willis had ceased his

contributions to the New York “Mirror,” and he did not resume them until

the end of 1842. But meanwhile he was not left without a market for his

literary wares. Just before leaving England he had received a letter from

Mr. J. Gregg Wilson, the publisher of “Brother Jonathan,” a new weekly

printed in New York, with a circulation of some twenty thousand,

informing him of the “Corsair’s” suspension, expressing a warm admiration

for his talents, and inviting him to write the “Brother Jonathan” a weekly

letter, a column in length, for which he promised to pay him at the

highest current rates. To this paper Willis contributed about a year and a

half, or up to September, 1841. His humorous poem, “Lady Jane,” was

published in installments in the “Dollar,” the monthly edition of “Brother

Jonathan.” With both of these periodicals he had a _quasi_ editorial

connection, though the real editor was Mr. H. Hastings Weld. He received

similar invitations from the two monthlies, “Graham’s Magazine” and

“Godey’s Lady’s Book,” which were paying their contributors--among whom

were nearly all the principal writers in the country--prices hitherto

unknown to American periodicals. Willis was paid at the rate of $50 for an

article of four printed pages of the “Lady’s Book,”--less, no doubt, than

a writer of equal reputation could command now, but regarded as wildly

munificent in 1841. Twelve dollars a page were the regular rates of both

these magazines. “The burst on author-land of Graham’s and Godey’s liberal

prices,” said Willis, “was like a sunrise without a dawn.” Mr. Charles T.

Congdon, in his interesting “Reminiscences of a Journalist,” says that

“Mr. Willis was the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid. At

one time, about 1842, he was writing four articles monthly for four

magazines, and receiving $100 each.” This means an income of $4,800 a

year, but the strain required to keep up such a rate of production must

tax the powers of the readiest writer, and it was no wonder if the product

was of very uneven excellence. The four magazines here referred to were

undoubtedly the “Mirror,” “Graham’s,” “Godey’s,” and “The Ladies’

Companion,” of which Mrs. Sigourney was for a time the editor, and to

which Willis contributed in 1842 and 1843 a half dozen stories and a few

“Passages from Correspondence” and “Leaves from a Table Book.” Two of

these stories are not found among his collected writings: “Poyntz’s Aunt,”

a Saratoga tale, which has been mentioned before, and “Fitz Powys and the

Nun, or Diplomacy in High Life,” a very impossible fiction, and not worth

describing. Such of the “Leaves” and “Scraps” as deserved preserving found

their way into “Ephemera.” His contributions to “Godey’s” began with the

January number for 1842, and continued, though with greatly diminished

frequency, till January, 1850. During the first year he had an article in

nearly every number, most of them stories. For “Graham’s” he began to

write in January, 1843, and contributed occasionally as late as 1851.

“The Marquis in Petticoats” and “Broadway; A Sketch” were published in

1843 in Epes Sargent’s short-lived magazine; “The Power of an Injured

Look” in the “Gift” for 1845, an annual issued in Philadelphia. He edited

another annual, the “Opal” for 1844, and wrote articles of various kinds

for other periodicals. During the two years and a half from January, 1842,

to June, 1844, he published, all in all, some forty stories, collected,

with two or three exceptions, in “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.”

Willis was at this time, beyond a doubt, the most popular, best paid, and

in every way most successful magazinist that America had yet seen. He

commanded the sympathy of his readers more than any other periodical

writer of his day, and his reputation almost amounted to fame. Colonel

Higginson tells a story, illustrating his vogue, about a solid commercial

gentleman in Boston, who, finding himself by chance at some literary

dinner or tea, is reported to have entered into the spirit of the occasion

by saying that “he guessed Gō-ēthe was the N. P. Willis of Germany.”

Willis lived at Owego till 1842, and continued to date his letters to

“Brother Jonathan,” “Graham’s,” etc., “from under a bridge.” He had

expected something like £1,000 from General Stace’s estate, but it yielded

him nothing. His publisher failed about this time, and his arrangement

with “Brother Jonathan” coming to an end, he engaged with a Washington

paper, the “National Intelligencer,” to send it fortnightly correspondence

from New York. All these causes combined made it necessary for him to take

up his residence in the city and to offer Glenmary for sale; which he did

with a heavy heart, taking the public into his confidence, as usual, in

his affecting “Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of

Glenmary,” first printed in “Godey’s” for December, 1842, and included in

all subsequent editions of “Letters from under a Bridge.”

“I thought to have shuffled off my mortal coil tranquilly here;

flitting at last in some company of my autumn leaves, or some bevy

of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw.… In the shady depths

of the small glen above you, among the wild flowers and music, the

music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to

love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of

Glenmary as we can leave behind stay with you for recompense!”

This sacred nook--reserved from purchase--was the spot where his own hands

had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first

child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and

disappointment found a voice in one of the most naturally and simply

written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born

Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only

surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up

his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his

uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a

time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836,

Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then

“a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at

Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and

Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description,

hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs.

Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present

at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an

afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had

danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets

“slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and

broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from

Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842, regretting that he should not

have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.

A _rapprochement_ now took place between Willis and his former associate

General Morris. The “New York Mirror” of December 31, 1842, announced

that, expenditures having largely exceeded receipts, the paper would

henceforth be discontinued, but that a new series would begin in a few

weeks. The issue of the 17th of the same month had contained two short

sketches, “Imogen and Cymbeline” and “A Charming Widow of Sixty,” which

were afterwards joined into one and worked up into “Poyntz’s Aunt.” These

were of no importance except as being his first direct contributions to

the “Mirror” since the establishment of the “Corsair,” over two years and

a half before. On Saturday, April 8, 1843, the first number of the “New

Mirror” was issued under the joint editorship of Morris and Willis. The

latter had now entered upon an active career of journalism which lasted,

with a single brief interruption, for nearly a quarter of a century, till

his death in 1867. With the “New Mirror” he resumed the duties of an

editor, which he had laid down when he sold out the “American Monthly” in

1831. He had been, it is true, a nominal editor of the old “New York

Mirror” and of the “Corsair,” but virtually he was merely a contributor

and foreign correspondent of both these papers, and had felt no real

responsibility for their conduct. In the three periodicals which Morris

and Willis now edited successively, the “New Mirror,” the “Evening

Mirror,” and the “Home Journal,” the business management remained in the

hands of the former, but the literary policy was largely shaped by Willis,

and almost the entire time and energies of both partners were given to

their enterprises. The office of the new journal was at No. 4 Ann Street,

and its title in full ran as follows:--

“The New Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction:

Containing Original Papers, Tales of Romance, Sketches of Society,

Manners, and Everyday Life; Domestic and Foreign Correspondence; Wit

and Humor; Fashion and Gossip; the Fine Arts and Literary, Musical,

and Dramatic Criticism; extracts from New Works; Poetry, Original

and Selected; the Spirit of the Public Journals, etc., etc., etc.”

Willis could not afford to give up all the other strings to his bow until

he saw how the new venture was going to succeed. He retained his position

as New York correspondent to the “National Intelligencer,” and his

“Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” published in that paper, were

regularly reprinted in the “New Mirror.” His stories in “Graham’s” and

“Godey’s” went on up to January, 1844, after which time he announced that

he should write in future exclusively for his own paper. His contributions

to the “Mirror,” while editor, included tales, poems, sketches,

reminiscences, letters, book notices, besides editorial papers of a

miscellaneous sort, such as “Jottings,” “Slipshoddities,” “Diary of Town

Trifles,” “More Particularly,” “Just You and I,” “While We hold You by the

Button,” and what not, in which he set himself to catch and reflect the

passing humors and picturesque surfaces of town life. He might have said

of his muse at this time, as the psalmist of his soul, _Adhæsit

pavimento_. He wrote a number of “City Lyrics,” signed “Down Town Bard,”

celebrating beauties in white chip hats, whom he had helped into

omnibuses: Broadway odes, inviting his sweetheart to a moonlight walk up

to Thompson’s for an ice; or mock heroic lamentations in blank verse, that

the lady in the chemisette with black buttons, whose sixpence he had

passed up to the driver, might be doomed to pass him forever without

meeting,--

“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and I

Lone in the Waverley.”

It might have been expected that Willis, with his peculiarly dainty

instinct, would excel in this carving of cherry stones. But his society

verses in this kind were too hurriedly done and fell short of that

perfect workmanship and fineness of taste which float many a trifle of

Praed or Dobson. Willis’s city poems are flimsy and sometimes a little

vulgar, and their place is mid-way between really artistic society verse

and such metropolitan ballads as “Walking Down Broadway” and “Tassels on

the Boots,” which Lingard used to sing. The best of them, perhaps, is

“Love in a Cottage,” a charmingly frank expression of a preference for the

artificial, a quatrain from which has got into common quotation:--

“But give me a sly flirtation

By the light of a chandelier,

With music to play in the pauses,

And nobody very near.”

These “City Lyrics” were not all humorous, however. The bitter contrasts

which forced themselves upon Bryant walking “slowly through the crowded

street” appealed also to the “Down Town Bard,” who expressed them in “The

Pity of the Park Fountain,” and more successfully in “Unseen Spirits,”

first printed in the “New Mirror” of July 29, 1843. This little

poem--suggested, perhaps, in some mood of abstraction when the poet was

strolling listlessly up Broadway, his spirits low and his eternal

watchfulness for effects asleep--has, for that very reason doubtless, the

sudden touch of genius, the unconsciousness and careless felicity which

seem likely to keep it alive and to make it, possibly, the only work of

Willis destined to reach posterity. It was a favorite with Edgar Poe, who

used to recite it at reading clubs and the like, and who said that, in his

opinion and that of nearly all his friends, it was “the truest poem ever

written by Mr. Willis. There is about this little poem,” he continues,

“(evidently written in haste and through impulse) a true imagination. Its

grace, dignity, and pathos are impressive, and there is more in it of

earnestness of soul than in anything I have seen from the pen of its

author.”[6]

Willis took advantage of his new facilities to become his own publisher,

issuing successively, as shilling extras in the “Mirror Library,” his

“Sacred Poems,” “Poems of Passion,” and “Lady Jane and Humorous Poems;”

following these up with the first complete editions, from the “Mirror”

press, of “Letters from Under a Bridge,” and “Pencillings by the Way.”

The poems contained few notable additions to “Melanie” and earlier

volumes, except those just mentioned as printed in the “New Mirror,” and

the lines on the death of President Harrison, which were much admired at

the time. They were in anapestics, an unusual metre with him, but one

which he handled not without fire in this excellent elegy. “Lady Jane” was

a society poem in some two hundred “Don Juan” stanzas and was by no means

the worst of the many imitations of Byron’s inimitable masterpiece--if the

bull may be pardoned. The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,--this time

he was twenty-two,--and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly

affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a

decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the

boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes

enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who,

“having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may.

This is all, but the poet has caught, as successfully as was possible for

him, the alternate irony and sentiment, the rattling digressiveness, and

the eccentric rhyming and audacious punning of his original. There is a

delicate suggestion of Lady Blessington in the heroine; but Willis’s

English acquaintances could hardly have felt pleased at being served up

by name in the picture of a London _soirée_, as “Savage Landor, wanting

soap and sand,” as “frisky Bowring, London’s wisest bore,” or even as

“calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie.” Willis was now in considerable

request for lectures and occasional poems. On August 17, 1841, he

delivered a poem before the Linonian Society of Yale College, extracts

from which appear in his collected poems as “The Elms of New Haven.” This

address was not without touches of fancy and tender reminders to the

assembled scholars of

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

and of summer nights in Academus, when the bird

“Sang a half carol as the moon wore on

And looked into his nest.”

But the blank verse carried him along into that smooth diffuseness which

was his besetting sin, and the poem, as a whole, did not rise above

commonplace. It compares but poorly with Dr. Holmes’s noble “Astræa,”

delivered in 1850 before the Phi Beta Kappa society at New Haven by a poet

who, though the son of another Alma Mater, gracefully acknowledged himself

the grandson of Yale. At another time, in response to an invitation from

James T. Fields to recite a poem in Boston, Willis wrote: “I took the

time to consider whether there _could be_ such a thing as an effective

_spoken_ poem. I am satisfied now, that my style depends so much on those

light shades which would be lost on more ears than two at a time, that I

should make an utter failure.” In 1843 he lectured on the formation of

character before the Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore, and the

audience--a large one--was disappointed by the serious nature of the

address. A “Lecture on Fashion” given before the New York Lyceum and

published in 1844 was more characteristic, at least in subject. He

lectured also in Boston and Albany, perhaps in other places, but without

marked success, being an indifferent orator and not at home on the

platform. “The calling on a hen for an egg, while she stands on the fence,

would seem to me reasonable,” said he, “in comparison with asking for my

sentiments, to be delivered on my legs.”

In the issue of the “New Mirror” for September 28, 1844, the editors

announced that they had been driven out of the field of weekly journalism

by the United States Post Office. The “Mirror,” being stitched, could not

go at newspaper rates, but was taxed, at the caprice of postmasters, from

two to fifteen cents a copy. This more than doubled the price to country

readers and killed the mail subscription. Remonstrances addressed to the

authorities at Washington only brought, in reply, a letter of

“sesquipedalian flummery.” Accordingly the editors decided to change the

shape of the paper and publish it as a daily. The first number of the

“Evening Mirror” came out October 7, 1844. It was published every day in

the week but Sunday, and ran till the close of the following year, under

the joint conduct of Morris, Willis, and Hiram Fuller. The last was a

young man, and a far-away cousin of Margaret Fuller. He continued the

paper, under the same name, for years after his partners had left him. It

was of Fuller that Bennett said, “We saw the editor of the ‘Evening

Mirror,’ the other day, treating his subscribers to an excursion; he drove

them all down Broadway to the Battery in an omnibus.” Edgar Poe was

engaged upon the “Evening Mirror” as critic and sub-editor in the autumn

of 1844, and remained upon it about six months. His relations with Willis

were of the pleasantest. The latter tried to befriend him in various ways

and lent him the hearty support of his paper. His recollections of his

former associate were given in the “Home Journal” for October 13, 1849,

shortly after Poe’s death, in an article bearing generous testimony to his

perfect regularity, reasonableness, and courtesy, while engaged upon the

“Mirror.” Poe’s own estimate of Willis is given at some length in his

series of papers on “The Literati of New York.”[7] It is friendly in tone,

but quite impartial and discriminating. Its literary criticism need not be

here repeated, but Poe’s personal impressions of Willis are worth

giving:--

“Mr. Willis’s career,” he writes, “has naturally made him enemies

among the envious host of dunces whom he has outstripped in the race

for fame; and these his personal manner (a little tinctured with

reserve, _brusquerie_, or even haughtiness) is by no means adapted

to conciliate. He has innumerable warm friends, however, and is

himself a warm friend. He is impulsive, generous, bold, impetuous,

vacillating, irregularly energetic, apt to be hurried into error,

but incapable of deliberate wrong. He is yet young and, without

being handsome in the ordinary sense, is a remarkably well-looking

man. In height he is perhaps five feet eleven and justly

proportioned. His figure is put in the best light by the ease and

assured grace of his carriage. His whole person and personal

demeanor bear about them the traces of ‘good society.’ His face is

somewhat too full or rather heavy in its lower proportions. Neither

his nose nor his forehead can be defended. The latter would puzzle

phrenology. His eyes are a dull bluish gray and small. His hair is

of a rich brown, curling naturally and luxuriantly. His mouth is

well cut, the teeth fine, the expression of the smile intellectual

and winning. He converses little, _well_ rather than fluently, and

in a subdued tone.”

It was after Morris and Willis had dissolved their connection with the

“Evening Mirror” that that journal published the article, by Thomas Dunn

English, reflecting severely on Poe’s character, for which he sued Fuller

and recovered $225 damages. His “Raven” was written while he was on the

paper, and first published anonymously in the “American Review.” Willis

reprinted it in the “Mirror” over Poe’s name, with a send-off, in which he

said, “We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive

poetry ever published in this country.”[8]

The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of

Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing

that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our

frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever

sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity--and calamity as

yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother

whose love had been to him both a stay and an inspiration. His youngest

sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25,

1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without

fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote

against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for

whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of

editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the

grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of

breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed

on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter

Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the

child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England

he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and

published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of

Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.”

This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American

Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part,

“Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840,

and which now appeared for the first time in book form, exhibited more

range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a

decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in

some of the earlier stories--such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and

Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”--of a capacity for stronger and graver

work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without

clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life”

stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the

hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the

Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.”

Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing

villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very

great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in the _dénouement_ and

confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French

adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend--like the Goddesses

on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer,

sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in

particular. But in each and all of these protean shapes, he is equally

fascinating and invincible. In “Beware of Dogs and Waltzing,” the author

entered the confessional with even less precaution than usual. It is

quite plain to one reading between the lines, that the hero, Mr. Lindsay

Maud, with his _retroussé_ nose, sanguineous tint, curly hair, and dimpled

chin, is no other than Willis himself; that the Surrey manor where the

scene is laid is Shirley Park; that its hospitable occupants, the

Becktons, are in truth the Skinner family; that Mabel Brown, the heroine,

is identical with Miss Mary Stace; and, lastly, that Miss Blakeney, the

dazzling but heartless heiress, whose hand Mr. Maud’s hostess kindly

destines for her young _protégé_, but whom, yielding to his better angel,

he flings overboard in favor of the gentler and sweeter Mabel, is a

certain belle of fortune, who figures in Willis’s private correspondence

as “trotted out” by Mrs. Skinner for his inspection with a view to his

making a rich marriage.

In “A Revelation of a Previous Life” and “The Phantom Head upon the

Table,” the supernatural is introduced, but not with success. Willis had

not the weird, haunting imagination of Hawthorne or Poe. He does not

prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required

for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are

set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have no

_vraisemblance_. Nor was he more at home in broad comedy. His humor--and

he had humor--was delicate rather than robust; was made out of irony,

pleasantry, and gay spirits, and depended more upon situation than

character. If the situation was droll, the humor was good; otherwise not.

“Miss Jones’s Son,” “The Spirit Love of Ione S----,” “Nora Mehidy,” “Meena

Dimity,” and “Born to love Pigs and Chickens” were all _manqué_. The best

of the humorous tales is “The Female Ward,” which tells of the

embarrassments of a rather fast young gentleman in Boston, who receives an

unexpected consignment, in the shape of a raw heiress, from a Southern

plantation; her confiding parents intrusting her to his guardianship, with

a request that he place her at school in some high-toned seminary. His

difficulties in trying to perform this commission, ending with his lodging

her temporarily in a private lunatic asylum, are very happily imagined.

“The Female Ward” would lend itself nicely to the dramatizer, and make up

into a most amusing little farce. “Those Ungrateful Blidginses” was funny,

but wicked. It was Willis’s way of avenging himself upon two maiden ladies

with whom he had fallen in, and subsequently fallen out, during his

travels in Italy, and who, on returning to America, had circulated reports

not to his credit. He had another hit at them in “Ernest Clay,” as “two

abominable old maids by the name of Buggins or Blidgins, representing the

_scan. mag._ of Florence.” The story caused a good deal of scandal. The

victims (whose names were thinly disguised) were high in Knickerbocker

social circles, and the doors of many of the best houses in Albany and New

York were closed forever against Willis, as a consequence of this

indiscretion. There was even some rumor in the Albany newspapers to the

effect that he had been challenged by a friend of the injured ladies, and

had declined the challenge, but this he denied. “Kate Crediford” is a

clever specimen of anti-climax. The writer sees an old love at the theatre

and, fancying that she looks unhappy, his flame revives, and he goes home

and writes her an impassioned declaration. His letter is answered by the

lady’s husband, who informs him of her recent marriage, and explains her

pensiveness by the fact that she had eaten too heartily of unripe fruit

before going to the play. In “The Poet and the Mandarin” and “The Inlet of

Peach Blossoms,” the descriptions are richly fanciful. But the most truly

imaginative of all these tales is “The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall.” The

theme is one that would have delighted Hawthorne, and though he might have

treated it more meaningly, he could not have improved upon its wild,

half-eerie gayety, with its undercurrent of regret--the old Horatian

regret for the shortness of life and vanished youth. A superannuated beau,

lingering in the empty colonnade of Congress Hall after the close of the

Saratoga season, sees a spectral procession of coaches drive up to the

door and deposit, one after another, their loads of ladies with escorts

and baggage. Later in the evening, peering in through the ball-room

windows, his brain reels as he beholds the well-remembered belles and

dandies--apparently grown no older--of the golden age of the springs, the

days of “the Albany regency.” They dance to the same old waltz music,

played by the same old negro fiddlers, by the light of spermaceti tapers

that floods the dusty evergreens “with a weird mysteriousness, an

atmosphere of magic, even in the burning of the candles,” and drink

champagne of “the exploded color, rosy wine suited to the bright days when

all things were tinted rose.”

It is needless to say that there is an abundance of pretty and clever

things scattered through these tales of Willis. “Flirtation”--as an

instance of his epigrams--“is a circulating library in which we seldom ask

twice for the same volume.” “His politeness,” he says of one of his

characters, “had superseded his character altogether.” He tells of “a

person of excellent family, after the fashion of a hill of potatoes, the

best part of it under ground;” and of the Frenchman who could trace his

lineage back to “the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel.” “Mr.

Potts’s income was a net answer to his morning prayer: it provided his

daily bread.” “Wigwam _vs._ Almacks,” which follows out the suggestions of

a true story told in “À l’Abri,” is not very satisfactory as a fiction,

but is worth noticing for the lovely description, with which it opens, of

a wayside spring in the valley of the Chemung.