Just a century ago, in 1806, was born Nathaniel Parker Willis, in
Portland, Maine. Willis was a fellow townsman of Longfellow, but while
the latter finally made his way to Boston and Cambridge, Willis found
New York the most congenial residence. There he was successively
editor of the _Mirror_, the _Corsair_, and the _Home Journal_,
enlivening their pages with an inexhaustible supply of witty,
well-timed, and sometimes brilliant prose and verse. He was the first
American to write _vers de société_ that deserved preservation, and
that were at once light, amusing, and in good taste.
Willis affected an extreme elegance in dress, manner, and
surroundings. He pretended to write amid rare flowers, with old vines
beside him, and to use an amber penholder in the summer to cool his
palm. Those who disliked this display of foppery were wont to explain
the initials of his name as representing “Namby-Pamby.” But with all
his superficial frivolity, Willis was a man of genuine talent. His
early poems were quite as popular as Longfellow’s. He was the first
American author to make a good living wholly by his pen. He discovered
and gave substantial aid to many younger men of genius, among them
James Russell Lowell and Bayard Taylor, and he first drew the
attention of his countrymen to the great gifts of Thackeray, long
before “Vanity Fair” had been written, and while the future novelist
was still known only as a writer for the English magazines. He even
engaged Thackeray to contribute a series of papers from Paris to the
New York _Corsair_—this as far back as 1838. Willis also, in his own
letters from Europe, created a model for all foreign correspondents
since that time; and his collected epistles, “Pencilings by the Way,”
still remain the most vivid sketches in existence of the men and women
who were famous when Victoria first became queen.
The little poem here reprinted is one of the light, half-mocking
productions, which its author wrote to amuse his urban public. It
voices the sentiment of the young-man-about-town in the New York of
the early fifties. Perhaps the best comment upon it is the fact that
Willis himself, whenever he could possibly do so, was accustomed to
leave the city and enjoy the rustic pleasures of his own country-house
at Idlewild on the Hudson.