Finally he exhumed from some quarter the pasquinade of poor Joe Snelling, referred to in our third chapter, from which he printed the following lines by way of showing Willis’s standing at home:—

Marryat’s article was a stupid one, ungrammatical and coarsely written. But its clumsy malice made it all the more exasperating. Lockhart was a gentleman and Maginn was an Irishman. The former took care not to say too much, and what the latter said was of no consequence. Both of them, besides, were clever writers, and a man of wit and spirit had rather be pricked by a rapier in the hand of a dexterous adversary than pounded on the head by an awkward bully with a bludgeon. Willis made a mistake in noticing Marryat’s article at all, but he was stung by the implied insult to his parents, and his military friends persuaded him that his honor was touched. Accordingly he prepared an elaborate reply in the shape of a letter, dated January 10th, and sent it to Marryat at Brussels, whither the latter had gone about the middle of December, while his article was still in proof.

“Of that part of the paper which refers to the merits of my book,” Willis wrote, “I have nothing to say. You were at liberty, as a critic, to deal with it as you pleased. You have transcended the limits of criticism, however, to make an attack on my character, and your absence compels me to represent, by my own letter, those claims for reparation which I should have intrusted to a friend, had you been in England.” The letter then proceeds to answer, in detail, the charges and innuendoes of the “Metropolitan.” As to his seeking introductions, Willis declares, “I have never, since my arrival in England, requested an introduction to any man.… In the single interview which I had with yourself, I was informed by the lady who was the medium of the introduction, that you wished to know me.” The letter concludes, apropos of Marryat’s slur on Willis’s birth and parentage, “You will readily admit that this dark insinuation must be completely withdrawn. My literary reputation and my position in society are things I could outlive. My honesty as a critic is a point on which the world may decide. But my own honor and that of my family are sacred, and while I live, no breath of calumny shall rest on either. I trust to receive, at your earliest convenience, that explanation which you cannot but acknowledge is due to me on this point, and which is most imperatively required by my own character and the feelings of my friends.” As to the remark which had drawn the “Metropolitan” article upon him, Willis confesses that it was an unjust one, but says that “it occurred in a private communication to the editor of the ‘Mirror’ and was never intended for publication.”

Willis had this letter lithographed and sent copies to seven of his particular friends, to clear his character, as he said, in his own immediate circle, of the aspersions in Marryat’s article. The reply to this demand was a long letter, under date of January 21st, declining to make any apology until Willis had publicly withdrawn his remark in the “Mirror” about Marryat’s gross trash selling about Wapping, etc., which, said the latter, amounted by implication to an attack on his private character; denying, furthermore, that he had attacked Willis’s private character. “The observations made by you upon my writings must be considered as more or less injurious in proportion to the rank in society and estimation of the person who made them.… It was therefore necessary, in this instance, to point out that the critic had not been accustomed to good society.… Now this, if true, is no crime, and therefore the remark can be no attack upon private character.” Willis accepted this explanation, in a second letter to Marryat, and then sent the entire correspondence to the “Times” for publication. Marryat was furious at this, and wrote at once to Willis, “I refuse all explanation—insist upon immediate satisfaction—and that you forthwith repair to Ostend to meet me.” If the captain thought that his opponent was a dandy poet, who would be afraid to face his pistol, he mistook his man. “The puppies will fight,” said the Duke. Willis was no shot, and the only weapon that he knew how to handle was his pen, but he never showed any want of personal courage. The correspondence that followed this challenge was long and tedious. The documents in the case are a score in number and need not be reproduced here. The substance of these various protocols and formalities was as follows. Willis answered Marryat’s letter, explaining why he had thought right to publish the first three letters that had passed between them, accepting his challenge, in case he found this explanation insufficient, but claiming his privilege, as the challenged party, to name some place in England for the meeting. Meanwhile a duplicate of Marryat’s challenge had been handed to Willis by the former’s “friend,” a Mr. F. Mills, and Willis had referred him to his friend, Captain Walker, and had agreed to waive his right to name a place, and to meet Marryat at Ostend. Mr. Mills and Captain Walker finally adjusted the matter and arranged a basis for an amicable settlement. But while these negotiations were pending, Marryat, on the receipt of Willis’s letter of explanation, withdrew his challenge in a letter dated February 9th, which he sent to the “Times,” along with his challenge and Willis’s reply to it. The terms of this withdrawal Willis considered insulting, and the publication of the challenge after it had been agreed upon between the friends of the parties that Marryat “should entirely withdraw the offensive letter containing his challenge,” he regarded as a further insult. He therefore wrote to the “Times,” on the day following the appearance of these letters, that the differences between himself and Captain Marryat were not at an end; and on February 17th he wrote to Marryat that his challenge still stood accepted, insisting on his right to name England as the place of meeting, but offering in case of interruption there to give him a meeting on the other side of the Channel. Marryat accordingly came to England and—Mr. Mills having withdrawn from the affair—named as his second Captain Edward Belcher of the Royal Navy. Captain Belcher’s ship was at Chatham and thither all parties repaired on the 27th of February. Willis’s second declared to Captain Belcher that his principal “had come to fight, not to negotiate,” but on a little discussion Captain Belcher found his principal in the wrong, and made him concede what was necessary, the following pronunciamento being signed by both seconds:—

Thus peacefully ended this tempest in a teapot. Willis had carried his point and had acted throughout in a high-spirited and creditable manner—barring the folly of entering into “an affair of honor,” in the first place. His letters to Marryat are those of a gentleman, while his adversary’s language is invariably hectoring and coarse. The quarrel, of course, made a great deal of noise at the time in London literary and social circles. “The United Service Gazette,” the organ of the British Army and Navy, took Willis’s side in a long editorial in which much of the correspondence was reprinted from the “Times.” The latter journal, however, probably voiced the true sentiment of the community when it said: “We confess that we have a great distaste for this sort of squabbling, which exhibits, to say the least, an extraordinary want of judgment in the disputing parties.”

From Chatham Willis posted at once to Woolwich, thirty miles away, where he found his wife in convulsions. He had left a farewell letter for her, fully expecting to be killed in a duel with Marryat, who was reputed a crack shot. Two days later Willis went to London and called out Mr. F. Mills, who had acted as Marryat’s “mediator,” for an offensive letter in the “Times.” Mr. Mills named W. F. Campbell of Islay and Willis named John Tyndale, between whom this subsidiary quarrel was soon patched up, in a manner honorable to both. The assaults in the English magazines and the rumors of the Marryat affair of course found their way speedily to America, and were circulated and commented upon in the American periodicals according to their various prepossessions. “The cultivated old clergymen of the ‘North American Review,’” as Poe used to call them, lent the support of that influential quarterly to Willis in an article by C. C. Felton, a very friendly review of the “Pencillings,” and a defense of their author—a favor which Willis gratefully appreciated.

In March, 1836, he published in London “Inklings of Adventure,” consisting of thirteen stories and sketches of American and European life, reprinted from the “New Monthly,” “The Metropolitan,” and the “Court Magazine,” together with “Minute Philosophies” (from the “American Monthly”) and “A Log in the Archipelago,” from the “Mirror.” The book was handsomely published in three volumes, and dedicated to Edward Everett. For an edition of 1,200 copies Willis was paid £300, reserving to himself the copyright; and as he had received a guinea a page for the original articles, besides what Morris gave him for their republication in the “Mirror,” they may be said to have been fairly profitable.

These “Slingsby” papers are exceedingly clever. With the possible exception of “Letters from under a Bridge” and portions of “Pencillings by the Way,” they are the best work that Willis ever did; and they compare well with such lighter fiction, in the way of short tales or sketches of travel and adventure, as has been produced in America since Willis’s day. Whatever else they are, they are never dull and always readable. They are not read now only because the readers of light fiction habitually follow the market and inquire merely for the last thing out. Many of them were worked over from his “American Monthly” juvenilia, but his touch had grown firmer and he had purchased experience, as his motto declared, by his “penny of observation.” These “Inklings” do not penetrate to the stratum of real character, of strong passion, and of the interplay of motives and moral relations in which all vital fiction has its roots. Their plots are commonly slight, their persons sketchy, their incidents not seldom improbable, their coloring sometimes too high. As transcripts of actual life such stories as “Pedlar Karl,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” and “Tom Fane and I,” with the easy optimism of their conclusions and their cheerful avoidance of all the responsibilities imposed upon the dwellers in this workaday world, are of course misleading and false. Their air is the air of every day, but their happenings are those of the wildest romance. Their charm—and they have for many old-fashioned readers a quite decided charm—does not lie in truth to life, but in the vivacious movement of the narrative, the glimpses of scenery by the way, the alternations of sentiment and gayety, neither very profound, but each for the time sincere and passing quickly into one another; and finally in the style, always graceful, and in passages really exquisite. It has recently been announced that style is “increasingly unimportant,” but can this be true? Not surely, unless fiction is to become hereafter a branch of social science and valuable only for its accurate report of life. It will then be the novelist’s duty to obliterate himself in his message, and any intrusion of his personality between the reader and the subject will be an impertinence. But it is hard to believe that the personal element is to lose its place in fiction and be banished to the realm of autobiography and lyric poetry. Style may be a purely external part of an artist’s equipment, but it is a necessary part all the same. A bad man or a weak man may have it, but that does not make it any the less indispensable for the good man intending literature. Willis was born with it; it showed in his manners, in his dress, in his writing. Whatever he did was done with an air.

The American parts of “Inklings,” written for the English reader, are the best. They reproduce for us the life of gay society, when society was, or seemed, gayer, or at least fresher than at present. It was the era of expansion and hope before the financial panic of 1837. The great waterway lately opened through the state of New York had set people traveling. The beauties of American lakes, forests, and rivers were being discovered, but were as yet unhackneyed. Lake George, The Thousand Isles, and the St. Lawrence, did not swarm with tourists. Nahant was still a fashionable seaside resort and Niagara a watering-place, where people actually went to spend months, and not a fleeting show for bridal couples and a mill-race for manufacturers. Saratoga, and Ballston, and Lebanon were rival spas, the first a “mushroom village” merely,—“the work of a lath and plaster Aladdin,”—when Congress Hall, with its big wooden colonnades, was in its glory. “A relic or two of the still astonished forest towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy grove of firs, and five minutes’ walk from the door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on the village.” In which wilderness was embosomed Barhydt’s once famous hermitage, with its ear-shaped tarn and columnar pine shafts, whither one resorted for trout dinners, and where “the long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy elysium, on the rim of that ebon lake were as solitary as a melancholy man could desire.”

This newness in life at the Springs, this background of primitive wilderness against which the drives and dances and piazza promenades of the fashionable frequenters were projected, has long since disappeared, and with it has gone a certain old school exclusiveness which once marked the society at American baths. That society, if not more aristocratic than at present, was at all events more select, simply by virtue of being smaller. Fewer people were in the habit of going into the country in summer, and fashionable circles in the cities were not so large but that “the best people” from all over the States might know each other at least by name. A reigning belle or a distinguished beau had a national reputation. Southern planters brought their families to Northern resorts and supplied an element which has been missed since the war.

It is, for the most part, the life of this society which Willis so engagingly portrays in the “Slingsby” sketches. His heroes are devil-may-care young fellows, who wander about from one fashionable resort to another, composing love verses, flirting, dancing, eloping, or assisting at elopements. It was the era of the buck or beau, a joyous, flamboyant creature who wore figured waistcoats, was a knowing whip, danced with vigor, loved pink champagne, serenaded the ladies, was gallant in speech, dashing and confident in bearing, and never in the least blasé.

This freshness and youthfulness, this air of stir, adventure, excitement, hope, which was impressed upon American life, books, and society of that date are reflected from Willis’s sparkling pages and give them even a sort of historical interest, apart from their claims as literature. There is a breath of morning wind in them. With the homelier side of life he had little concern, and his writing lacks gravity and simplicity. Whenever he grows serious, it is to grow sentimental. “F. Smith” is perhaps the most artistic of these sketches, and the most representative of its author’s talent, in its quick interchange of poetic description, bright dialogue, light, malicious humor, and natural sentiment; neither mood in excess, nor dwelt on long enough to fatigue. It is a trifling episode—the caprice of a summer belle at Nahant. Its hero is the same “gentle monster” who reappears in many of the “Inklings”—in “Edith Linsey,” “The Gypsy of Sardis,” and “Niagara,” a Green Mountain Frankenstein and Quixote in one, absent-minded and uncouth of aspect, but with a soul filled with enthusiasm for beauty and a delicate, chivalrous devotion to women. He is half hero and half butt, and introduced as a constant foil to Slingsby, the dandy exquisite and man of the world.

“Edith Linsey” was the most ambitious of the American sketches. It was a novel in outline, and had an original plot, the intellectual passion of a young student for a girl who is thought to be dying of consumption, and whose disease has imparted an exaltation to her feelings, and a nervous, spiritual intensity to her thoughts. The anti-climax comes when she unexpectedly recovers her health, and with it her worldly ambitions, and coolly jilts her quondam lover. There are passages in “Edith Linsey”—particularly in the scenes between the lovers in the library—of unusual thoughtfulness, eloquence, and emotional depth, but the story is loosely put together, and interrupted by digressions, and in the latter part of it the author seemed more concerned to deliver himself of college reminiscences and descriptions of scenery than to carry on his narrative with a firm hand.

“The Gypsy of Sardis” was the best of the European sketches, and had a very moving, though slightly melodramatic, conclusion. It was a more highly finished study of Eastern scenery and life than Willis had had leisure to give in his “Pencillings.” A comparison of the two shows from what slight hints he worked up the romance,—a momentary glimpse of a gypsy girl at a tent door, and of an Arab in the slave market at Stamboul, a ride up the Valley of Sweet Waters, and a morning in the shop of old Mustapha, the perfumer. “Love and Diplomacy” and “The Revenge of the Signor Basil” were less successful, because more remote from their author’s experience. He had not the kind of imagination necessary to transport him into alien characters and situations. His fancy required some contact with its object before it would take off the electric spark.

Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut, pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks. But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. He had at all times, however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures had a daintiness which displeased severe critics. Thus: “The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop’s finger.” “As much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large water-lily” is an instance of his superfine way of putting things. He likened Daniel Webster’s forehead, among the heads at a Jenny Lind concert, to “a massive magnolia blossom, too heavy for the breeze to stir, splendid and silent amid fluttering poplar leaves.” The “crushed orange blossom, clinging to one of the heels” of Ernest Clay’s boots, was a touch which greatly amused Thackeray. And others have been amused by the fantastic headings which he invented for certain columns in the “Home Journal”: “Sparklings of Tenth Waves: or Bits Relished in Recent Readings,” “Breezes from Spice Islands, passed in the Voyage of Life,” and the like, which read like the title of a sixteenth century pamphlet. An old lady in Hartford used to say that “Nat Willis ought to go about in spring, in sky-blue breeches, with a rose-colored bellows to blow the buds open.” It is remarkable with what consent all who have had occasion to characterize Willis’s diction hit upon the metaphor of champagne. “The wine of Bacon’s writings,” said Dr. Johnson, “is a dry wine.” The wine of Willis’s writings was certainly a Schaumwein. It had not the rich, still glow of burgundy, but a fizz and an up-streaming of golden bubbles, and when the spirit had effervesced the residue, as in his later writings, was rather flat.

During his stay abroad he made a few other contributions to literature which have not yet been mentioned. Among these were some miscellaneous papers in the “Mirror”: “Notes from a Scrap Book” and “Fragments of Rambling Impressions,” portions of which he afterwards republished in “Ephemera.” Also a short tale of no value, “The Dilemma,” from which he rescued the verses “To Ermengarde” for his collected poems. He contributed to the London “Athenæum” for January and February, 1835, a series of four articles on American literature, which do not appear in his “Complete Works.” That pioneer of literature in the West, the Rev. Timothy Flint, some time editor of the “Cincinnati Monthly Review,” author of a novel called “Francis Berrian,” and of a work on the Mississippi Valley, had agreed to supply the required papers, but he having left New York for Louisiana Territory, and failed to come to time, Willis was invited to take his place. He wrote the articles hastily, though he asserted that he had “read the productions of two hundred poets and seventy-two prose writers whose works have been printed in America since the settlement of New England.” He made no approach to an exhaustive treatment of the subject, but gave a number of graphic personal sketches of American authors, one in particular, of Channing as a pulpit orator, which excited Lady Byron’s interest, as has been mentioned, and another of Cooper, whom he indignantly defended against the slanders of a portion of the American press. The literary judgments are not always sound (Poe said that Willis had good taste, but was not a good critic), but they were the current opinions of the day rather than of Willis individually. They were in the air. Thus he pronounces Bryant’s “Evening Wind” the best thing he had written, and prefers Percival to Bryant, saying that he is “the most interesting man in America. He has not written anything equal to the ‘Evening Wind’ of Bryant, but his birthright lies a thousand leagues higher up Parnassus.” Timothy Flint afterwards supplemented these papers by a dozen of his own, which amply made up in heaviness for any want of ballast in Willis’s, and were full of “general views,” which, if not correct, were harmless because unreadable. Willis’s “Athenæum” articles first introduced the English public to “The Culprit Fay,” long passages of which he gave from a manuscript in his possession, the poem having not as yet appeared in print. Miss Mitford, who took a warm interest in American literature, wrote him a note of thanks on the publication of this series, praising it in the highest terms.

It appears by a letter to Willis from Carl August, Freiherr von Killinger, dated Carlsruhe, April 13, 1836, that some of the “Inklings” had already attained to the honors of translation. The Freiherr, it seems, was engaged in translating “Pencillings” also, and wanted material for a biographical notice.

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:—

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.”

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 “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:—