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American Men of Letters.

Edited by

Charles Dudley Warner.


[Illustration: S. Lawrence, 1837. Illman & Sons.

N. P. Willis.]


American Men of Letters.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

by

HENRY A. BEERS.







[Illustration]

Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1890.

Copyright, 1885,
By Henry A. Beers.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.




PREFACE.


The materials for a life of Willis are rich enough to be embarrassing.
Most of his writings are, in a greater or less degree, autobiographical;
and it would be possible to make a very tolerable life of him, by
arranging passages from these in the right order, and linking them
together with a few paragraphs of cold facts. Then, he lived very much in
the world’s eye, and was constantly talked and written about, so that
there is abundant mention of him in newspaper files, and in volumes of
“Recollections,” etc., by his contemporaries. In addition to these printed
sources, I have been furnished, by the kindness of Mrs. N. P. Willis, Miss
Julia Willis, and Mrs. Imogen Willis Eddy, with private letters, journals,
and other MS. memoranda by Willis, which extend from his school days at
Andover down to a few weeks before his death--of course not without
_lacunæ_. Although I have not quoted very freely from these letters, they
have been of the greatest service, by supplying facts which I have
incorporated with the body of the narrative, and by correcting or
verifying data otherwise obtained. A biography of Willis could have been
written without them, but this particular biography could not; and I take
occasion hereby to acknowledge my debt to the ladies whose courtesy gave
me access to this material.

There are many others who have helped my undertaking in various ways--too
many for me to thank them all by name. But I cannot withhold mention of my
obligations to Mr. Richard S. Willis and to Mr. Morris Phillips, the
editor of the “Home Journal.”

                                                          HENRY A. BEERS.




CONTENTS.


                                                 PAGE

                       CHAPTER I.

    ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS                        1

                       CHAPTER II.

    COLLEGE LIFE                                   31

                      CHAPTER III.

    BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY                71

                       CHAPTER IV.

    LIFE ABROAD                                   107

                       CHAPTER V.

    LIFE ABROAD CONTINUED                         154

                       CHAPTER VI.

    GLENMARY--THE CORSAIR--THE NEW MIRROR         219

                      CHAPTER VII.

    THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND--THE HOME JOURNAL      283

                      CHAPTER VIII.

    IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS                        326

    BIBLIOGRAPHY                                  353

    INDEX                                         357




NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.




CHAPTER I.

1806-1823.

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.


Willis was born January 20, 1806, in the little old seaport city of
Portland, Maine, celebrated by the “Autocrat” for its great square
mansions, the homes of retired sea-captains. The town had already made
some noise in literature, as the residence of that wild genius, John Neal;
and on February 27, 1807, little more than a year after the date with
which this biography begins, it witnessed the birth of its most
illustrious citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A comparison at once suggests itself between the subsequent fortunes in
the republic of letters of these two infant poets, fellow townsmen for
some five years. Willis was the earlier in the field. In 1832, when
Longfellow, then a young professor at Bowdoin College, began to
contribute scholarly articles to the “North American Review,” the former
had been five years before the public, and was already well known as a
poet, a magazine editor, and a foreign correspondent. When “Outre-Mer” was
issued in 1835, Willis had won a reputation as a prose writer on both
sides of the Atlantic by his “Pencillings” in the “New York Mirror;” and
by 1839, when Longfellow published his first volume of original poetry,
“Voices of the Night,” his senior by a year had printed five books of
verse. But there is no question as to which has proved the better
continuer. Longfellow is still the favorite poet of two peoples; a singer
dearer, perhaps, to the general heart than any other who has sung in the
English tongue. His brilliant contemporary, after being for about fifteen
years the most popular magazinist in America, has sunk into comparative
oblivion.[1] This is the fate of all fashionable literature. Every
generation begins by imitating the literary fashions of the last, and ends
with a reaction against them. At present “realism” has the floor,
sentiment is at a discount, and Willis’s glittering, high- pictures
of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact,
have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James.

Without presuming any native equality between Willis and the Cambridge
poet, it is fair to add that the former never found opportunity to deepen
and ripen such gift as was in him. His life was passed not “in the quiet
and still air of delightful studies,” but in the rush of the gay world and
the daily drudgery of the pen; in the toil of journalism, that most
exhausting of mental occupations, which is forever giving forth and never
bringing in. His best work--all of his work which claims remembrance--was
done before he was forty. His earlier writings are not only his freshest,
but his strongest and most carefully executed.

Willis is a glaring instance of inherited tendencies, being the third
journalist in succession in his line of descent. The founder of the family
in this country, and the progenitor of our subject in the seventh
generation, was a certain George Willis, born in England in 1602, who
arrived in New England probably about 1630. He was a brickmaker and
builder by trade, and is described as “a Puritan of considerable
distinction,” who resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some sixty years,
having been admitted to the Freeman’s Oath in 1638 and elected a deputy to
the General Court. Probably the most noteworthy of the poet’s forbears, at
least upon the father’s side, was the Rev. John Bailey, his ancestor in
the fifth generation, a non-conforming Independent minister in Lancashire,
who, having been silenced and afterwards imprisoned, escaped to
Massachusetts in 1684, and was settled, first as minister over the church
in Watertown, and later as associate minister over the First Church in
Boston, where he died in 1697. Increase Mather preached his funeral
sermon. His tomb is in the Granary Burying Ground, adjoining Park Street
Church, and his portrait in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical
Society. What more could a man ask for in an ancestor? No New England
pedigree which respects itself is without one or more fine old Puritan
divines of this kind. Accordingly, when Willis began to take that mild,
retrospective interest in his own genealogy which foretokens the oncoming
of age,--when new twigs upon the family tree give an unthought-of
importance to the roots,--he bestowed the name of this particular
forefather upon his youngest boy, Bailey Willis.

The poet’s great-grandmother Willis, born Abigail Belknap, was
granddaughter to this Rev. John Bailey, and had some traits which cropped
out in her posterity. At the time of the destruction of the tea in Boston
harbor, she cannily saved a little for private use. She used to say, “I
have got some Belknap pride in me yet;” and among her favorite maxims
were, “Never go into the back door when you can go into the front,” and
“Never eat brown bread when you can get white.” The husband of this lady
was Charles Willis, a sail-maker and patriot, who was present on the
occasion when tar and feathers and hot tea were administered to his
Majesty’s tax-collector in Boston. His position and action in the affair
were represented in an ancient engraving, bought long afterwards by his
grandson, Deacon Nathaniel Willis, our Willis’s father. A copy of the same
is now in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The son of
Charles and Abigail Willis was Nathaniel, the third, though by no means
the last, Willis with that baptismal name; the first literary man in the
family, and the poet’s grandfather. He conducted in Boston, during the
Revolutionary War, the “Independent Chronicle,” a Whig newspaper,
published from the same building in which Franklin had worked as a
printer. This Nathaniel senior, as we may call him, was an active man. He
was a fine horseman, took part in the Boston tea-party, and was adjutant
of the Boston regiment sent on an expedition to Rhode Island under General
Sullivan. In 1784 he sold his interest in the “Independent Chronicle,” and
became one of the pioneer journalists of the unsettled West. He removed
first to Winchester, Virginia, where he published a paper for a short
time; then to Shepardstown, where he also published a paper; and thence in
1790 to Martinsburg, Virginia, where he founded the “Potomac Guardian” and
edited it till 1796. In that year he went to Chillicothe, Ohio, and
established the “Scioto Gazette,” the first newspaper in what was then
known as the Northwestern Territory. He was printer to the government of
the territory, and afterwards held an agency in the Post Office
Department. He bought and cultivated a farm near Chillicothe, on which he
ended his days April 1, 1831. His wife was Lucy Douglas, of New London,
Connecticut.

His son and the poet’s father, Nathaniel Willis, Junior,--the fourth
Nathaniel in the family,--was born at Boston in 1780, and remained there
until 1787, when he joined his father at Winchester and was employed in
his newspaper office, and subsequently at Martinsburg on the “Potomac
Guardian.” In the infancy of American journalism, the editor and publisher
of a paper was usually a practical printer. Young Nathaniel was put to
work at once in folding papers and setting types. At Martinsburg he used
to ride post, with tin horn and saddle-bags, delivering papers to
scattered subscribers in the thinly settled country. N. P. Willis himself
served a year’s apprenticeship at his father’s press in Boston, in an
interval of his schooling; and in his letters home from England alluded
triumphantly to his having once been destined by his parents to the trade
of a printer. His particular duty was to ink the types. “We remember
_balling_ an edition of ‘Watts’s Psalms and Hymns,’ and there are lines in
that good book that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the
ink-balls, while conning them over.” A sketch of the old office of the
“Potomac Guardian,” made by “Porte Crayon,” is in the possession of Mr.
Richard Storrs Willis of Detroit.

At the age of fifteen young Nathaniel returned to Boston and entered the
office of his father’s old paper, the “Independent Chronicle,” working in
the same press-room in Court Street where his father had once worked, and
the great Franklin before him. He also found time, while in Boston, to
drill with the “Fusiliers.” In 1803, invited by a Maine congressman and
other gentlemen of the Republican party, he went to Portland and
established the “Eastern Argus” in opposition to the Federalists. Here the
subject of this biography was born three years later. “Well do I remember
that day,” his father wrote to him fifty-seven years after the event, “and
the driving snow-storm in which I had to go, in an open sleigh, to bring
in the nurse from the country. Francis Douglas boarded with us at that
time. He was a very pleasant young man, and had a half promise (if it was
a boy) it should be called _Francis_. But your mother soon overruled that,
and decided that you should have both of our names, for fear she should
never have another son! You was a fine fat baby, with a face as round as
an apple.”

Party spirit ran high at this time, and political articles were
acrimonious. Libel suits were brought against the publisher of the
“Argus,” which involved him in trouble and expense; and six years after
its establishment it was sold for four thousand dollars to the same
Francis Douglas who had come so near imposing his Christian name on the
infant Willis. At Portland Nathaniel Willis came under the ministrations
and influence of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D.,--on whose death, many
years after, his son composed some rather perfunctory verses,--and began
henceforth to devote himself to the cause of religion. From 1810 to 1812
he sought to establish a religious newspaper in Portland, but met with no
substantial encouragement. At the latter date he returned to Boston,
where, after years of effort, during which he supported himself by
publishing tracts and devotional books, he started, in January, 1816, the
“Boston Recorder,” which he asserted to be the first religious newspaper
in the world. It was in this periodical that the earliest lispings of
Willis’s muse reached the ear of the public. The “Recorder” was conducted
by his father down to 1844, in which year it was sold to the Rev. Martin
Moore. It still lives as the “Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.”

Nathaniel Willis also originated the idea of a religious paper for
children. “The Youth’s Companion,” which he commenced in 1827 and edited
for about thirty years, was the first, and remains one of the best,
publications of the kind in existence. In a letter to his son he gave the
following account of its inception: “He was in the habit of teaching his
children, statedly, the Assembly’s Catechism, and to encourage them to
commit to memory the answers, he rewarded them by telling them stories
from Scripture history without giving names. The result was that the
Catechism was all committed to memory by the children, and the idea
occurred of a children’s department in the ‘Recorder.’ This department
being much sought for by children, it suggested the experiment of having a
paper exclusively for children.” Around the fireplace where Mr. Willis sat
with his children were some old-fashioned Dutch tiles, representing scenes
from the New Testament, and it was in answer to their questions about
these that he began his narrations. One sees in this little domestic
picture the beginnings of the young Nathaniel’s literary training and the
germ of his “Scripture Sketches.” Years after, a college lad, when shaping
into smooth blank verse the story of the widow of Nain or the healing of
Jairus’s daughter, his memory must have gone back to their rude figures
about his father’s hearth, seeming to move and stir in the flickering
light of the wood fire; and the recollection of his father’s voice and the
listening group of brothers and sisters gave tenderness to the strain.

He was only six when the family removed from Portland