Henry A. Beers
Nathaniel Parker Willis
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066136161
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I. 1806-1823. ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.
CHAPTER II. 1823-1827. COLLEGE LIFE.
CHAPTER III. 1827-1831. BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY.
CHAPTER IV. 1831-1834. LIFE ABROAD.
CHAPTER V. 1834-1836. LIFE ABROAD (CONTINUED) .
CHAPTER VI. 1836-1845. GLENMARY—THE CORSAIR—THE NEW MIRROR.
CHAPTER VII. 1845-1852. THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND—THE HOME JOURNAL.
CHAPTER VIII. 1853-1867. IDLEWILD AND LAST DAYS.
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.
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-colored 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