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 to Boston, and he appears to have kept little remembrance of his birthplace. The noble harbor, with its islands, which were the Hesperides of Longfellow’s boyish dreams, the old fort on the hill, the mystery of the ships, the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, the noise of the sea fight far away, and the faces of the dead captains as they lay in their coffins, did not enter into Willis’s experience. Indeed, the period of childhood, which has been to many poets so fruitful in precious memories, seems to have left few deep traces on his mind, if we except its religious impressions. The life of his father’s household, though rich in domestic affections, was probably not stimulating to the imagination. It was the life of a Puritan home, of what is called in England a “serious family,”—that life which oppresses Matthew Arnold with its