Nathaniel Parker Willis. Henry A. Beers

Dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going were, of course, forbidden pleasures. The elder Willis, though a thoroughly good man and good father, was a rather wooden person. His youth and early manhood had been full of hardship; his education was scanty, and he had the formal and narrow piety of the new evangelicals of that day, revolting against the latitudinarianism of the Boston churches. He was for twenty years deacon of Park Street Church, profanely nicknamed by the Unitarians “Brimstone Corner.” “My recollection of a particular occasion,” says an old member of that society, “when, at a conference meeting in the church, he, as presider, was expounding John xv., is that I regarded it as a memorable illustration of a man’s attempting to expound without ideas. I hear him saying—more than fifty years ago—‘v. 4. Abide in me. Abide is to dwell,’ in a most monotonous tone, and the rest in the same manner of appreciation.” His rigidity was, perhaps, more in his principles than in his character, and his austerity was tempered by two qualities which have not seldom been found to consist with the diaconate, namely, a sense of humor—“dry,” of course, to the correct degree—and an admiration for pretty women, or, in the dialect of that day, for “female loveliness.” These tastes he bequeathed to his son, as also a certain tenacity of will, which, latent throughout the latter’s career, came to the surface in an astonishing way during the trials of his last years. This trait is amusingly illustrated in the senior Willis’s correspondence with his son by his allusions to an interminable litigation that he was carrying on in his eighty-fourth year. “I should have written you sooner,” he says, “but that Irishman, Garbrey, has sued me the fourth time about that old drain which he dug up before my front door, in Atkinson Street, that we never knew before was there. He has lost his case in three different courts, and now sends to the Supreme Court a ‘Bill of Exceptions,’ which all my friends think he cannot recover. It has been a great trouble and expense to me. But I have carried the case in prayer to God, constantly, and He has three times defeated the extortioner.” Willis always retained a cordial affection and respect for his father, but between two such different natures and divergent lives there could be little genial sympathy or real intellectual intimacy. The tough old deacon outlived the inheritor of his name and calling by some three years, and died May 26, 1870, at the age of ninety.

      For his mother Willis cherished, as boy and man, a devotion that may well be called passionate, and which found utterance in many of his most heartfelt poems, such as his “Birth-Day Verses,” “Lines on Leaving Europe,” and “To my Mother from the Apennines.” Her maiden name was Hannah Parker. She was born at Holliston, Massachusetts, and was two years younger than her husband. She was a woman whose strong character and fervent piety were mingled with a playful affectionateness which made her to her children the object of that perfect love which casteth out fear. Like many another poet’s mother—like Goethe’s, for example—she supplied to her son those elements of gayety and softness which were wanting in the stiffer composition of the father:—

      “Von Mutterchen die Fröhnatur,

      Die Lust zu fabuliren.”

      He inherited from her the emotional, impulsive part of his nature as well as his physical constitution, his light complexion, full face, and tendency, in youth, to a plethoric habit. “My veins,” he wrote, “are teeming with the quicksilver spirit which my mother gave me. Whatever I accomplish must be gained by ardor, and not by patience.” She was his confidant, his sympathizer, his elder sister. The testimony to her worth and her sweetness is universal. The Rev. Dr. Storrs of Braintree, in an obituary notice written on her death, in 1844, at the age of sixty-two, spoke of her as “the light and joy of every circle in which she moved; the idol of her family; the faithful companion, the tender mother, the affectionate sister, the fast and assiduous friend.”

      Willis was the second in a family of nine children, all of whom reached maturity, and two of whom, besides himself, achieved literary reputation. These were Sarah Payson Willis, afterwards famous, under the nom de plume of “Fanny Fern,” as a prolific and successful writer for children, and Richard Storrs Willis, his youngest brother, formerly editor of the “Musical World,” the author of “Our Church Music,” and known both as a musical composer and a poet. Julia Willis, his favorite sister and constant correspondent, was also a woman of remarkable talent, with a gift of tongues and a sounder scholarship than her more showy brother. She wrote many of the book reviews in the “Home Journal,” but always declined to renounce her anonymity.

      Such were the influences which surrounded Willis’s early years. And if, at the first touch of the world, the youthful members of the household flew off like the dry seeds of the Impatiens, it need not therefore be hastily concluded that the home training, though perhaps too repressive and severe, was without lasting effect for good. Among the children and grandchildren of Nathaniel Willis are Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and representatives of other shades of belief and unbelief. But this is the history of many a New England Puritan family, and such are the disintegrating forces of American life. In the case of the eldest brother, it may be affirmed that, from a career which was certainly worldly, and in some of its aspects by no means edifying, the light that shone from his mother’s face uplifted in prayer for him never altogether faded away.

      Willis began school life under the tuition of the Rev. Dr. McFarland, of Concord, New Hampshire. “I have forgotten every circumstance,” he wrote long after, “of a year or two that I was at school at Concord, New Hampshire, when a boy, except the natural scenery of the place. The faces of my teacher and my playmates have long ago faded from my memory, while I remember the rocks and eddies of the Merrimac, the forms of the trees on the meadow opposite the town, and every bend of the river’s current.” Later he was brought home and sent to the Boston Latin School, then under “its well-remembered Pythagoras, Ben Gould.” A few reminiscences of his slate-and-satchel days are scattered here and there through his writings. Thus he vaguely recalled Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one of the boys whose fathers were Unitarians,” and he was greatly impressed by Edward Everett, then a young Harvard professor, whose stylishly dressed figure used to appear occasionally in Atkinson Street, at No. 31, in which thoroughfare the Willises dwelt. He remembered “the rousings before daylight,” on May-day, “to go to Dorchester Heights, and the shivering search after never found green leaves and flowers; the buttoning up of boy-jacket to keep out the cold wind, and pulling out of penknife to cut off the bare stems of the sweet-brier in search of the hidden odor of the belated bud.” In “The Pharisee and the Barber,” one of the two or three stories of Willis whose scenes are laid in Boston, the description of Sheafe Lane is evidently from the life. The Pharisee of that tale, Mr. Flint, an “active member of a church famed for its zeal,” who “dressed in black, as all religious men must (in Boston),” was doubtless a sketch from memory of some pious familiar of his father’s house, whose black eyes and formal talk left upon the lad a mixed impression of awe and distrust.

      Harvard was the natural destination of a Boston Latin School boy intending college. But the line between the Orthodox and the Unitarians was drawn more sharply in 1820 than in 1884. Even now stray youths from Boston are found at other colleges than Harvard, attracted elsewhere by family ties or theological affinities. But at that time the cleavage made by the schism in Eastern Massachusetts was still raw, and Deacon Willis would almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college.

      “Larry’s father,” wrote Willis in “The Lunatic’s Skate,” “was a disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a four years’ ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the other; and in the New England States these two sects are bitterly hostile. So to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of ‘election and free grace,’ whether or no.”

      Of the two great fitting-schools founded by Samuel and John Phillips respectively at Andover and at Exeter, the latter had been captured by the Unitarians. But the Andover academy, under the sheltering wing of the famed theological seminary in the same town, though