“There was a bride, and she was beautiful
And fond, affectionate; her soul did love.
’Twas not the transient feeling of an hour,
That loves and hates, and loves and hates again—
Oh, no; it was a purer, kindlier feeling—
A something rooted, grafted on the soul,
That cannot help but live and bud and blossom.”
He also began to wreak thought upon expression in that common vent to the cacoethes scribendi, of young writers—keeping a diary, “a red morocco volume, of very ornate slenderness and thinness, in which I recorded my raptures at spring mornings and blue sashes, my unappreciated sensibilities, my mysterious emotions by moonlight, and the charms of the incognita whom I ran against at the corner. This precious record shared in the final and glorious conflagration of Latin themes, grammars, graduses, and old shirts, on leaving academy for college.”
“The Lunatic’s Skate” opens with some reminiscences of school life at Andover:—
“In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from him), and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s clearing and that by our own door. Out of school Larry and I were inseparable. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made in the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other’s approbation.”
One of his school-fellows here was Isaac McLellan, who afterwards became a contributor to Willis’s “American Monthly.” He published a long poem, “The Fall of the Indian,” which Willis reviewed in the same periodical, referring to the poet as “the very boy that has tracked the woods with us, and called us by our nickname over a hedge, and cracked nuts with us by the fire in the winter evenings. Which of us dreamed, as we read in our blotted classic, ‘Quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum,’ that he should ever be guilty of a book? How it would have swelled our idle veins, as we lay half asleep, bobbing our lines over the bank of the Shawsheen on those long Saturday afternoons, that we should ever play for each other the gentle office of critic!”
In after years the rice fields of Georgia, with their embankments and green surfaces, reminded Willis of “the gooseberry pies which formed part of my early education at Andover, and which are among the warmest of my recollections of that classic academy.” “We have fine times picking berries here,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “Every kind grows in profusion in Andover—raspberries, black, blue, thimble, and whortle berries. The woods are crowded with them. After tea we generally start, and after we have eat enough go and bathe in the Shawsheen, our Andover river.”
This Indian Ilyssus was the scene of an adventure recorded in certain “Tête-à-tête Confessions” in the “American Monthly,” doubtless with some exaggerations for literary effect and with a dénoûment suspiciously dramatic. The passage may be given, however, for what it is worth:—
“Cytherean Venus! How I did love Miss Polly D. Low, the pride of the factory on the romantic Shawsheen! I saw her first in the tenderest twilight of a Saturday evening, washing her feet in the river. I was a lad of some impudence, and I sat down on a stone beside her, and by the time it was dark we were the best friends possible. She was beautiful. I think so now. She was about eighteen, and, though four years older than I, my education had more than equalized us. At least, if not the wiser of the two, I was the most skilled in the subtlety of love, and practiced with great success les petites ruses. She was a tall brunette, and I sometimes fancied, when her eye exhibited more than ordinary feeling, that there was Indian blood under that dark and glowing skin. The valley of the Shawsheen, just below the village where I was at school, is a gem of solitary and rich scenery, and the overhanging woods and long meadows afforded the most picturesque and desirable haunts for ramblers who did not care to be met. There on Sunday afternoons, when she was released from her shuttle and I from my Schrevelius, did we meet and stroll till the nine o’clock bell of the factory summoned her unwillingly home. I could go without my supper in those days, though I doubt if I would now on such slight occasion. By the time vacation came, I found myself seriously in love, declared my passion, and left her with my heart half broken. We were gone four weeks, and when I returned the butcher’s boy was engaged to Miss Low, and I was warned to avoid the factory at the peril of a flogging.”
In his last year at Andover Willis experienced religion and joined the church. Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called “revivals,” in some school or college needs no description of the kind of pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young consciences there assembled. At the first rumor of an unwonted “seriousness” abroad, occasioned perhaps by the death of a fellow-student, by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in a winter term, the machinery is set in motion. Daily prayer-meetings are held, in which the elders play part—the movement at Andover was taken in hand by the “Seminarians,” that is, the students of the Divinity School;—the unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and submit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of stimulus there follows a great awakening. Many are “under conviction,” the air becomes electric, and there is a strange spiritual tension which is felt even by the resisting. Momentous choices are made in an instant and under the stress of contagious emotions. The awful issues of eternity are set before a roomful of boys in the midst of prayers and sobs and eloquent words, exhorting the sinner not to let pass this opportunity of salvation—perhaps his last. And then the movement subsides, leaving an impression which endures with some, and with others quickly wears off. Those who believe that the Christian character and the Christian life are the result of nurture and slow endeavor look with distrust upon these sudden conversions. The hardened sinner may need some such violent call to repentance, but there is a sort of indecency in this premature forcing open of the simple and healthful heart of a boy, substituting morbid self-questionings, exaggerated remorse, and the terrors of perdition for his natural brave outlook on a world of hope and enjoyment. The story of Willis’s conversion is fully told in his letters home, and it reads like a chapter of “Doctor Johns.”
In 1821, being then fifteen years of age, he had written to his father:—
“I can plainly see an answer to prayer in the delay of my admission to the church. I prayed that God would, if I was in danger of making a hasty step, by some means or other prevent it. I doubted, till it became almost a certainty, whether it was proper. I doubted myself, my pretensions to a change of heart; and my very heart seemed to sink under me every time I thought of the solemn engagement I was unhappy, extremely unhappy, when in Boston, and have been, I might say, miserable ever since.”
And again in 1822:—
“As