In the summer term of his sophomore year Willis was again suspended for a few weeks, this time in common with a majority of his class and in consequence of what was known as “the Conic Sections Rebellion.” The class had been assured by the tutors that they would not have to learn the corollaries to the propositions in that branch of mathematics, and when the objectionable corollaries were, notwithstanding, imposed upon them, the mercury then standing at 90° and the annual examinations at hand, eighty-four members bound themselves by a solemn pledge not to recite them. The government were firm, and the recalcitrant sophomores were suspended in platoons, day after day. Horace Bushnell was a ring-leader in this revolt, which included the “professors” equally with the worldly. All the suspended men were taken back at the end of the term.
In some recollections of Willis by his classmate, Hugh Blair Grigsby, published in the latter’s journal, the “Norfolk Beacon,” in the autumn of 1834, he says:—
“The first notice that the public had of his budding genius was a little poem in six verses, the two first lines of the first verse being—
‘The leaf floats by upon the stream
Unheeded in its silent way,’
We cannot recall the whole stanza; but our fair readers may remember that their albums contained, some time since, a beautiful vignette representing a lady resting in her bower, listening to the notes of a pretty songster perched above her. This engraving was taken from these lines in this poem:—
‘The bird that sings in lady’s bower,
To-morrow will she think of him?’ ”
Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824–25, about an old man planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,” where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of these juvenilia were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the “Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,” “The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.” It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best poem printed in their columns during the year—a device now relegated to the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his “Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the ‘Christian Watchman,’ ” as announced in the issue of that paper for March 30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,” and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode Island,” and other publications.
All this literary glory gave the young undergraduate great éclat in New Haven. He received many invitations out, and was teased for verses by the owners of countless albums. He began to frequent the society of the town, where his rapidly developing social gifts soon made him a favorite. He was at this time a tall, handsome stripling, with an easy assurance of manner and a good deal of the dandy in his dress. His portrait, painted by Miss Stuart of Boston, a daughter of the famous portrait-painter, Gilbert Stuart, shows him with a rosy face, very fair hair hanging in natural curls over the forehead, a retroussé nose, long upper lip, pale gray eye with uncommonly full lid (a family trait), and a confident and joyous expression. He carried himself with an airy, jaunty grace, and there was something particularly spirited and vif about the poise and movement of his head—a something which no portrait could reproduce. With naturally elegant tastes, an expansive temper, and an eagerness to see the more brilliant side of life, Willis could at all times make himself agreeable to those whom he cared to please. But he was quick to feel the chill of a hostile presence, and toward any one, in especial, who seemed to disapprove of him he could be curt and defiant. He had a winning way with women, who were flattered by his recognition of their influence over him and grateful for les petits soins which he never neglected.
Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to literature.
Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia, that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:—
“I sunk some pocket money in a blank book on reading Wilson’s ‘Noctes.’ Celestial nights I thought we had of it, at old black Stanley’s forbidden oyster house in New Haven; and it struck me it was robbery of posterity (no less!) not to record the brilliant efflorescence of our conviviality. Regularly on reaching my chambers (or as soon after morning prayers as my head became pellucid), I attempted to reduce to dialogue the wit of our Christopher North, ‘Shepherd’ and ‘Tickler;’ but alas! it became what may be called ‘productive labor.’ Either my memory did not serve me, or wit (I shouldn’t be surprised) reads cold by repentant daylight. It was heavy work, as reluctant as a college exercise, and after using up for cigar-lighters the short-lived ‘Noctes,’ I devoted the remainder of the book to outlines of the antique (that is to say, of old shoes), my passion just then being a collection of French slippers from the prettiest feet in the known world (‘known,’ to me).”
Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines have gone through this species of measles.
“I do not hate, but I have felt
Indifferent to woman long:
I bow not where I once have knelt,
I lisp not what I poured in song.
They are too beautifully made
For their tame earthliness of thought;