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 in 1638 and elected a deputy to the General Court. Probably the most noteworthy of the poet’s forbears, at least upon the father’s side, was the Rev. John Bailey, his ancestor in the fifth generation, a non-conforming Independent minister in Lancashire, who, having been silenced and afterwards imprisoned, escaped to Massachusetts in 1684, and was settled, first as minister over the church in Watertown, and later as associate minister over the First Church in Boston, where he died in 1697. Increase Mather preached his funeral sermon. His tomb is in the Granary Burying Ground, adjoining Park Street Church, and his portrait in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society. What more could a man ask for in an ancestor? No New England pedigree which respects itself is without one or more fine old Puritan divines of this kind. Accordingly, when Willis began to take that mild, retrospective interest in his own genealogy which foretokens the oncoming of age,—when new twigs upon the family tree give an unthought-of importance to the roots,—he bestowed the name of this particular forefather upon his youngest boy, Bailey Willis.

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 ennui; its interests divided between “business and Bethels;” its round of long family devotions, strict Sabbath observances, catechisms, and visiting missionaries. 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:—

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.

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 barely thirty miles from Boston, remained an insoluble lump of Calvinism, a wedge of defiant Orthodoxy in partibus infidelium. To Andover, accordingly, young Willis was sent, after a course in the Latin School, to complete his preparation for Yale. The academy was then under the headship of that sound classical master, John Adams, who was principal from 1810 to 1833. It gave an excellent fit in the classics, insomuch that Willis, though the reverse of diligent in college, was carried along a good way, with little study, by the impetus acquired at Andover. At Andover, too, he began to give signs of literary tastes and in particular to scribble verses, which had already given him the reputation of a poet among his fellows before he came up to college. A letter dated July 3, 1823, and addressed to his elder sister Lucy, about a fortnight before her marriage, incloses a copy of verses which is perhaps the earliest poem of Willis now extant. It has no merit, but as containing hints of his later manner and the unformed germs of that smooth, diffuse blank verse in which his “Scripture Sketches” were written, the opening lines may be not without interest:—

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:—

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:—

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:—

And again in 1822:—

In a letter of the same year to his mother, who had his conversion much at heart, he says:—

It is curious to reflect that these “mazes of pleasure and folly” meant nothing more than innocent school-boy diversions, such as black-berrying and swimming parties, or at worst a juvenile flirtation with some rural belle. The oldness and gravity of the phrase, in contrast with the boyish tone of other parts of his letters, illustrate well that moral precocity—precocity of the conscience as distinguished from the mind—developed in New England boys of the last generation by the Puritan training.

In January, 1823, the great revival which had been in progress at Boston struck the Andover academy. Mr. Willis made his son a visit, and urged him to join the church. After his return to Boston he received the following letter:—

The William Adams here mentioned was a son of the principal of the academy, and was afterwards Willis’s classmate at Yale. Louis Dwight was a theological student, who a year later was married to Willis’s second sister, Louisa. The subsequent progress of the revival is related in the following letter, written two or three days later:—

Andover, Mass., January 15.
Wednesday evening, 12 o’clock.

My dear Father,—My heart is so overflowing with joy and gratitude and happiness that I could not rest till I had sat down and told you all. We have had a meeting in Allen’s room to-night. Mr. Styles was there, and talked so that I thought I could almost see a halo round his head, and expected him to turn into St. Paul come down again from heaven. After meeting Mr. S. told them the meeting was closed, but if any wished to converse with him or the other professors of religion in the room, they might tarry. The room was crowded, body and all, so that you could not have got through, but no one stirred. Sobbing and weeping was heard all round the room. William Adams, Allen, Styles, and I then went round and conversed with them. They all burst into tears immediately, and listened with the greatest eagerness, and when I got up to go to the next one, they held on to me as though salvation depended on my talking with them. Isaac Stuart sobbed aloud the whole meeting time. Joseph Jenkins was in tears, and came down to my room after meeting and asked me to pray for and with him. He said he could not pray himself; he dared not. I gave him the best advice I could and prayed with him, and he is now in his room, as I hope praying for himself. I talked with little Joshua Huntingdon, and told him about his father. He wept, and promised to go home and pray. J. C. Alvord, a member of my class and a fine fellow, was in the greatest misery. He could not sit upon his chair, and took me out of the meeting to go to my room and pray with him. Jno. Tappan of Boston was very deeply affected. I conversed with Darrach of Philadelphia, Carter of Virginia, King of Convers, and several others. They all seemed to feel very deeply, and all begged me earnestly to pray for them. We could not get them away. They stood round weeping and looking for some one to say something to them. Oh, my dear father, what can we render to God for all his mercies! Allen has been down in my room several times to pray for some particular one. There were so many to pray for that we have been on our knees from seven o’clock till now almost all the time. Kennett, my room-mate, is very much affected. He fears to delay repentance, but says his father won’t like it when he goes back to Russia, and that there are no Christians in Russia.… Prayer ascends continually, sinners are repenting, and I am as proud as Lucifer. I feel as if I was going to do all myself; as if I could convert a thousand without God, if I only told them the truth. Oh, pray that I may have humility! It is and must be the burden of my supplications.