The profession of letters was Willis’s manifest destiny. Family tradition, his inborn tastes and talents, the course of his studies, and his achievements hitherto, all pointed that way. Yet in the then state of the American press it took no small amount of self-confidence to decline a paying profession and launch upon the uncertain currents of literary life. His next four years were spent in Boston and were years of apprenticeship in his life-work as an editor and journalist. He continued to write and publish verses, but his hand was acquiring cunning, through constant practice and frequent failure, in the production of that light, brilliant prose which made him the favorite periodical writer of his day; and he was also learning how to conduct a magazine. He still made occasional contributions to the “Recorder”—among others the New Year’s verses, then essential to every well-regulated paper—for 1828 and 1829. But his first editorial engagement was with Samuel G. Goodrich, the well-known bookseller and publisher, who had removed from Hartford to Boston in 1826. One of the first books which he had published in Boston was Willis’s “Sketches,” and he now employed the author of it to edit “The Legendary” for 1828 and “The Token” for 1829. Goodrich was a fine example of Yankee enterprise and versatility. He was one of the pioneers of “the trade” in America, entering the field at the same time with the Harpers. Under the pen-name of “Peter Parley,” he wrote or edited a long list of books for the young, histories, travels, biographies, tales, works of natural history, school text-books, etc. He had himself some pretensions as a poet, by virtue of “The Outcast and Other Poems,” 1841. He was an extensive traveler, and he became in 1851 United States consul at Paris. It was the fashion among a certain set in Boston to abuse “Peter Parley” and laugh at his literary claims. But he was a very successful publisher, and in selecting his editorial assistants, he had a keen eye for the kind of talent that takes, and the kind of work that pays. In his interesting “Recollections of a Lifetime” he gives contrasted sketches of the two principal contributors to his annuals—Willis and Hawthorne. Goodrich’s perceptions were, perhaps, not of the finest, but he was a shrewd observer of matters within his ken, and his recollections of Willis are worth repeating.

It is needless to pursue the contrast which the writer goes on to draw between Willis and the other and greater Nathaniel, who was then “the obscurest man of letters in America.” The publisher’s sympathies were obviously with his more lively and popular contributor, and he is puzzled to understand why such articles as “Sights from a Steeple,” “Sketches beneath an Umbrella,” “The Wives of the Dead,” and “The Prophetic Pictures,” should have “extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame” when originally published in “The Token,” while “now universally acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and power.” He is inclined to attribute it to a “new sense” in a portion of the reading world—obtained unluckily too late to profit the publisher of “The Token”—“which led them to study the mystical.” To Goodrich’s personal description of Willis may be added the following little portrait by Dr. Holmes, who remembers him well, as he looked during this Boston period.

“The Legendary” described itself as consisting of original pieces in prose and verse; tales, ballads, and romances, chiefly illustrative of American history, scenery, and manners. It was designed as a periodical, but only two volumes were issued, one in the early, and one in the later part of 1828. “The work proved a miserable failure,” said Goodrich, though numbering among its contributors Mrs. Sigourney, Miss Sedgwick, Halleck, Pierpont, Willis, Gaylord Clark, George Lunt, Grenville Mellen, and others less known to this generation. Willis wrote the two prefaces and contributed half a dozen poems of no importance, unless we except “The Annoyer,” which had considerable currency, and three prose papers, “Unwritten Poetry,” “Unwritten Philosophy,” and “Leaves from a Colleger’s Album.” These last were very juvenile and he never reprinted them. The first two were tales with a moral, one depicting the restorative influences of nature on a heart crushed by bereavement, the other describing a scholarly recluse, who lived alone with nature and his books, and finally educated and married his landlady’s daughter. The story in both instances is very slight, overladen with sentiment, descriptive digressions, and philosophy, that might better have stayed “unwritten.” In short, they are tedious—which Willis in his later work never was. “Unwritten Poetry” included, however, a description of Trenton Falls and a fine rhapsody about water which he rehabilitated afterwards and incorporated with “Edith Linsey.” Both of these had the honor—in the then paucity of our literature—to be selected by Mary Russell Mitford for her “Stories of American Life by American Authors.” “Leaves from a Colleger’s Album” was a first experiment of another kind, a humorous sketch of a trip on the Erie Canal, utilizing the experiences of his senior vacation, and, in particular, the incident of his reading a sermon in the cabin of the canal boat on Sunday. It contains, in the person of Job Clark, the nucleus of Forbearance Smith in the “Slingsby” papers—the nearest approach that Willis ever made to the genuine creation of a character. He was always thus economical of his material, repeatedly working over the same stuff into new shapes.

“The Token” belonged to the class of illustrated publications known as Annuals. It was the age of Annuals, Gift Books, Boudoir Books, Books of Beauty, Flowers of Loveliness, and Leaflets of Memory. The taste for these ornate combinations of literature and art was imported from England, where the Ackermans had published “The Forget-Me-Not,” the earliest specimen of the kind, in 1823. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia brought out the first American Annual, “The Atlantic Souvenir,” for which Willis had been asked to write, when in college, and to which he actually did contribute a copy of birthday verses, “I’m twenty-two—I’m twenty-two,” in the volume for 1829. These were written, he affirmed, “in a blank leaf of a barber’s Testament, while waiting to be shaved.” They were also inserted in the “London Literary Souvenir” for the same year, by Alaric A. Watts, a copious editor of Annuals, whose middle initial was cruelly asserted by Lockhart to stand for Attila. The rage for Annuals soon became general and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates some forty of them, bearing such fantastic titles as The Gem, The Opal, The Wreath, The Casket, The Rose, The Amulet, The Keepsake, Pearls of the West, Friendship’s Offering. And these are probably not half the list. There were religious Annuals, juvenile Annuals, oriental, landscape, botanic Annuals. Most rummagers among the upper shelves of an old library have taken down two or three of them, blown the dust from their gilt edges, ruffled the tissue papers that veil “The Bride,” “The Nun,” “The Sisters,” and “The Fair Penitent,” and wondered in what age of the world these remarkable “embellishments” and the still more remarkable letterpress which they embellish could have reflected American life. There is a faded elegance about them, as of an old ball dress: a faint aroma, as of withered roses, breathes from the page. Those steel-engraved beauties, languishing, simpering, insipid as fashion plates, with high-arched marble brows, pearl necklaces, and glossy ringlets—not a line in their faces or a bone in their bodies: that Highland Chieftain, that Young Buccaneer, that Bandit’s Child, all in smoothest mezzotint,—what kind of a world did they masquerade in? It was a needlework world, a world in which there was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the nightingale chanted in the grove ’neath the mouldering ivy-mantled tower; where vesper chimes and the echoes of the merry bugle-ugle-ugle horn were borne upon the zephyr across the yellow corn; where Isabella sang to the harp (with her hair down) and the tinkling guitar of the serenader under her balcony made response; a world in which there were fairy isles, enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly rococo landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a “sincere” art and an “earnest” literature.

In these Gems and Albums, the gemmy and albuminous illustrations alternated with romantic tales of mediÆval or eastern life and with “Lines on Seeing——,” or “Stanzas occasioned by” something. “The May-Flowers of Life,” for example, “suggested by the author’s having found a branch of May in a volume of poems which a friend had left there several years ago.” In the Annual dialect a ship was a “bark,” a bed was a “couch,” a window was a “casement,” a shoe was a “sandal,” a boat was a “shallop,” and a book was a “tome.” Certain properties became gemmy by force of association, as sea-shells, lattices, and Æolian harps. In England L. E. L. and in America Percival and Mrs. Sigourney were perhaps the gemmiest poets. But much of Willis’s poetry was album verse, with an air of the boudoir and the ball-room about it, a silky elegance and an exotic perfume that smack of that very sentimental and artificial school. This passage from “The Declaration” is in point:—

“The Token,” begun in 1828 and continued to 1842, was edited by Goodrich every year except 1829, when Willis had charge of it. Like other Annuals it contained, in spots, some good art and good writing. There were delicately designed and engraved vignette titles or presentation plates by Cheney, the Hartford artist. There was an occasional contribution, in prose, from Longfellow or Mrs. Child—then Miss Francis, and likewise a contributor to “The Legendary.” Many of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales” came out in “The Token.” Mrs. Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” divided with Willis’s “The Soldier’s Widow” the $100 prize offered by the publisher for 1828. Among the contributors to Willis’s volume (1829) were John Neal, Colonel William L. Stone, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hale, the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet, Willis’s Albany friend, J. B. Van Schaick, and Goodrich himself. The Rev. G. W. Doane—afterward Bishop Doane—gave his well known verses, “What is that, Mother?” Willis gave five poems of his own, the only noteworthy one among which was “Saturday Afternoon,” written to accompany the frontispiece, engraved by Ellis from a painting by Fisher, and representing children swinging in a barn. This had more the character of a simple, popular ballad than anything else which he had written, and was liked by many readers who cared little about his more elaborate verse. Another poem in “The Token,” “Psyche before the Tribunal of Venus,” he wrote for the engraving by Cheney from a drawing of Fragonard. A college tale, “The Ruse,” was a slight advance on the experiments in “The Legendary;” the dialogue was handled more freely, but the story was weak as a whole, hardly worth mentioning, certainly not worth preserving. Willis continued to contribute verses to “The Token” after he had resigned its editorship. “To a City Pigeon,” “On a Picture of a Girl leading her Blind Mother through the Woods,” and doubtless other pieces were printed in subsequent numbers. He wrote for other Annuals, at various times: “The Power of an Injured Look,” for “The Gift,” a Christmas book, 1845; an article “On Dress,” for “The Opal,” 1848, and edited “The Thought Blossom,” a memorial volume, as late as 1854. “The Torn Hat” was contributed to “The Youth’s Keepsake” for 1829, and “Contemplation” was written in 1828 to accompany an engraving in “Remember Me,” a religious Annual published in Philadelphia. But he had no very high opinion of the class of literature that they cultivated, and spoke of them as “yearly flotillas of trash.”

In the spring of 1829 he entered upon his first serious venture as a journalist, by starting the “American Monthly Magazine,” which ran two years and a half—from April, 1829, to August, 1831. Mr. Thomas Gold Appleton describes Willis’s undertaking as “a slim monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Appleton and his friend Motley, then students in Harvard, were both contributors. For a young littÉrateur, only a year and a half out of college, without capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of a monthly magazine was certainly an enterprise of some boldness. His expectations, however, were modest enough, and his preliminary card, “To the Public,” casts some light on the conditions of literary journalism at that time. He says that he cannot pay much for contributions, like the English magazines which he took for his model. “The difficulties of transmission over such an immense country and the comparatively small proportion of literary readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two, at the farthest.” He had, moreover, “the ebb of a boyish reputation” against him. Notwithstanding he launched upon his voyage with excellent pluck and vigor. He conducted his magazine with little assistance, writing himself from thirty to forty pages of printed matter every month in the shape of tales, poems, essays, book reviews, and sketches of life and travel. Boston was not yet the Boston of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, but it had already as fair a claim to the title of literary metropolis as New York. Everett and Channing were great names. Dana, Pierpont, and Sprague were among its poets. These men were not available for Willis’s purposes, but he rallied to his support a number of younger men, such as Richard Hildreth, the historian, George Lunt, the poet, Park Benjamin, Isaac McLellan, the Rev. George B. Cheever, Albert Pike, afterwards the Arkansas poet and fire-eater, and Rufus Dawes,—then a budding genius, subsequently a preacher of erratic doctrines,—J. O. Rockwell, Mrs. Sigourney, and others whose names have fallen silent. Next to the editor’s own graceful work, the most notable things given to the public through the columns of the “American Monthly” were Pike’s “Hymns to the Gods,” poems of a richly classical inspiration, which have often provoked comparison with Keats’s odes; and which, if their workmanship were equal to their imaginative fervor, would justify the comparison.

Willis led off in the opening number with a carefully written, but not very characteristic, essay on “Unwritten Music.” It was thought monstrous fine by his friends, but suggests, it must be confessed, that dreariest product of the human mind,—a prize composition. As a study of the harmonies of nature, it was much too general in its reflections and descriptions to please a modern taste, wonted to the sharp and full detail of Thoreau and his successors. The editorial articles, prose and verse, in the “American Monthly” were too many to be mentioned here individually. There were stories, “The Fancy Ball,” “The Elopement,” “P. Calamus, Esq.,” and others which their author never recognized so far as to give them any place in his collected writings. Others, as “Baron von Raffloff,” “Captain Thompson,” “Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man,” etc., were the rough drafts of later tales, such as “Pedlar Karl,” “Larks in Vacation,” and “Scenes of Fear.” “Albina M’Lush” was the best of these. “The Death of the Gentle Usher” contained an eloquent passage on the night heavens, which obtained a better setting in “Edith Linsey.” “An Inkling of Adventure” lent its name and nothing else to the first published collection of Willis’s “Slingsby” stories. Then there were sketches of travel in New York State and Canada, partly reminiscences of senior vacation and partly memorials of holidays from the editorial desk, spent at Saratoga, Lebanon Springs, or elsewhere: “Notes upon a Ramble,” “Letters of Horace Fritz, Esq.,” and “Pencillings by the Way,”—a title afterward used to better advantage. Parts of these were similarly refurbished for later employment. The secret of that skillful blending of gayety and sentiment, the quick, light transitions, which make much of the charm of Willis’s best stories and sketches, like “F. Smith,” or “Pasquali,” he had not yet learned. In these earlier efforts the serious parts drag and the humorous parts are flashy and thin. Besides the monthly “table” there were editorial articles of that rambling, chatty description peculiar to the period, and which the “Noctes” had done as much as anything to introduce: “Scribblings,” “The Scrap Book,” “The Idle Man,” “TÊte-À-tÊte Confessions,” etc., in which the editor takes the reader into his confidence and his sanctum, makes him sit down in his red morocco dormeuse, reads him bits of verse from his old scrap-books and his favorite authors, calls attention to his japonica, his smoking pastille, his scarlet South American trulian (a most familiar bird with Willis—he gets it in again in “Lady Ravelgold”), and his two dogs Ugolino and L. E. L., whose lair is in the rejected MSS. basket. He fosters an agreeable fiction that he writes with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, and he says now and then in a hospitable aside “Take another olive,” or “Pass the Johannisbergh”; this to his imaginary interlocutor, Cousin Florence, or Tom Lascelles, or The Idle Man, an epicure and dandy, “who eats in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool.”

These amiable coxcombries of Willis gave dire offense to the critics, and especially to Joseph T. Buckingham, the veteran of the Boston press and editor of the “Courier,” then the most influential Whig newspaper in Massachusetts. He published epigrams on Willis, with very blunt points, administered fatherly rebukes to him for his affected English, and objected strongly to Ugolino, L. E. L., and the trulian. Willis retorted in kind, and a good-natured war raged between the “Courier” and the “American Monthly,” though their editors were privately the best of friends. In his “Specimens of Newspaper Literature,” Buckingham paid a glowing and, indeed, extravagant compliment to the talents of his young adversary. Willis’s experience in editing the “American Monthly” was of great advantage to him. He had a natural instinct for journalism, and he soon acquired by practice that personal, sympathetic attitude toward his readers, and that ready adjustment of himself to the public taste, which made him the most popular magazinist of his day and defined at once his success and his limitations. For its purposes Willis’s crisp prose was admirable: “delicate and brief like a white jacket,—transparent like a lump of ice in champagne,—soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.” It had an easy, conversational grace, the air of “the town,” the tone of good society. In his review of Lady Morgan’s “Book of the Boudoir,” he made a plea for that negligÉ style which he practiced so daintily himself. “We love this rambling, familiar gossip. It is the undress of the mind. There are few people who possess the talent of graceful trifling, either in writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is like naÏvetÉ in character,—nature let alone.” There was a great deal of good writing in Willis’s “American Monthly” articles; bright thoughts expressed in exquisite English, here and there a page which Charles Lamb or Leigh Hunt might have been glad to claim. Some of these he rescued from the old files of the magazine and inserted in his later work. The chapter on “Minute Philosophies,” “A Morning in the Library,” and “The Substance of a Diary of Sickness” were used again in “Edith Linsey,” and a spirited description of Nahant in one of the “tables” did duty in “F. Smith.” But many a nice bit was too small for resetting and remained lost in the ephemeral context,—many such a scrap as this little picture of summer in town:

The “New England Galaxy,” which was also under Buckingham’s management, was edited for a time by one William Joseph Snelling, who made quite a stir in Boston newspaper circles. He had been an under-officer in the army and stationed somewhere in the Northwest, but came to Boston about 1830 and devoted himself to sensational journalism and in particular to a crusade against gamblers. His life was threatened for this, and he converted his office into a sort of arsenal. In 1831 he published a slashing lampoon, “Truth: a New Year’s Gift for Scribblers,” in which he blackguarded American writers in general and paid his respects to Willis as follows:—

Some of this delicate banter was exhumed and quoted a few years later by Captain Marryat, in the article in the “Metropolitan” which led to the affair of honor between that warrior and Willis. The latter answered Snelling “contemptuously but effectively,” Goodrich reports, “in some half dozen verses inserted in the ‘Statesman,’ and addressed to Smelling Joseph. The lines stuck to poor Smelling for the remainder of his life.” The pasquinader himself afterwards went to New York and conducted a meat-axe publication, “The Censor.” Goodrich adds, that he “fell into habits of dissipation, which led from one degradation to another, till his miserable career was ended,”—a victim, no doubt, to the angry muse. Willis also contrived to offend Mrs. Lydia Maria Child by a satirical review of her “Frugal Housewife” and by harping on a sentence from that authority, “hard ginger-bread is nice.” She took this very much to heart, and when she afterwards had charge of the literary department of the “Traveller” showed an abiding hostility toward her whilom critic. He early attained to the dignity of parody. “The Annoyer” was travestied in the “Amateur” and a humorous imitation of “Albina M’Lush” was also printed. Mere literary criticism, however unfair, need not greatly disturb any one. But Willis was subjected, in Boston, to personalities of a very annoying character. He was constantly in receipt of anonymous letters calling him a puppy, a rake, etc. He was attacked in the newspapers for his frivolity, his dandyism, and his conceit. Private scandal, circulated by word of mouth, concerning his debts and his alleged immoralities, sometimes got into print. It would not be easy to explain why so kind a man as Willis, one always so eager to oblige and so prone to say good-natured things about everybody, should have excited so much wrath, not only at this time, but all through his life, by his harmless literary fopperies and foibles, did we not remember that he was successful, that he was a favorite in society, and, above all, that he wore conspicuously good clothes. There was also something about his airy way of writing and the personality it suggested that was and is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of serious-minded people who resent all attempts to entertain them on the part of any one whom they cannot entirely respect. Willis carried it off lightly enough, though, of course, it must have stung him. He knew, he said, “how easy it is to despise the ungentlemanly critic and forget the poor wrong of his criticism.”

In intervals of work on the “American Monthly” he contributed frequently to the “Boston Statesman,” having been engaged, together with Lunt and Dawes, to write something for it every week, “short or long, prose or verse,” at the rate of five dollars an article, an arrangement that lasted for some months. This seems now beggarly pay, but Nathaniel Greene of the “Statesman” was, according to Willis, the only editor in the country who, as early as 1827, paid anything at all for verse. During these early years of journalistic life Willis sojourned awhile in the pleasant land of Bohemia. He was a member of a supper club, which included two representatives of each profession. Washington Allston and Chester Harding were the artists; Willis and Dawes the men of letters; Horace Mann and five or six more completed the tale. Willis was a frequent lounger in Harding’s studio, and some years after he was delighted to come across his tracks at Gordon and Dalhousie castles, where Harding was known. Willis was fond of fast horses, and used to drive his friends out to Nahant, for a spin on the hard beach along the edge of the surf. This was the scene of “F. Smith,” one of his most perfect and characteristic stories. With Dawes and others he resorted, not seldom, for a game supper, to an ancient and once somewhat stately hostelry, known as the “Stackpole House,” where the wines were excellent and the landlord good-humored and disposed to trust,—the original, doubtless, of Gallagher in “The Female Ward,” a story written long afterwards, but whose incidents and descriptions are assignable to this period.

Willis’s position in Boston was in some respects a difficult one. His family connection were plain, good folks, not “in society,”—not, at least, in the literary society, which was Unitarian, or in the so-called aristocratic society, which was mainly either Unitarian or Episcopalian. He himself was socially ambitious, and these were the circles which he wished to frequent. “The pale of Unitarianism,” he wrote, “is the limit of gentility.” He was a great favorite with Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, the “lady autocrat” and leader of the ton in the Puritan capital for many years. He was constantly at her house when she was in town, and was invited to be one of her party when she went to Saratoga in the summer. Nor was this a passing fancy with Mrs. Otis, but stood the test of time and separation. She made him a long visit at Idlewild during the latter years of his life. But the Park Street Church people, among whom he had been brought up, looked askance upon his fashionable associations. The old stories of his college dissipations were revived, while rumors of his Boston irregularities reached the ears of his New Haven acquaintances. Willis himself took no notice of these slanders, but they were warmly resented by his friends. His brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, wrote to Mr. D. W. Whiting of New Haven: “Nat is a good fellow. He is not dissipated in any way; nor traveling the Tartarean turnpike, as the good New Haven people suppose. He is attending to his magazine, and doing his duty as well as any of us.” Though Willis did not make the impression of a man of very scrupulous morality, he was certainly not given to any serious dissipations. It was not in his temperament to run into physical excesses. His senses were delicate, and he always respected them. He never, for example, used tobacco; he was never a hard drinker. In youth he affected a moderate conviviality and had an Æsthetic liking for champagne. In middle age he was accustomed to mix a little spirit with his water, expressing a horror for the pure element, on the whimsical ground that it tasted of sinners ever since the flood. In this Boston period, his offenses were probably limited to running up bills at livery stables and inns, with a too sanguine expectation of being able to pay them from the proceeds of his literary work. Edward Beecher, who had been a tutor at Yale during his college course, was at this time pastor of the Park Street Church. Finding himself unwilling to conform his life to the strict rules of that society, Willis called on Mr. Beecher and stated the manner of his supposed conversion in a revival at Andover, and the influences that had induced him to join the church. He said that he was sincere in the act, but was convinced afterward that he was mistaken in his conviction, and that he had not experienced the change that qualified him for church membership; and he requested Mr. Beecher to obtain for him an honorable dismission. Mr. Beecher sympathized with him in his feelings, and made an effort to satisfy his request, but failed, as the church then believed that there were but three ways out of it, death, dismissal to another church, or excommunication. Accordingly, at a church meeting on April 29, 1829, in which Mr. Beecher took no part, the following sentence was passed:—

“Whereas certain charges have been made against Brother N. P. Willis, which, in the opinion of this church has been fully proved, namely: Absence from the communion of this church and attendance at the theatre as a spectator; and whereas he has neglected to appear before the church to answer the said charges, although duly notified; and has not given to the church satisfactory evidence of penitence, but has evinced by a letter laid before the church an entirely different state of feeling; therefore voted, That Mr. Nathaniel P. Willis be, and he hereby is, in the name and by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, excommunicated from this church.”