Whatever may have been the effect of Willis’s career in Europe upon his character, its influence on his literary fortunes was most propitious. Foreign travel furnished just the stimulus that he wanted. As a writer he was at all times very dependent on his supplies. If they were fresh and abundant his writing was correspondingly so; if life stagnated with him his writing wore thin. Place is comparatively indifferent to men of deep or intense genius, to a philosopher like Emerson or a brooding idealist like Hawthorne. They strike root anywhere, and it is no great matter from what corner they look forth upon the world. The life of the soul, the life of nature, the problems of the conscience, may be studied in Concord or Salem as well as anywhere else. A profound insight, a subtle imagination will interpret the humblest environment into philosophy and poetry. And yet even these are not quite free of their surroundings. To all but sworn Emersonians “English Traits” is probably the most intelligible and satisfactory of Emerson’s writings. “The Marble Faun” is not Hawthorne’s greatest romance, but there is a richness about it, a body, that comes simply from its material, and is not to be found in “The Scarlet Letter” or “The House of the Seven Gables.”

As for Willis, his genius, such as it was, was frankly external. His bright fancy played over the surface of things. His curiosity and his senses demanded gratification. He needed stir, change, adventure. He was always turning his own experiences to account, and the more crowded his life was with impressions from outside, the more vivid his page. He had the artist’s craving for luxury, and was fond of quoting a saying of Godwin: “A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding.” This taste for the sumptuous had been starved in Willis at home. Not only were literature and society in America far more provincial then than now, but life was plainer in every way. The rapid growth of wealth has obliterated the most striking contrasts between cities like New York and Boston, on the one hand, and cities like London and Paris, on the other. In every foreign capital nowadays one finds his simple republican compatriots grumbling at the absence of American conveniences, cursing the steamboats, the railway carriages, the hotels, the luggage system, the portable baths and bed-room candles, and proclaiming loudly that the Americans are the most luxurious people on the face of the earth. In Europe, and especially in England, circumstances threw Willis into a new world. He shared for a time in the life of the titled aristocracy and the idle rich, and he took to it like one to the manner born. He was at home at once amid all that gay ease and leisure. The London clubs, the parks, the great country houses, Almack’s and the Row, the beautiful haughty women, the grace, indolence, and refinement, hereditary for generations, seemed no more than the birthright of this New England printer’s son, from which some envious fairy had hitherto shut him out.

Willis arrived at Havre November 3d, and went on by diligence to Paris, where he spent between five and six months. He had taken out with him a number of good letters, some from Martin Van Buren among the rest. The American colony in Paris was then small and select. It was under the wing of Lafayette, who was very polite to Willis during his stay. Cooper was there and his protÉgÉ, Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, who had come from Florence to execute a bust of Lafayette. Morse, the artist, too, who, on his return trip to America in a Havre packet, in the year following, was to hit upon his invention of the electric telegraph. And lastly, Willis’s fellow-townsman, Dr. Howe, then a zealous young philanthropist, who had won much glory by his recent campaign in Greece, and was now attending medical lectures at the French capital. Willis took lodgings with Howe until the latter, having been appointed president of the American committee for the relief of the Poles, went off on his dangerous mission of distributing supplies among the insurgent bands in Polish Prussia, an enterprise which ended in his capture and confinement for six weeks in a Prussian prison. All these gentlemen Willis had the good fortune to meet in familiar and cordial intercourse. Cooper asked him to breakfast with Morse and Howe, and walked and talked with him in the gardens of the Tuileries. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun between the two authors was afterwards renewed at home, though, from accidents of geography, they never became really intimate.

Willis also made desirable acquaintances among the foreigners resident in Paris. Morse took him to call upon Sir John Bowring, editor of the “Westminster Review,” the translator of much of the national poetry of the Russians and Hungarians, and afterwards the English governor of Hong Kong at the time of the Opium War. He made acquaintance, too, with Spurzheim, the phrenologist, who took a cast of his head; with General Bertrand, who had been with Napoleon at St. Helena; and with the Countess Guiccioli, who presented him with a sonnet by herself, and an autograph note from Shelley. The glamour of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was still over Europe, and everywhere the American traveler looked eagerly for his footprints. Mr. Rives, the minister of the United States at Paris, was very attentive to his young countryman, and presented him to the king, with two other American gentlemen, Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Carr. The latter was American consul at Tangiers. He took a great liking to Willis, made him a number of presents, and offered to appoint him his secretary, and take him to Morocco. This offer Willis was at first inclined to accept. It was a tempting one in many particulars, and in a birthday letter to his mother, January 20, 1832, he thus explained its advantages:—

Why he did not embrace this golden chance remains uncertain, though he hints at a possible difficulty in the fact that his friend, the consul, was a notorious duelist, who had shot seven or eight men and had a very pretty wife. However, before he left Paris, Mr. Rives attached him to his own embassy, a courtesy which proved of the greatest service to him. It entitled him to wear the uniform of a secretary of legation, and the diplomatic button gave him the entrÉe to the court circles of every country he visited.

Willis saw Paris at an interesting moment. The Polish revolution had just failed, and the city swarmed with refugees. Louis Philippe was already growing unpopular, and there were continual small Émeutes on the Boulevard Montmartre, at the Porte Saint Denis, and in other quarters, led by Polytechnic students and put down without much trouble by the troops. It was a cholera year and people were dying by the hundreds daily. Meanwhile the gay world went on much as ever. Carnival was kept with the usual elaborate follies. There were masked balls at the palace. Malibran and Taglioni were on the stage. Paris, with its novelties and splendors, exercised the same fascination over Willis that it exercises proverbially over his compatriots. He was never tired of promenading and sight-seeing. His lodgings were in the Rue Rivoli, facing the Tuileries. Sismondi, the historian, had the apartment under him. In a private letter he thus describes his daily occupations:—

He had no fear of the cholera and firmly believed that it was not contagious. He was advised that good living, frequent bathing, a cheerful frame of mind, and regular habits were the best preventives. He even went boldly through the cholera wards of the HÔtel Dieu, and sent a harrowing description of them to the “Mirror.” But towards spring the pestilence gained more and more. The theatres were shut, all gayeties suspended, and thousands fled the city daily. The upper classes, who had thus far escaped, began to be attacked. The streets were almost deserted, people went about holding camphor bags to their nostrils, and the panic became universal. Finally, toward the middle of April, while dancing at a party, Willis was seized with violent pains in the stomach, vomiting, and chills. He ran out of the room to an apothecary’s, swallowed thirty drops of laudanum, took a carriage home, and a prescription of camphor and ether, and went to bed. These instant remedies, he had no doubt, were all that saved him, and on April 16th he started for Italy.

It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the “Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.” Both described well the character of these letters, which were written hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision, to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.” There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s “Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and “Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born “foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber. Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous works of art are often either at second hand or incorrect. His education had not prepared him to pronounce on these, and he had not the patience to cultivate a critical appreciation of them. But in the crowd and out of doors—whither he gladly escapes—he is always happy, and there are many pictures, scattered here and there through these excellent letters, which for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled either by Hawthorne, in his “Note-Books,” or by Bayard Taylor, in his numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.

Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, and become the interpreter to the New World of the Old World’s romantic past. He was never much of a scholar. The literature and legends of the countries he traveled had little to give him, though he possessed just enough of the historic imagination for the proper equipment of a picturesque tourist. In general it was the present that interested him: all this stirring modern life, the strange manners and dresses, the changing landscapes, the gay throngs in the streets, the pretty women and notable men at the drive or the ball. Nor was his attitude that of criticism, but rather of intense personal enjoyment. He had gone out ready to be pleased, and he was pleased. He gave, in consequence, a somewhat rose-colored view of Europe to his readers at home. Not that the disagreeable side escaped his notice, but he was having his holiday and he gave a holiday account of it, and his engaging egotism lent a personal interest to his descriptions. The “Edinburgh Review,” in a just but rather heavy notice of “Pencillings,” complained of the scantiness of useful information in them. Useful information was a thing which Willis eschewed. He took small interest in politics, public institutions, industrial conditions, etc.; and he knew that they would bore nine out of ten among his readers. He lumped them jauntily under the head of “statistics,” referred the anxious inquirer concerning them to the cyclopÆdias, acknowledged with delightful candor that he himself was an ornamental person, and went on with his sketches of people and places. Yet “Pencillings by the Way” was a book which so solid a man as Daniel Webster carried with him on a journey, and which, says his biographer, “he read attentively and praised. He said the letters were both instructive and amusing and evinced great talents on the part of the author.” They inspired the young Bayard Taylor with his first longing to travel. Thousands of Americans have taken their impressions of Europe from them; and in spite of all that has since been written by more leisurely and better instructed observers, they retain their freshness wonderfully, and present to the reader of to-day vivid glimpses of the outside of European life, at a time when steam had not yet made the byways of all countries accessible.

Willis spent the summer and autumn of 1832 in the north of Italy, making Florence his headquarters. Dr. Bowring had given him in Paris a letter to Count Porro at Marseilles. The latter had been with Byron in Greece, where Count Gamba, the Guiccioli’s brother, was of his corps and served under him. He gave Willis letters to “half the rank of Italy:” among others, to the Marquis Borromeo, who owned the “Isola Bella” in Lake Maggiore. Porro assured Willis that Borromeo would give him the use of one of his palazzos, “as he has five or six and is happy when people he knows occupy his servants.” The nominal position of attachÉ to the American legation at Paris obtained for him a private presentation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and an invitation to the ducal balls and the receptions at the Casino, both of which were given weekly. The Florentines did not entertain much at their houses, but the foreign residents did, and especially the English. Willis was dined by Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Westphalia, who was living at the Tuscan capital with the title of Prince Montfort, and giving very exclusive parties. He resorted to the Saturday soirÉes of Prince Poniatowski, who professed love for Americans, and whose august name was afterwards borne by the favorite pony of the Willis children at Idlewild. In short, he was freely admitted to Florentine society and took part in its fashionable intrigues and dissipations. He secured lodgings in Florence in the same palazzo with Greenough, in the apartment just vacated by Cole, the American landscape painter. Through Greenough he saw a great deal of artist life in Italy. At Rome Greenough subsequently introduced him to Gibson, the English sculptor, who presented him with a cast of his bas-relief, Cupid and Psyche. Under the guidance of the two, Willis amused himself by trying his hand, in an amateurish fashion, at moulding in clay. He was flattered by their assurances that he had a good touch, and felt half inclined, for a moment, to exchange his dilettantish pursuit of letters for an equally dilettantish pursuit of art. His dreams of the possibilities of such a career took shape long after in the novel of “Paul Fane.” Greenough had moulded a bust of Willis at Florence, and some years after he cut it in marble and gave it to him. There is a story about this which is authentic, and too pretty to leave untold. Mr. Joseph Grinnell of New Bedford happened to be in Florence in the spring of 1830 and had employed Greenough to make him a statue of his niece Cornelia,—then a child of five years,—who became in time Willis’s second wife. It was from a remnant of the same block used for her statue that the sculptor, unconscious of the omen, afterwards carved the bust of her future husband. The two fragments thus strangely reunited stand now in the same drawing-room, the head of the youthful poet, with its Hyperion curls, and the full-length figure of the demure little Quaker maiden, holding in one hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat abroad. His inherited tendency to embonpoint was counteracted in later life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,” apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.”

August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting, and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season.

This programme was altered for some reason. Instead of starting for England, he made a second visit to Venice, then returned to Florence, and when the autumn was far enough advanced to make it safe went on to Rome. In the letter just quoted he mentions that he has made the acquaintance of a young Mr. Noel, a cousin of Byron.

The winter of 1832-33 and the spring of 1833 were spent between Florence, Rome, and Naples.

Wherever he traveled he made friends. He was not without a title to his secretary’s button, for his whole progress through Europe was a ticklish feat of diplomacy. Few of the people whom he met in society suspected what thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant that the dashing young attachÉ was dependent for his bread and butter on weekly letters to a newspaper. The failure of remittances from Morris sometimes put him in an awkward predicament, but he always managed to find a way out. In one of the letters which he made it a religion to write his mother on each recurring birthday—this one dated at Florence, January 20, 1833—he relates some of his experiences of the kind:—

With all his taste for luxury, Willis knew how to make economies, and living was much cheaper then. He never affected a mystery, and in one of his letters to the “Mirror” he explained how it was that he could live in Florence on three hundred dollars a year “exclusive of postage and pleasure,” paying four dollars a month for his apartment and attendance, breakfasting for six cents, and dining “quite magnificently” for twenty-five. Meanwhile a deal of gossip about him was in circulation in America, and the editor of the “Mirror” had to contradict, inter alia, a rumor that his foreign collaborator had married the widow of a British nobleman and was faring sumptuously in Rome.

Having been invited by the officers of the frigate United States to join them in a six months’ cruise up the Mediterranean, he repaired to Leghorn, from which port the United States, with her consort the Constellation, set sail on the 3d of June, 1833. Commodore Patterson of Baltimore commanded the former ship and Captain Reed of Philadelphia the latter. Both gentlemen were accompanied by their wives and the commodore by his three beautiful daughters. These were all old friends of Willis, and he had made acquaintance with the other officers of the squadron in Italy. He could not have seen the East under pleasanter auspices, and the next half year was the richest in literary fruit of his entire sojourn upon the continent. The squadron loitered along like a pair of pleasure yachts, touching at all the more interesting ports. The bright shores of the Mediterranean and the Levant passed in a magic panorama before the eyes of the passengers, who sailed and danced and ate the lotus day after day. Elba, Naples, and Sicily; Trieste and Vienna; the Ionian Islands, Greece, and the shores of the Dardanelles were visited in turn, and at length in October the frigate dropped anchor in the Golden Horn. Willis’s “Pencillings” of Constantinople are among the best in his portfolio, among the best, indeed, that have ever been made of the surface of Oriental life. Italy was hackneyed: the Rialto and Saint Mark’s, the Coliseum and the Vatican, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples, had been described a thousand times. But here he was off the track of common tourists. His nature reveled in the barbaric riches of the East and cheerfully blinked the discomforts and the dirt. The mysteries of the seraglio and the slave market and the veiled women in the bazaars piqued his curiosity, and the poetry of the Turkish cemeteries and mosques appealed to his sentiment. He was never weary of wandering through the grand bazaar. “I have idled up and down in the dim light and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable odors of its thousand spices.” Willis was a born shopper and had a feminine eye for the niceties not only of costume, but of upholstery, pottery, and all kinds of purchasable knick-knacks. He relished a fine appeal to his senses and his fancy all in one. So he liked to go through the street of the confectioners and taste the queer sweetmeats with flowery names, “peace to your throat” and “lumps of delight,” and to inventory the merchants’ stock in trade, their gilded saucers, brass spoons, and vases of rose water. He liked the opium-eating druggists, smoking their narghiles and fingering their spice wood beads, the edges of their jars “turned over with rich colored papers (a peculiar color to every drug), and broad spoons of box-wood crossed on the top.” He delighted to cheapen amber and embroidered slippers in the Bezestein, and best of all to lounge on the cushioned divan, taking sherbet and aromatic coffee and bargaining for attar of roses in the octagonal shop of Mustapha, the perfumer to the Sultan, whom he has introduced as a deus ex machina into his story, “The Gypsy of Sardis.” In the “Letters from under a Bridge,” he affirms, whether seriously or not I cannot say, that the English artist Bartlett, who was his collaborator in “American Scenery,” encountered old Mustapha in Constantinople, and that the latter showed him Willis’s card “stained to a deep orange with the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath hour to bath hour with the precious oils he traffics in.” He questioned Bartlett about America, “a country which to Mustapha’s fancy is as far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt tip of the seraglio,” and finally gave him a jar of attar of jasmine to send to Willis. “The small gilt bottle, with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breathing before me.” Then there was the street of the booksellers, where “the small brown reed stood in every clotted inkstand,” and the bearded old Armenian bookworm, interrupted in eating rice from a wooden bowl, took down an illuminated Hafiz, “and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian.” Willis also struck up an acquaintance with Dr. Millingen, the Sultan’s physician, who had attended Byron in his last illness. He spent two days with him, by invitation, at his house on the Bosphorus, and picked up a smattering of Romaic from Mrs. Millingen, who was a Greek.

After five weeks at Constantinople, the frigate weighed anchor for Smyrna. There he found an old schoolmate, Octavus Langdon, a Smyrniote merchant, who entertained him very hospitably, and invited him to join a party for a few days’ tour in Asia Minor. The party consisted of Willis and his host, an American missionary named Brewer, and two other gentlemen, and their adventures included a night in a real Oriental khan at Magnesia, and a visit to the site of ancient Sardis. A beautiful girl, of whom Willis caught a glimpse, through a tent door, in a gypsy encampment on the plain of Hadjilar, was the original of his “Gypsy of Sardis.” At Smyrna he said good-by to Commodore Patterson and his other friends on the United States; and the ship which had been his home for more than six months sailed away to winter at Minorca, leaving him “waiting for a vessel to go—I care not where. I rather lean toward Palestine and Egypt, but there are no vessels for Jaffa or Alexandria.”

By this time Willis’s literary reputation had penetrated to the London press, though not as yet to the London public, possibly through scattered copies of his “Mirror” letters; and while staying at Smyrna he received “an offer of a thousand dollars a year to write for the London ‘Morning Herald.’ But the articles were to be political, and that I had modesty enough to think beyond my calibre. I was to live abroad, however, and go wherever there was a war or the prospect of one. I would much rather write about pictures and green fields.” The not unpleasant hesitation as to his next move was ended at last by the departure from Smyrna of the Yankee brig Metamora, bound for his native Portland with a cargo of figs and opium. The skipper, a Down-Easter, agreed to take him as a passenger, and land him at Malta. At Malta, accordingly, he arrived late in December, after being nearly shipwrecked in a Levanter, and was put ashore through a heavy sea in the brig’s long boat, narrowly escaping being carried all the way to America. The letter to the “Mirror” in which this part of his travels was recorded was lost, and the “Pencillings” leap at once from Smyrna to Milan. He afterwards rewrote the episode, turning it into a capital story (“A Lost Letter Rewritten,” in the “Mirror” for May 14 and June 11, 1836), which figures in his collected writings as “A Log in the Archipelago.” The startling conjunction of East and Down East on board the Metamora suggested, no doubt, some of the incidents in “The Widow by Brevet,” a tale which moves between the poles of Constantinople and Salem, Massachusetts.

From Malta he made his way via Italy, Switzerland, and France to England, arriving at Dover on the 1st of June, 1834.

While at Florence, Willis had been introduced by Greenough to Walter Savage Landor, who was then living in his villa at Fiesole. Landor entertained him hospitably, and, at parting, made him a present of a Cuyp, for which Willis had expressed admiration, and gave him some valuable letters to people in England. One of these was to the Countess of Blessington, and with it Landor intrusted to his American guest the manuscript of his “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare,” for delivery to the same lady, under whose superintendence it was duly published the following autumn. He also put into his hands a package whose temporary disappearance was the cause of some blame attaching to Willis. Landor’s own story of the transaction, told in an addendum to the first edition of “Pericles and Aspasia,” is as follows:—

“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the most thumbed books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, together with my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.”