Henry A. Beers

Mr. and Mrs. Willis, with their children, had passed the summer of 1850 at Cornwall, in the highlands of the Hudson, boarding at the farmhouse of a Mrs. Sutherland. They grew so attached to the beautiful neighborhood that they resolved to make it their home some day, and with this in view, in the fall of the same year, they had bought the fifty acres of land which afterwards became widely known as Idlewild. This little domain lay upon a shelf or terrace on the western bank of the Hudson, lifted some two hundred feet above the level of the river, at the point where its waters received the slender tribute of Moodna Creek. Behind the site chosen for the house was a wild ravine, shaded by hemlocks, at the bottom of which a brook, swollen to sizable rapids and cascades by the spring freshets, but a mere trickle in midsummer, ran down to join the creek. The location seemed destined by nature for a gentleman’s country seat, from its variety of surface, its contrasting prospects, and its noble timber. The outlook in front was upon a wide bend of the river and the opposite heights and distant mountain perspectives of the eastern shore. Behind the house was a private landscape of glen and forest, sunk away quite out of sight of the sails and steamers that passed continually up and down the watery highway before the front door. To the south, a mile away, was the imposing shape of Storm King, a mountain which owes its baptism to Willis, having previously figured in geography as Butter Hill. Four miles below this were West Point and the gate of the highlands, and on the other bank General Morris’s summer home of Undercliff. Four miles above Idlewild was the considerable town of Newburg, for a market; and only a mile from his door, the post office village of Moodna.

Willis’s trip to the tropics had been of small benefit to his health, and, on his return in the summer of 1852, he joined his family at their boarding place at Cornwall. His doctor warned him that a return to New York would be at the risk of his life. He had grown tired, himself, of the city and of gay society, and longed for the repose of the hills. Levavit oculos ad arces. In the hope that rural quiet and the drier air of the highlands might restore his health, he decided that autumn to begin building at once, and to take up his permanent abode in the country. During the winter and spring he remained with his family at the Sutherlands’, and busied himself in superintending the erection of his house, laying out roads and paths, cutting vistas through his trees, building stone walls, constructing a dam for his brook, and reporting progress in gossipy letters to the “Home Journal.” In the spring of 1853 the New York house was sold, and on the 26th of July Idlewild received its tenants.

Willis had a happy knack at inventing names, and if everything that he wrote should become obsolete, he will still have left his sign manual on the American landscape and the English tongue. “Idlewild” was an apt and beautiful name, and like Sunnyside, the place became and remains one of the historic points of the scenery of the Hudson. The story that Willis tells of the origin of the word is this: The old farmer and fisherman who owned the land—uncle of the “Ward boys,” of aquatic fame—was showing him over the property, and Willis, inquiring the price of this particular piece, was answered that it had little value, being “an idle wild of which nothing could ever be made.” I fancy that this little anecdote is in part a myth, invented after the fact to give the name a history and a justification. Willis was particular, not to say fussy, in such matters, and the title finally chosen was obtained by a process of elimination from a list that I have seen, of several hundred “pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms,” such as Everwild, Mieux-ici, Lodore, Loudwater, Idle-brook, Wanderwild, Up-the-brook, Shadywild, Loiterwild, Demijour-brook, etc.

Thus ten years after the break-up of his home at Glenmary, he had again pitched his pavilion—this time for good—by green pastures and running waters. Henceforth he abjured fashionable life and devoted himself to the domesticities; to the care of his health and his grounds, the entertainment of his guests, and the preparation of his weekly letter to the “Home Journal.” There was little left in him of that dandyism which had distressed his critics. But the old coats and hats which he loved to wear were worn with a certain grace peculiar to the man. He could not put on the seediest garment without straightway imparting to it an air of jauntiness. He was fond of pets and was a most playful and affectionate companion to his children, the number of whom gradually increased to five by the birth of a third daughter, Edith, on September 28, 1853, and a second son, Bailey, on May 31, 1857. All of these survive, but his last child, a daughter, born October 31, 1860, lived only a few minutes.

From early spring till after Christmas the family at Idlewild kept open house, having almost always company staying with them, and in summer constantly receiving transient guests. The place had become celebrated through Willis’s descriptions in the “Home Journal.” Cornwall was growing to be a summer resort, and there were daily visits to the glen and to the house from all manner of people. Willis’s habit was to breakfast in his own room and write till noon. Sometimes he would take a stroll to the post office or the glen before dinner. After dinner he would write letters or do “scissors work” before the afternoon drive or ride. The evening was spent with his guests, or, if the family were alone, he would write again and come down to a nine o’clock supper.

From the trivial incidents of this daily life he wove his correspondence; enough of it, at last, to fill two volumes, “Out Doors at Idlewild” and “The Convalescent;” the former dedicated to Mr. Grinnell, the latter to Doctors William Beattie and John F. Gray, his physicians, and both books addressed more particularly to the author’s “parish of invalids.” These letters have by no means the literary merit of the “Letters from under a Bridge,” and it was, perhaps, presuming too far on their claim to even contemporary respect to bind them up at all after they had once done duty in the newspaper column. They were eagerly read, nevertheless, as they appeared from week to week, and a sympathetic public was interested in Willis’s kindly prattle about his landscape gardening, his tree planting, the deluges in his brook, his children, his horses and dogs, the eccentricities of his country neighbors, the humors of his poultry, the daily voyage of the family wagon to Newburg, the sleighing on the frozen Hudson, and the occasional picnics and excursions to Storm King, West Point, Poughkeepsie, or remoter points. Willis found himself not without amusement, becoming something of a country gentleman and public-spirited bulwark of society, taking part in local interests. There was a picturesque little Episcopal church a mile from Idlewild, in which he became a vestryman and used to pass the plate. Once he even made a speech at a public meeting, in favor of dividing the county. Letters XXXIX. and XL. in “Out Doors at Idlewild,” giving a graphic description of the ascent of Storm King, are perhaps the best thing in the volume.

Among the many guests attracted to Idlewild by the hospitalities of its owner and his inviting pictures of his highland retreat were numbers of literary men and artists.[11] Bayard Taylor, Charles A. Dana, De Trobriand, of the “Courrier des États-Unis;” Hicks and Kensett, the painters, came up from New York at various times, and rambled, bathed, or otherwise disported themselves in the glen. Whipple and Fields ran across from Boston and made a pleasant visit of two or three days, of which both afterwards gave reminiscences. Fields loved to recall an anecdote that Willis told him, “of his watching a little ragged girl, one day in London, who was peering through an area railing. A window of a comfortable eating-house gave upon this area, and a man sat at the window taking a good dinner. The child watched his every movement, saw him take a beefsteak and get all things in readiness to begin; then he stopped and looked round. ‘Now a pertaty,’ murmured the child.”

In the summer of 1854, Willis had a call from his down-river neighbor, Washington Irving, and repaid it at Sunnyside in 1859, in company with J. P. Kennedy and Lieutenant Wise, the author of “Los Gringos,” who had both been passing a day or two with him at Idlewild. Irving drove them through Sleepy Hollow, as recounted in “The Convalescent,” in which this visit fills an agreeable chapter; and Willis characteristically begged his host to give him his blotting-sheet for memorabilia, as being “the door-mat on which the thoughts of Irving’s last book had wiped their sandals as they went in.” “The Convalescent” (1859) was the last book which Willis published, if we except some late editions of his poems, but there are gleams in it, here and there, of the wit and fancy that never quite forsook him. There was, for instance, a long and very dark covered bridge over Moodna Creek, which he always entered with dread, when on horseback, and which he described as giving “a promise of emergence to light on the other side, which required the faith of a gimlet.” Upon the whole, it would be a very difficult reader who should refuse to admit the plea which the author urges in behalf of books of “The Convalescent” kind. “I learned also, to my comfort, that Nature publishes some volumes with many leaves, which are not intended to be of any posthumous value—the white poplar not lasting three moonlight nights after it is cut down. Even with such speedy decay, however, it throws a pleasant shade while it flourishes; and so, white poplar literature, recognized as a class in literature, should have its brief summer of indulgence.”

Willis found that his best medicine was horseback riding, and spent as many hours as he could in the saddle. His horses and dogs were a great source of amusement to him. One of his special pets was CÆsar, a superb Newfoundland, that had been with Dr. Kane on one of his Arctic voyages, and was afterwards presented to Willis. When it died its grave at Idlewild was marked by a marble slab, the gift of Brown, the famous Grace Church sexton, with an epitaph of his own composition. The slab was on exhibition for a time, in July, 1862, at Barnum’s museum, and the inscription on it ran as follows:—

CÆSAR,
WHO MADE THE VOYAGE TO THE ARCTIC
REGIONS WITH DR. KANE,
AND WAS AFTERWARDS THE FAVORITE DOG OF THE CHILDREN
OF IDLEWILD,
LIES BURIED BENEATH THIS STONE.

Died December 7, 1861, aged thirteen years.

Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,

And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.

In 1854 a book was published which became the occasion of many heart-burnings, and of accusations against Willis that have not yet ceased to go the rounds of the newspapers. This was “Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale of the Present Time,” by Fanny Fern. The lady who wrote under this pen name was his younger sister, Sarah, the author of much cleverish literature—“Fern Leaves,” and the like—which once enjoyed a prodigious circulation. She was the enfant terrible of the family, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, but not always discreet. By the death of her husband, Charles Eldridge of Boston, she had been suddenly reduced from comfort to poverty. She afterwards contracted an unfortunate marriage with a Mr. Farrington, from whom she was finally divorced. To support herself and her children, she turned instinctively to literature, in which she at last made a decided hit. Among other things she offered some contributions to the “Home Journal;” but Willis, whose literary taste, though certainly not severe, was fastidious in its way, could not see merit enough in his sister’s writing, and disliked what he regarded as its noisy, rattling style. He felt obliged to decline her articles, but that there was any literary jealousy in this, as is intimated in “Ruth Hall,” will hardly be believed, when his eagerness to welcome and patronize young writers is remembered. It seems to have sprung from an original opposition in character and taste between the two. But it naturally made hard feeling and led to recriminations. Mr. James Parton, who was then sub-editor of the “Home Journal,” took Fanny Fern’s part, and the acquaintance thus begun soon ripened into an engagement of marriage. There was a scene, in consequence, in the office of the “Home Journal,” and Mr. Parton retired from the paper, his place being supplied by Mr. T. B. Aldrich. Smarting under a sense of neglect by her kinsfolk, Fanny Fern wrote and printed this novel of “Ruth Hall,” in which, under a very thin mask of fiction, she washed a deal of family linen in public. Willis figures therein as Hyacinth, a “heartless puppy,” who worships social position, has married an heiress, inhabits a villa on the Hudson, and is the prosperous editor of the “Irving Magazine.” When Ruth asks him to help her by printing her pieces in this periodical, he coldly assures her that she has no talent, and advises her to seek “some unobtrusive employment.” But when she becomes famous and begins to get letters from college presidents, begging her for her autograph, and from grateful readers, saying, “I am a better son, a better brother, a better husband, and a better father than I was before I commenced reading your articles. God bless you!” then, under these triumphant circumstances, Hyacinth, who had given $100 for a vase when Ruth was starving, is proud to point out to a friend, as they sit together in the porch of his country seat, a beautiful schooner tacking up stream with “Floy,” his sister’s nom-de-plume, painted on the bows.

Against this caricature of himself Willis made no public protest. When a man is wounded in the house of his friends, his only refuge is silence. But in private and to his intimates he asserted that the attack upon him in “Ruth Hall” was most unfair; that he had helped his sister in the early days of her widowhood, but that after her second marriage and divorce he had ceased to have any communication with her, and felt justified in letting her alone. Willis was doubtless a man who took his responsibilities lightly. But had he felt called upon to do his utmost for Fanny Fern, even to the end, it is easy to see how his hands were tied in various ways. He had an expensive family of his own, whose support depended upon his pen. His home on the Hudson had been purchased with his wife’s inheritance. As to paying his sister for articles in the “Home Journal,” supposing them to have been otherwise acceptable, the editors were constantly reiterating that the paper did not, as a rule, pay its contributors anything, and could not afford to do so. It paid its own editorial staff, and that was all. Contributors were glad to write for it for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print.

Willis continued to put forth permutations and combinations of old matter under new titles, as long as his books would sell. “Fun Jottings,” “Ephemera,” “Famous Persons and Places,” and “The Rag-Bag” were all made up from the contents of previous volumes, or the teeming sheets of the “Mirror” and “Home Journal.” But in 1857 he published something new, “Paul Fane,” his only novel, and the only book which he wrote as a book, and not as one or more contributions to periodicals. So exclusively a feuilletoniste had he made himself, that any talent for construction on a larger scale which he may once have had was quite frittered away.

“It has been with difficult submission to marketableness,” he had written in his preface to “Dashes at Life,” “that the author has broken up his statues at the joints and furnished each fragment with head and legs to walk alone. Continually accumulating material, with the desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as continually tempted by extravagant prices to shape these separate forms of society and character into tales for periodicals; and between two persuaders—the law of copyright, on the one hand, providing that American books at fair prices should compete with books to be had for nothing; and necessity, on the other hand, pleading much more potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame—he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing off for a magazine any chance view of life that turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary chapters what should have been kept together, and moulded into a proportionate work of imagination.”

If “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” was a response to this artistic craving for unity in a sustained work, its author had waited too late. It was, in effect, a poor novel; and—what was unusual with Willis, even at his thinnest—it was dull. The story is told in the first person, and the hero is a young American artist, who, feeling his social equality challenged by a look in the eyes of a cold English girl of high birth, is driven abroad by a restless determination to put himself on a level with any nobility that hereditary rank can bestow. He brings the haughtiest daughters of Albion to his feet. Three or four women fall in love with him, including the original offender and her aunt, but he will none of them. It is Willis’s old theme of nature’s nobleman versus caste. The novel was an experiment, before the times were ripe, in that field of international manners which has since been so cleverly occupied by Henry James. It tries to deal with the perplexities and real miseries, which arise not so much from the deeper conflicts of character as from the attempt to adjust hostile social standards. Mr. James has made a very interesting story out of the simple episode of a young English lady marrying an American, coming to America to live, and then, not finding American ways to her taste, taking her husband back to England with her. But Willis was not well equipped for success in this field. He could not keep his fancy in check; there must be a dash of romance, of exaggeration in his tale. And he was a quick observer rather than a patient student of manners, as of other things. He lacked the sober, truthful vigilance of James and Howells. Miss Firkin, in this book, an overdone Daisy Miller, and Blivins, an American type once rumored to have existed, but inconceivable at this distance of time, show how far his execution fell below the fine and solid work of our contemporary realists. There are passages of vulgarity in “Paul Fane” which are a surprise in any book of Willis’s, but which came rather from the weakness and failure of his hand in its attempt to execute scenes of broad humor, than from any crudity of feeling. This kind of violent and assumed indelicacy on the part of naturally refined writers, when they are trying to put on the healthy coarseness of a Hogarth or Teniers, is a not uncommon phenomenon; daintiness mistaking coarseness for the strength of which it is often a sign or an accompaniment.

In “The Convalescent” were included narratives of a trip to the Rappahannock, to Nantucket, and to the horse fair at Springfield, Massachusetts. In July, 1860, Willis accompanied Mr. Grinnell on a journey to the West,—reported for the “Home Journal” as a “Three Weeks’ Trip to the West,”—going to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Chicago, and as far as Madison, Wisconsin; then descending the Mississippi in a steamboat to St. Louis, and returning East by way of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

In Willis’s later writings his verbal affectations gained upon him to an intolerable extent. “Mr. N. P. Willis,” says Bartlett in his “Dictionary of Americanisms,” “has the reputation of inventing many new words, some of which, though not yet embodied in our dictionaries, are much used in familiar language.” One of the phrases which Bartlett accredits to him is, “the upper ten,”—originally and in full, “the upper ten thousand of New York city.” This seems likely to keep its place in the language. “Japonicadom” took at the time, but has now gone out. He had a fondness for agglutinations. “Come-at-able” is a convenient word which is traced to his mint; and Professor George P. Marsh, in his “Origin and History of the English Language,” lends the weight of his authority to Willis’s “Stay-at-home-itiveness,” as a synonym for the Greek ???????a, and the early English studestapelvestnesse. But such philological monsters as re-June-venescence, worthwhile-ativeness, fifty-per-centity, with which some of his books are strewn, have a painfully forced effect, and the trick became, from repetition, a tedious mannerism. Punning, likewise, was a habit which grew upon him, though both of these offenses are commoner in his private correspondence than in his published work.

At the outbreak of the civil war in the spring of 1861, there was a rush of newspaper men to Washington. It was decided that the “Home Journal,” too, should have its war correspondent, and accordingly Willis, bidding good-by to Idlewild, flung himself into the tide of journalists, soldiers, politicians, office-seekers, contractors, and speculators of all sorts, setting toward the seat of government. At Baltimore he stayed over a day with his friend Kennedy, who was prominently mentioned for the secretaryship of the navy, and who went on to Washington with Willis, where the latter introduced him and Reverdy Johnson to Mrs. Lincoln. The feeding of the “Home Journal” press with “Lookings-on at the War” proved a longer job than Willis had anticipated. It kept him in Washington for over a year, with occasional furloughs for a hurried visit home. He had always been curiously indifferent to politics. His opinions had been Whiggish, and he was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with the South, and a liking for “those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners, incapable of a short word or a mean action,” whom he had known at Saratoga years before. Nevertheless, he dropped his light plummet of observation into the boiling sea of the civil war, where it was tossed about at no great depth below the surface. It is interesting to compare his letters from the capital with the patriotic fervor and swing of such martial sketches as Theodore Winthrop’s “Washington as a Camp.” The war, indeed, may be said to have made Willis and the kind of literature which he cultivated obsolete for a time. A more earnest generation of writers had come to the fore, who struck their roots deeper down into the life of the nation. Mr. Derby, the publisher, proposed in 1863 to make a book out of Willis’s “Lookings-on at the War,” but the project hung fire for some reason, and “The Convalescent” remained, as has been said, his last publication in book form.

Willis found all the world at Washington; among the rest, Lady Georgiana Fane, whom he presented to Mrs. Lincoln. “Fancy anticipating this at Almack’s twenty-five years ago!” he wrote of this conjunction, in a letter to Mrs. Willis. He met Charles Sumner, whom he had known in Boston, and had a long talk with him about the political situation; found Pierpont, the poet, employed as a clerk in one of the departments, and got rooms for him and Mrs. Pierpont in the house where he lodged himself; was introduced to General McClellan and to the cabinet officers, and the numerous congressmen and brigadiers who swarmed Pennsylvania Avenue and crowded the lobbies at Willard’s. He went out to all manner of receptions and dinner parties, and became quite a favorite with Mrs. Lincoln, who drove him out frequently in her barouche, had him to dine en famille at the White House, sent him flowers, and promised him a vase presented to the President by the Emperor of China. In one of his letters to the “Home Journal,” he had described her as having a “motherly expression,” whereupon she addressed him the following note:—

A sudden fit of sickness had hindered Willis’s plan to follow the army to Bull Run—fortunately, no doubt, as the correspondent who took his place was made prisoner. He afterwards took horseback rides into the enemy’s country, once narrowly escaping capture near Mount Vernon, and made excursions to Fortress Monroe, Manassas, Old Point Comfort, etc. On March 15, 1862, he was of the party which visited Harper’s Ferry at the invitation of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Hawthorne, too, was of the party and reported the occasion in his article, “Chiefly about War Matters,” in the July “Atlantic” of that year. “Hawthorne is shy and reserved,” wrote Willis in one of his letters to his wife, “but I found he was a lover of mine, and we enjoyed our acquaintance very much.” Emerson and Curtis lectured in Washington while Willis was there, and Greeley dined with him in January, 1862. The novelty and excitement of life at the capital were agreeable at first, but he soon grew homesick and pined for his beloved Idlewild.

In consequence of the war, the circulation of the “Home Journal,” a large proportion of whose subscribers were in the South, had fallen off seriously. Willis found himself greatly straitened, and was obliged to close his country house for a time. Mrs. Willis and the children had spent the winter and spring of 1861-62 at New Bedford, with her father. In April she rented Idlewild and went with her family to pass the summer at Campton, near Plymouth, New Hampshire. In June Willis left Washington and joined her at Campton for a few days, and then returned to New York and took lodgings for himself. Morris’s health had grown so feeble that it became necessary for his partner to apply himself more closely to the management of the paper and do double work. He had been much opposed to the renting of Idlewild, and it troubled him to think of the place in the hands of strangers. He paid it a visit in August, by invitation of his tenant, a Mr. Dennis, and was very hospitably treated. In the autumn of the following year (1863) Mrs. Willis opened at Idlewild a little school for girls, in the hope of persuading her husband to leave New York and come home for life. He appreciated her energy and devotion,—shown through long years of failing health and fortune,—but he doomed himself to homeless exile, and refused to abandon his post. He was opposed to the school project, as he had been to the renting of Idlewild, unreasonably, no doubt, since something of the kind had to be done. But it touched his pride, and with increasing illness there grew upon him a morbid horror of dependence on any one. He fancied that he could work better in his New York lodgings. By 1864, moreover, Morris had become quite imbecile, and the responsibilities of editorship weighed more and more heavily on Willis. He remained at New York, therefore, running up to Idlewild for an occasional visit of a day or two, over Sunday, or sometimes for a week at a time. In July, 1864, General Morris died. Willis was deeply moved as he stood by his coffin. “My beloved old friend,” he wrote, “looked wonderfully tranquil, and so sweetly noble that I could not forbear giving him a parting kiss, though William sobbed as he looked on. So passes from earth one who loved me devotedly.” After Morris’s death Willis took into partnership a young man named Hollister, who had capital and enthusiasm; but the business management of the “Home Journal” began to fall more and more upon the shoulders of its present editor, Mr. Morris Phillips.

The story of the last few years of Willis’s life is a melancholy chronicle of failing powers, and of persistent struggle with disease and narrowing fates. He had long borne up against ill health with the gay courage of a cavalier. His pen faltered, but nothing that it wrote gave signs of bitterness or discouragement. Toward the last his temper, which had been uniformly sweet, sometimes grew irritable and morbid, though nothing of this appeared in his writing. As early as 1852 he had fancied that he had consumption, but his cough turned out to be merely “sympathetic,” and his lungs were pronounced sound. His disease finally declared itself as epilepsy, and resulted at the last in paralysis and softening of the brain. He was subject for years to epileptic fits, occurring periodically, usually on the tenth day. During these attacks, so long as his strength lasted, he was extremely violent, but as he grew weaker, they simply made him unconscious, leaving him greatly prostrated when the fit was over. The true nature of his malady was, for some years, known only to his wife and his physician, Dr. Gray, who feared that it might injure Willis’s business and literary interests if it were publicly understood that his brain was affected, or in danger of being affected. Willis was himself very sensitive on this point, and begged that no stranger might see him during his attacks. Accordingly, the matter was kept secret as long as possible. After Willis’s death, one of his physicians, Dr. J. B. F. Walker, printed some “Medical Reminiscences of N. P. Willis,” in the course of which he said: “Not only was he a martyr to the agonies of sharp and sudden attacks, but he suffered all the languors of chronic disease. With the exception of Henry Heine, there has hardly been a man of letters doomed to such protracted torments from bodily disease.”

Under these trying circumstances he exhibited a persistence in his work which astonished his friends. They had not thought that such endurance was in the man. But from some underlying stratum of character, some strain of toughness inherent in his Puritan stock, he brought up resources of will and stubbornness which resisted all appeals. Though complaining sometimes in his letters that he was “pitilessly overworked,” he declared his intention of dying in harness, and clung to his desk and his lonely lodgings till the doctors pronounced him a dying man. A part of the summers of 1865 and 1866 he spent at Idlewild, but the autumn of the latter year found him still at work in the city. He was now so weak that he often fainted in the street and had to be carried to his rooms. His partner, Morris Phillips, was untiring in his attentions; and finally, early in November, he brought him home to Idlewild, Willis yielding at last to the united entreaties of his wife, his father, and his sisters, and the imperative command of his doctor, to stop work. But he had come home only to die. He kept his room and seldom went down-stairs. During the first month he had some enjoyment of the home associations, taking pleasure in the daily visit of his children, and listening to the reading of poetry, more for its soothing effect than for any intellectual apprehension of it. He soon became helpless and slept much of the time, and when waking lived in continual visions and hallucinations. His recognition of his family was fitful during the last six or eight weeks of his life. He was watched and cared for by his wife and faithful Harriet, and no strange hand ministered to him or marked his failing consciousness. He died on the afternoon of the 20th of January, 1867,—his sixty-first birthday,—so quietly that the single watcher could not say when. He was taken to Boston, and buried in Mount Auburn. The funeral service of the Episcopal Church was read over his body in St. Paul’s Church, by the Rev. P. D. Huntington, the bookstores of the city being closed, in token of respect, while the service lasted. His pall was borne by Longfellow, Dana, Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Dr. Howe, Merritt Trimble, and Aldrich. “I took the flower which lies before me at this moment, as I write,” says Dr. Holmes, in a recent number of the “Atlantic,” “from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad, overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867.”

The obituary notices which were published after Willis’s death made it evident that he had, in a sense, survived his own fame. They were reminiscent in tone, as though addressed to a generation that knew not Joseph. It was forty years since he had come before the public with his maiden book. It was twenty since he had put forth anything entitled to live; and meanwhile a new literature had grown up in America. The bells of morning tinkled faintly and far off, lost in the noise of fife and drum, and the war opened its chasm between the present and the past. For a time even Irving seemed sentimental and Cooper melodramatic. Yet these survive, but whether Willis, whose name has so often been joined with theirs, is destined to find still a hearing, it is for the future alone to say. “He will be remembered,” wrote his kinsman, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, “as a man eminently human, with almost unique endowments, devoting rare powers to insignificant purposes, and curiously illustrating the ‘fine irony of Nature,’ with which she often lavishes one of her choice productions on comparatively inferior ends.”

But, laying aside all question of appeal to that formidable tribunal, posterity, the many contemporaries who have owed hours of refined enjoyment to his graceful talent will join heartily with Thackeray in his assertion: “It is comfortable that there should have been a Willis.”