[1] This statement needs, however, some qualification. Mr. Clark, of Clark & Maynard, who publish Willis’s poems, tells me that there is a steady sale for these of about two hundred copies annually. Fifty years after date this is not bad. How many copies of Something and Other Poems, issued in 1884, will be asked for at the booksellers’ in the year of grace 1934? The copyright of most of Willis’s poems having lately expired, a cheap reprint of them has just been put forth, bearing date 1884 and forming No. 352 of “Lovell’s Library.” This seems to point to a continued popular demand. His prose writings are at present out of print. The fourth volume of Stories by American Authors contains his “Two Buckets in a Well,” and it is understood that the publishers of that series have in mind the publication of a volume of selections from Willis’s prose.
[2] The book here mentioned was her compilation, Stories of American Life by American Authors, printed in 1830, to which reference was made in chapter III. A number of Willis’s letters to Miss Mitford are published in The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford, from one of which the above passage is taken.
[3] It was doubtless this article which encouraged Bates in the Maclise Portrait Gallery to describe Willis as a “sumph” and “N(amby) P(amby) Willis.”
[6] In a late anthology, this poem of Willis is included under the melodramatic title Two Women. An author’s choice of a title is almost as much to be respected as his text. In this instance, Willis’s own selection was not only much the better, but it is interesting as probably suggested to him by lines that were favorites of his in Longfellow’s translation from Uhland:—
“For, invisibly to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.”
[7] See also his paper on The American Drama, for an elaborate review of Tortesa, which, with all its defects, he thought the best American play.
[8] See Gill’s Life of Poe for a fac-simile letter of Willis to Poe.
[9] An allusion to the interlocutors in Willis’s Cloister and Cabinet, dialogues between the editors of the Mirror in not very successful imitation of the Noctes AmbrosianÆ.
[11] J. Addison Richards visited Idlewild to make sketches for his illustrated article in Harper’s Magazine for January, 1858, q. v. for a full description of the place.
