Chapter VI (2)

Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”--

“There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by
the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not
content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne--not
for a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it
and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom
Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger
and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but
isn’t this _un peu fort_, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described
as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M.
for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her
husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your
part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little
prejudices?”

In April, 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Willis sailed for America, taking with them Miss Bessie Stace, a younger sister of Mrs. Willis, who was to make them a visit at Owego. The “Corsair” had not been a success financially, and Dr. Porter had become discouraged and discontinued publication in March, transferring his subscription list to the “Albion.” Since the establishment of the paper, a year before, Willis had ceased his contributions to the New York “Mirror,” and he did not resume them until the end of 1842. But meanwhile he was not left without a market for his literary wares. Just before leaving England he had received a letter from Mr. J. Gregg Wilson, the publisher of “Brother Jonathan,” a new weekly printed in New York, with a circulation of some twenty thousand, informing him of the “Corsair’s” suspension, expressing a warm admiration for his talents, and inviting him to write the “Brother Jonathan” a weekly letter, a column in length, for which he promised to pay him at the highest current rates. To this paper Willis contributed about a year and a half, or up to September, 1841. His humorous poem, “Lady Jane,” was published in installments in the “Dollar,” the monthly edition of “Brother Jonathan.” With both of these periodicals he had a _quasi_ editorial connection, though the real editor was Mr. H. Hastings Weld. He received similar invitations from the two monthlies, “Graham’s Magazine” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” which were paying their contributors--among whom were nearly all the principal writers in the country--prices hitherto unknown to American periodicals. Willis was paid at the rate of $50 for an article of four printed pages of the “Lady’s Book,”--less, no doubt, than a writer of equal reputation could command now, but regarded as wildly munificent in 1841. Twelve dollars a page were the regular rates of both these magazines. “The burst on author-land of Graham’s and Godey’s liberal prices,” said Willis, “was like a sunrise without a dawn.” Mr. Charles T. Congdon, in his interesting “Reminiscences of a Journalist,” says that “Mr. Willis was the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid. At one time, about 1842, he was writing four articles monthly for four magazines, and receiving $100 each.” This means an income of $4,800 a year, but the strain required to keep up such a rate of production must tax the powers of the readiest writer, and it was no wonder if the product was of very uneven excellence. The four magazines here referred to were undoubtedly the “Mirror,” “Graham’s,” “Godey’s,” and “The Ladies’ Companion,” of which Mrs. Sigourney was for a time the editor, and to which Willis contributed in 1842 and 1843 a half dozen stories and a few “Passages from Correspondence” and “Leaves from a Table Book.” Two of these stories are not found among his collected writings: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” a Saratoga tale, which has been mentioned before, and “Fitz Powys and the Nun, or Diplomacy in High Life,” a very impossible fiction, and not worth describing. Such of the “Leaves” and “Scraps” as deserved preserving found their way into “Ephemera.” His contributions to “Godey’s” began with the January number for 1842, and continued, though with greatly diminished frequency, till January, 1850. During the first year he had an article in nearly every number, most of them stories. For “Graham’s” he began to write in January, 1843, and contributed occasionally as late as 1851. “The Marquis in Petticoats” and “Broadway; A Sketch” were published in 1843 in Epes Sargent’s short-lived magazine; “The Power of an Injured Look” in the “Gift” for 1845, an annual issued in Philadelphia. He edited another annual, the “Opal” for 1844, and wrote articles of various kinds for other periodicals. During the two years and a half from January, 1842, to June, 1844, he published, all in all, some forty stories, collected, with two or three exceptions, in “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” Willis was at this time, beyond a doubt, the most popular, best paid, and in every way most successful magazinist that America had yet seen. He commanded the sympathy of his readers more than any other periodical writer of his day, and his reputation almost amounted to fame. Colonel Higginson tells a story, illustrating his vogue, about a solid commercial gentleman in Boston, who, finding himself by chance at some literary dinner or tea, is reported to have entered into the spirit of the occasion by saying that “he guessed Gō-ēthe was the N. P. Willis of Germany.”

Willis lived at Owego till 1842, and continued to date his letters to “Brother Jonathan,” “Graham’s,” etc., “from under a bridge.” He had expected something like £1,000 from General Stace’s estate, but it yielded him nothing. His publisher failed about this time, and his arrangement with “Brother Jonathan” coming to an end, he engaged with a Washington paper, the “National Intelligencer,” to send it fortnightly correspondence from New York. All these causes combined made it necessary for him to take up his residence in the city and to offer Glenmary for sale; which he did with a heavy heart, taking the public into his confidence, as usual, in his affecting “Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of Glenmary,” first printed in “Godey’s” for December, 1842, and included in all subsequent editions of “Letters from under a Bridge.”

“I thought to have shuffled off my mortal coil tranquilly here;
flitting at last in some company of my autumn leaves, or some bevy
of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw.… In the shady depths
of the small glen above you, among the wild flowers and music, the
music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to
love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of
Glenmary as we can leave behind stay with you for recompense!”

This sacred nook--reserved from purchase--was the spot where his own hands had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and disappointment found a voice in one of the most naturally and simply written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836, Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then “a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description, hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs. Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets “slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842, regretting that he should not have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.

A _rapprochement_ now took place between Willis and his former associate General Morris. The “New York Mirror” of December 31, 1842, announced that, expenditures having largely exceeded receipts, the paper would henceforth be discontinued, but that a new series would begin in a few weeks. The issue of the 17th of the same month had contained two short sketches, “Imogen and Cymbeline” and “A Charming Widow of Sixty,” which were afterwards joined into one and worked up into “Poyntz’s Aunt.” These were of no importance except as being his first direct contributions to the “Mirror” since the establishment of the “Corsair,” over two years and a half before. On Saturday, April 8, 1843, the first number of the “New Mirror” was issued under the joint editorship of Morris and Willis. The latter had now entered upon an active career of journalism which lasted, with a single brief interruption, for nearly a quarter of a century, till his death in 1867. With the “New Mirror” he resumed the duties of an editor, which he had laid down when he sold out the “American Monthly” in 1831. He had been, it is true, a nominal editor of the old “New York Mirror” and of the “Corsair,” but virtually he was merely a contributor and foreign correspondent of both these papers, and had felt no real responsibility for their conduct. In the three periodicals which Morris and Willis now edited successively, the “New Mirror,” the “Evening Mirror,” and the “Home Journal,” the business management remained in the hands of the former, but the literary policy was largely shaped by Willis, and almost the entire time and energies of both partners were given to their enterprises. The office of the new journal was at No. 4 Ann Street, and its title in full ran as follows:--

“The New Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction:
Containing Original Papers, Tales of Romance, Sketches of Society,
Manners, and Everyday Life; Domestic and Foreign Correspondence; Wit
and Humor; Fashion and Gossip; the Fine Arts and Literary, Musical,
and Dramatic Criticism; extracts from New Works; Poetry, Original
and Selected; the Spirit of the Public Journals, etc., etc., etc.”

Willis could not afford to give up all the other strings to his bow until he saw how the new venture was going to succeed. He retained his position as New York correspondent to the “National Intelligencer,” and his “Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” published in that paper, were regularly reprinted in the “New Mirror.” His stories in “Graham’s” and “Godey’s” went on up to January, 1844, after which time he announced that he should write in future exclusively for his own paper. His contributions to the “Mirror,” while editor, included tales, poems, sketches, reminiscences, letters, book notices, besides editorial papers of a miscellaneous sort, such as “Jottings,” “Slipshoddities,” “Diary of Town Trifles,” “More Particularly,” “Just You and I,” “While We hold You by the Button,” and what not, in which he set himself to catch and reflect the passing humors and picturesque surfaces of town life. He might have said of his muse at this time, as the psalmist of his soul, _Adhæsit pavimento_. He wrote a number of “City Lyrics,” signed “Down Town Bard,” celebrating beauties in white chip hats, whom he had helped into omnibuses: Broadway odes, inviting his sweetheart to a moonlight walk up to Thompson’s for an ice; or mock heroic lamentations in blank verse, that the lady in the chemisette with black buttons, whose sixpence he had passed up to the driver, might be doomed to pass him forever without meeting,--

“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and I
Lone in the Waverley.”

It might have been expected that Willis, with his peculiarly dainty instinct, would excel in this carving of cherry stones. But his society verses in this kind were too hurriedly done and fell short of that perfect workmanship and fineness of taste which float many a trifle of Praed or Dobson. Willis’s city poems are flimsy and sometimes a little vulgar, and their place is mid-way between really artistic society verse and such metropolitan ballads as “Walking Down Broadway” and “Tassels on the Boots,” which Lingard used to sing. The best of them, perhaps, is “Love in a Cottage,” a charmingly frank expression of a preference for the artificial, a quatrain from which has got into common quotation:--

“But give me a sly flirtation
By the light of a chandelier,
With music to play in the pauses,
And nobody very near.”

These “City Lyrics” were not all humorous, however. The bitter contrasts which forced themselves upon Bryant walking “slowly through the crowded street” appealed also to the “Down Town Bard,” who expressed them in “The Pity of the Park Fountain,” and more successfully in “Unseen Spirits,” first printed in the “New Mirror” of July 29, 1843. This little poem--suggested, perhaps, in some mood of abstraction when the poet was strolling listlessly up Broadway, his spirits low and his eternal watchfulness for effects asleep--has, for that very reason doubtless, the sudden touch of genius, the unconsciousness and careless felicity which seem likely to keep it alive and to make it, possibly, the only work of Willis destined to reach posterity. It was a favorite with Edgar Poe, who used to recite it at reading clubs and the like, and who said that, in his opinion and that of nearly all his friends, it was “the truest poem ever written by Mr. Willis. There is about this little poem,” he continues, “(evidently written in haste and through impulse) a true imagination. Its grace, dignity, and pathos are impressive, and there is more in it of earnestness of soul than in anything I have seen from the pen of its author.”[6]

Willis took advantage of his new facilities to become his own publisher, issuing successively, as shilling extras in the “Mirror Library,” his “Sacred Poems,” “Poems of Passion,” and “Lady Jane and Humorous Poems;” following these up with the first complete editions, from the “Mirror” press, of “Letters from Under a Bridge,” and “Pencillings by the Way.” The poems contained few notable additions to “Melanie” and earlier volumes, except those just mentioned as printed in the “New Mirror,” and the lines on the death of President Harrison, which were much admired at the time. They were in anapestics, an unusual metre with him, but one which he handled not without fire in this excellent elegy. “Lady Jane” was a society poem in some two hundred “Don Juan” stanzas and was by no means the worst of the many imitations of Byron’s inimitable masterpiece--if the bull may be pardoned. The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,--this time he was twenty-two,--and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who, “having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may. This is all, but the poet has caught, as successfully as was possible for him, the alternate irony and sentiment, the rattling digressiveness, and the eccentric rhyming and audacious punning of his original. There is a delicate suggestion of Lady Blessington in the heroine; but Willis’s English acquaintances could hardly have felt pleased at being served up by name in the picture of a London _soirée_, as “Savage Landor, wanting soap and sand,” as “frisky Bowring, London’s wisest bore,” or even as “calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie.” Willis was now in considerable request for lectures and occasional poems. On August 17, 1841, he delivered a poem before the Linonian Society of Yale College, extracts from which appear in his collected poems as “The Elms of New Haven.” This address was not without touches of fancy and tender reminders to the assembled scholars of

“The green tent where your harness was put on,”

and of summer nights in Academus, when the bird

“Sang a half carol as the moon wore on
And looked into his nest.”

But the blank verse carried him along into that smooth diffuseness which was his besetting sin, and the poem, as a whole, did not rise above commonplace. It compares but poorly with Dr. Holmes’s noble “Astræa,” delivered in 1850 before the Phi Beta Kappa society at New Haven by a poet who, though the son of another Alma Mater, gracefully acknowledged himself the grandson of Yale. At another time, in response to an invitation from James T. Fields to recite a poem in Boston, Willis wrote: “I took the time to consider whether there _could be_ such a thing as an effective _spoken_ poem. I am satisfied now, that my style depends so much on those light shades which would be lost on more ears than two at a time, that I should make an utter failure.” In 1843 he lectured on the formation of character before the Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore, and the audience--a large one--was disappointed by the serious nature of the address. A “Lecture on Fashion” given before the New York Lyceum and published in 1844 was more characteristic, at least in subject. He lectured also in Boston and Albany, perhaps in other places, but without marked success, being an indifferent orator and not at home on the platform. “The calling on a hen for an egg, while she stands on the fence, would seem to me reasonable,” said he, “in comparison with asking for my sentiments, to be delivered on my legs.”

In the issue of the “New Mirror” for September 28, 1844, the editors announced that they had been driven out of the field of weekly journalism by the United States Post Office. The “Mirror,” being stitched, could not go at newspaper rates, but was taxed, at the caprice of postmasters, from two to fifteen cents a copy. This more than doubled the price to country readers and killed the mail subscription. Remonstrances addressed to the authorities at Washington only brought, in reply, a letter of “sesquipedalian flummery.” Accordingly the editors decided to change the shape of the paper and publish it as a daily. The first number of the “Evening Mirror” came out October 7, 1844. It was published every day in the week but Sunday, and ran till the close of the following year, under the joint conduct of Morris, Willis, and Hiram Fuller. The last was a young man, and a far-away cousin of Margaret Fuller. He continued the paper, under the same name, for years after his partners had left him. It was of Fuller that Bennett said, “We saw the editor of the ‘Evening Mirror,’ the other day, treating his subscribers to an excursion; he drove them all down Broadway to the Battery in an omnibus.” Edgar Poe was engaged upon the “Evening Mirror” as critic and sub-editor in the autumn of 1844, and remained upon it about six months. His relations with Willis were of the pleasantest. The latter tried to befriend him in various ways and lent him the hearty support of his paper. His recollections of his former associate were given in the “Home Journal” for October 13, 1849, shortly after Poe’s death, in an article bearing generous testimony to his perfect regularity, reasonableness, and courtesy, while engaged upon the “Mirror.” Poe’s own estimate of Willis is given at some length in his series of papers on “The Literati of New York.”[7] It is friendly in tone, but quite impartial and discriminating. Its literary criticism need not be here repeated, but Poe’s personal impressions of Willis are worth giving:--

“Mr. Willis’s career,” he writes, “has naturally made him enemies
among the envious host of dunces whom he has outstripped in the race
for fame; and these his personal manner (a little tinctured with
reserve, _brusquerie_, or even haughtiness) is by no means adapted
to conciliate. He has innumerable warm friends, however, and is
himself a warm friend. He is impulsive, generous, bold, impetuous,
vacillating, irregularly energetic, apt to be hurried into error,
but incapable of deliberate wrong. He is yet young and, without
being handsome in the ordinary sense, is a remarkably well-looking
man. In height he is perhaps five feet eleven and justly
proportioned. His figure is put in the best light by the ease and
assured grace of his carriage. His whole person and personal
demeanor bear about them the traces of ‘good society.’ His face is
somewhat too full or rather heavy in its lower proportions. Neither
his nose nor his forehead can be defended. The latter would puzzle
phrenology. His eyes are a dull bluish gray and small. His hair is
of a rich brown, curling naturally and luxuriantly. His mouth is
well cut, the teeth fine, the expression of the smile intellectual
and winning. He converses little, _well_ rather than fluently, and
in a subdued tone.”

It was after Morris and Willis had dissolved their connection with the “Evening Mirror” that that journal published the article, by Thomas Dunn English, reflecting severely on Poe’s character, for which he sued Fuller and recovered $225 damages. His “Raven” was written while he was on the paper, and first published anonymously in the “American Review.” Willis reprinted it in the “Mirror” over Poe’s name, with a send-off, in which he said, “We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.”[8]

The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity--and calamity as yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother whose love had been to him both a stay and an inspiration. His youngest sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25, 1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part, “Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840, and which now appeared for the first time in book form, exhibited more range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in some of the earlier stories--such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”--of a capacity for stronger and graver work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life” stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.” Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in the _dénouement_ and confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend--like the Goddesses on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer, sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in particular. But in each and all of these protean shapes, he is equally fascinating and invincible. In “Beware of Dogs and Waltzing,” the author entered the confessional with even less precaution than usual. It is quite plain to one reading between the lines, that the hero, Mr. Lindsay Maud, with his _retroussé_ nose, sanguineous tint, curly hair, and dimpled chin, is no other than Willis himself; that the Surrey manor where the scene is laid is Shirley Park; that its hospitable occupants, the Becktons, are in truth the Skinner family; that Mabel Brown, the heroine, is identical with Miss Mary Stace; and, lastly, that Miss Blakeney, the dazzling but heartless heiress, whose hand Mr. Maud’s hostess kindly destines for her young _protégé_, but whom, yielding to his better angel, he flings overboard in favor of the gentler and sweeter Mabel, is a certain belle of fortune, who figures in Willis’s private correspondence as “trotted out” by Mrs. Skinner for his inspection with a view to his making a rich marriage.

In “A Revelation of a Previous Life” and “The Phantom Head upon the Table,” the supernatural is introduced, but not with success. Willis had not the weird, haunting imagination of Hawthorne or Poe. He does not prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have no _vraisemblance_. Nor was he more at home in broad comedy. His humor--and he had humor--was delicate rather than robust; was made out of irony, pleasantry, and gay spirits, and depended more upon situation than character. If the situation was droll, the humor was good; otherwise not. “Miss Jones’s Son,” “The Spirit Love of Ione S----,” “Nora Mehidy,” “Meena Dimity,” and “Born to love Pigs and Chickens” were all _manqué_. The best of the humorous tales is “The Female Ward,” which tells of the embarrassments of a rather fast young gentleman in Boston, who receives an unexpected consignment, in the shape of a raw heiress, from a Southern plantation; her confiding parents intrusting her to his guardianship, with a request that he place her at school in some high-toned seminary. His difficulties in trying to perform this commission, ending with his lodging her temporarily in a private lunatic asylum, are very happily imagined. “The Female Ward” would lend itself nicely to the dramatizer, and make up into a most amusing little farce. “Those Ungrateful Blidginses” was funny, but wicked. It was Willis’s way of avenging himself upon two maiden ladies with whom he had fallen in, and subsequently fallen out, during his travels in Italy, and who, on returning to America, had circulated reports not to his credit. He had another hit at them in “Ernest Clay,” as “two abominable old maids by the name of Buggins or Blidgins, representing the _scan. mag._ of Florence.” The story caused a good deal of scandal. The victims (whose names were thinly disguised) were high in Knickerbocker social circles, and the doors of many of the best houses in Albany and New York were closed forever against Willis, as a consequence of this indiscretion. There was even some rumor in the Albany newspapers to the effect that he had been challenged by a friend of the injured ladies, and had declined the challenge, but this he denied. “Kate Crediford” is a clever specimen of anti-climax. The writer sees an old love at the theatre and, fancying that she looks unhappy, his flame revives, and he goes home and writes her an impassioned declaration. His letter is answered by the lady’s husband, who informs him of her recent marriage, and explains her pensiveness by the fact that she had eaten too heartily of unripe fruit before going to the play. In “The Poet and the Mandarin” and “The Inlet of Peach Blossoms,” the descriptions are richly fanciful. But the most truly imaginative of all these tales is “The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall.” The theme is one that would have delighted Hawthorne, and though he might have treated it more meaningly, he could not have improved upon its wild, half-eerie gayety, with its undercurrent of regret--the old Horatian regret for the shortness of life and vanished youth. A superannuated beau, lingering in the empty colonnade of Congress Hall after the close of the Saratoga season, sees a spectral procession of coaches drive up to the door and deposit, one after another, their loads of ladies with escorts and baggage. Later in the evening, peering in through the ball-room windows, his brain reels as he beholds the well-remembered belles and dandies--apparently grown no older--of the golden age of the springs, the days of “the Albany regency.” They dance to the same old waltz music, played by the same old negro fiddlers, by the light of spermaceti tapers that floods the dusty evergreens “with a weird mysteriousness, an atmosphere of magic, even in the burning of the candles,” and drink champagne of “the exploded color, rosy wine suited to the bright days when all things were tinted rose.”

It is needless to say that there is an abundance of pretty and clever things scattered through these tales of Willis. “Flirtation”--as an instance of his epigrams--“is a circulating library in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.” “His politeness,” he says of one of his characters, “had superseded his character altogether.” He tells of “a person of excellent family, after the fashion of a hill of potatoes, the best part of it under ground;” and of the Frenchman who could trace his lineage back to “the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel.” “Mr. Potts’s income was a net answer to his morning prayer: it provided his daily bread.” “Wigwam _vs._ Almacks,” which follows out the suggestions of a true story told in “À l’Abri,” is not very satisfactory as a fiction, but is worth noticing for the lovely description, with which it opens, of a wayside spring in the valley of the Chemung.