the author of the poem Woodman, Spare that Tree, agreed with Willis that the latter should go abroad and send letters to the Mirror for publication. - Abroad 1831-1836. This was the kind of life that exactly suited Willis. He was very fond of foreign travel. He was entertained everywhere, and met all of the distinguished people of the day. His letters, Pencillings by the Way, were filled with amusing gossip about people and things and became very popular. Although most of this work was ephemeral, some few selections can still be read with pleasure. At Glenmary 1837-1842. October 1, 1835, Willis married Miss Mary Stace, the daughter of a distinguished officer in the British army, with whom he returned to America the next May. In 1837 he settled near the Susquehanna, on Owego Creek, in a cottage he called "Glenmary" in honor of his wife. "Give me "Here would I have a home!" he said. a cottage by one of these shining streamlets, upon one of these terraces that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing, and my head silvering in tranquil happiness." In his Reverie at Glenmary, Willis gives us a pleasant picture of himself and family in his new home : "I have enough, O God! My heart to-night "Rich, though poor! My low-roof'd cottage is this hour a heaven. The next five years he regarded as the happiest of his life. It was here that he wrote Letters from under a Bridge, full of pleasing fancy and loving sentiment. His work was like the man, chatty, gay, and volatile. He wrote some dramas which were produced in New York, but their success was brief. In 1842, having been compelled to sell his home, he went to New York to work conjointly with Morris in the publication of the New Mirror (later to become the successful Home Journal) and the Evening Mirror. When Poe's Raven appeared in the Evening Mirror, Willis wrote: "We regard it as the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country." Last Years and Death. In 1846 he began the publication of the Home Journal, which became the most prosperous of his many ventures. His influence, which was felt by the writers of his own day, has now entirely passed away. His last days, often attended by severe physical suffering, were spent at Idlewild, in the highlands along the Hudson, not far from Irving's Sunnyside. There he died on his sixty-first birthday, January 20, 1867. When his body was laid to rest in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, it was borne by such distinguished men as Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Fields, Whipple, and Aldrich. Willis's fame was of brief duration, and justly So. Donald G. Mitchell aptly characterizes him in his American Lands and Letters: "Nor were there signs of patient labor, mental or physical. He 'dashed' at things; his intuitions often good, keen; but they have presentment only in 'glimpses,' 'inklings.' Even his more elaborate tales (if the word be not too strenuous) are made long by aggregations; there is no well-considered logical sequence of ideas or coherence -no dovetailing of character or of incidents. He impresses one as a bird of too fine plumage for much scratching. His best is only By the Way.'" 6 |