is papa," cried Arthur, sobbing and trying to catch Dinky's fluttering fingers. -- "Oh, gentlemun, nice gentlemun!" Dinky said, still gazing into the corner, and stretching out his hands. "Whar you come fom, wid Spot? Thankee, mars, thankee. Spot, Spot, I'se glad. I'se so glad. Miss 'Rely got heap ov goodies in de pantry. No, no, Miss 'Rely, I won't steal. I gwine ter ax you 'er sumptin. Gie Spot a dollar fer Aunt Sally poor Aunt Sally in Jail Alley she don't know you, gentlemun but Mars Arty say you is so pitiful you lub her all de same. What Mars Arty say? When your fader and your mudder forsake you de Lordwill pick you up.' Dinky got no mudder, gentlemun. Is you my fader? You is n't de Lord come a-standin by a yaller chile like dis? Who is you? I ain't stole nuthin' ter-day. I ain't stole - nuthin sence Dinky befo. Marster, I'm sorry," and Dinky's eyes looked pleadingly at his invisible friend. Miss Aurelia had taken off her spectacles, and was crying softly, ashamed and contrite. The little negro boy was teaching the bigot that there are many paths leading to the house of God. Nobody ebber told Simple, well-meaning Mr. Chace! He had hoped to be the humble instrument of giving a Moses to his people. Poor man, his eyes were blinded with tears, but "it was well with the child." "Oh, papa, he won't look at me, he won't speak to me!" sobbed Arthur. "What is he looking at? What does he see?" "Spot," cried Dinky rapturously, "I'm coming wid de gentlemun. Spot, my Spot" and he fell back on the pillow. Mary Beale Brainerd. NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS. SEVENTEEN years ago Willis was laid at rest in Mount Auburn. It would almost seem as if his books had been buried in the same grave with him. One small collection of his poems remains in circulation, and that is all. The present generation knows him not, or knows him vaguely. At the period of his death Willis had already outlived his best inspiration; between him and his sparkling work the war had drawn that red line which had the effect of giving an air of obsoleteness to everything on the further side. New men and new literary fashions had sprung up: only the fittest of the old survived. It was natural that so delicate a talent as Willis's should fall into neglect. I think that some of the neglect is undeserved, and is therefore temporary. There are many persons still living who have not quite outgrown a feeling of attachment for that bright personality which at one time did so much to influence our unformulated social and literary tastes. Certainly, Willis was too individual a figure in our literature, too peculiarly American in spite of all his foreign airs and acquaintanceship, and too richly endowed with that rare faculty of interesting and attaching readers to himself, to be permanently passed by. His very faults and foibles are engaging, and should not blind us to the real manliness beneath the surface. He has a distinctive literary quality, a tone and manner entirely his own. There is in all that he has written a rich personal flavor, which affects one as a charm, and makes the man a part of his most trivial production. The reader comes at last to feel as if he had known the writer, and been taken into his very confidence. He had a rare gift of communicating his individual standpoint of thought and feeling, and could invest even trifles with a living and familiar interest. This was more than the effect of his swift, light stroke, as it was also more than a mere literary trick. Rather, it was a native facility and inborn instinct of approach, which gave him ready entrance to the heart. He was always sure of a response, too fatally sure, too cruelly favored by fortune in all his beginnings, to be equally certain of his best achievement. Nature might have done more for him if she had done less. Like Leigh Hunt, whom in some respects he resembled, he lacked the early discipline of rebuff and patient labor done in privacy. His flowering was premature, and the instant pressure of demand to which the undergraduate glory of Scripture Sketches subjected his powers put silent preparation out of the question. Hence, at times, a certain extravagance and want of proportion in his work, a general lightness of tone that often amounts to deliberate injustice to, himself and to his subject. Hence, too, an inability, which at last became constitutional, to undertake and carry on any systematic and sustained labor, together with a frankly confessed indifference to the peculiar consideration and rewards of such a course. His jaunty reply to the friends who begged him to concentrate his powers and write something for posterity but partially tells the story of Willis's apparent insensibility to fame. Doubtless he was sincere when he said that he would be glad to do so if posterity would make up a purse for him, as sincere, perhaps, as his English contemporary Praed, when he thus sings of himself to the same purpose: "For he was born a wayward boy, To jest at all that leave him; But circumstances as well as temperament had conspired in his case to bring about the short-sighted result. As Willis himself clearly shows, there was peculiar temptation for a facile pen like his to devote itself to popular work, when as yet American publishing had made lit tle or no headway against the deeply felt need of an international law of copyright, and American journalism was beginning to offer prices which well might seem to him "extravagant." Naturally enough, to quote his own words, will "necessity plead much more potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame; nor does one wholly wonder at that "difficult submission to marketableness" which led him to "break up his statues at the joints, and furnish each fragment with head and legs to walk alone." But this method of spontaneity, which so well fitted his gifts in prose, became the fatal limitation of his poetry. With no lack of native equipment, Willis never got beyond the promise of his early successes in versification, although he continued to enjoy the reputation of a poet during his lifetime. The Scripture poems, published while he was yet a student at Yale, had an instant and cordial reception. Henceforth we find little advancement upon the standard thus fixed by this immature fruitage of his youth. The hasty touch could hardly be expected to suffice for the wider reputation and riper demand of middle life, and we seem to see in much of the poetical work which followed only another case of arrested development. An occasional happy effect in some of the minor pieces still keeps the tradition of his power alive, even while the more exacting tests of to-day have ruled out the larger share of his poetry. Neither Willis nor John Pierpont succeeded in justifying the attempt at a modern reproduction of Scripture narratives. Unevenness of workmanship and want of painstaking toil to supplement his un doubted aptness also kept Willis from the rank he might otherwise have reached among the acknowledged masters of English society verse. Willis never attained that airy firmness of touch so native to Praed, Locker, Dobson, and our own Holmes, which fairly imprisons a thought or fancy without effort or apparent intention. Nowhere is shown more consummate tact and skill than in the cutting of these exquisite jeweled bits called vers de société, which reflect, without a line too much or too little, the fleeting lights and shadows of graceful sentiment. Even in his more serious flights of fancy Willis too often skirts the dangerous line that divides sentiment from sentimentality. His Dedication Hymn and the Death of Harrison will live, and there is still a pathetic power in the Reverie at Glenmary and that Invocation he addresses to his mother on bringing home his English bride. But we are after all forced to look beyond his poetic achievement for the secret of Willis's undoubted capacity for holding the popular heart. Willis himself had none of the common affectation of authorship, and took no pains to create an atmosphere of reserve or secrecy as to the sources of his power. He was the frankest of littérateurs, and barely escaped being a hack by the independence of his pen. He disarmed criticism at the outset by the unblushing confession that the readiness of the public to read and reward him for his work constituted his best excuse for writing at all. And somehow, in reading Willis, one never thinks of abusing so flattering a mark of confidence on his part. This power of making others feel with him, this free, fresh charm of engaging familiarity, is nowhere better shown than in the little sketch To the Julia of Some Years Ago, supposed to have been written from Saratoga. The thing is perfect and quite inimitable in its way. I can call it nothing but sympathetic, so swift and sure is it to enlist the feeling of the reader. And then the little undercurrent of pathos that flows so gently beneath the sparkle and apparent trifling of his manner! It all makes one think what a Thackerayan mastery of the sadder sides of sentiment our author might have had, with something more of constructive skill and genius for labor. Whatever else he was, Willis was first of all a journalist, with a trained and instinctive equipment in some respects second to none this country has ever produced. With no taste for Franklin's thrift, and none of that genius for political leadership which has marked the other great masters of the art in this country, Willis always had the feeling of a correspondent and the judgment of an editor. His knowledge of the public taste was unerring, and his faculty of instant adjustment to its demands something phenomenal. Indeed, it almost amounted to another sense, this instinctive adaptation to just the degree of the solid and soluble it is well to mingle in pabulum designed for the multitude. For he never sacrificed to any audience his moment of serious aside, nor the classical allusion of which he was so fond, while at the same time no one could more gracefully beat a retreat from the threatening danger of things abstruse or profound. With his sensitive appreciation of the public appetite, he could tell precisely how far to go, - could make a spurt or a dash, and appear to have exhausted a subject which he had in reality hardly more than touched in passing. There was a strong inherited journalistic flavor in Willis's blood. At the time of his birth, in Portland, January 20, 1806, his father, Nathaniel Willis, was editing the Eastern Argus; and ten years later we find him in Boston, - where he died May 26, 1870, at the ripe age of ninety, continuing the work which was to link his name with the early his tory of journalism in this country. To him will always belong the credit of establishing, in 1816, our first religious newspaper, the Boston Recorder; as well as of founding, in 1827, the Youth's Companion, that first of the many periodicals since devoted to the interests of the young. Before the son had fairly finished his course at Yale, in the year last mentioned, the availability of the rising collegian had been marked by the versatile Peter Parley, and his path made easy from the university benches to an editorial chair. Immediately upon graduation, Willis assumed the charge of the Token and Legendary, which inaugurate that long list of journalistic ventures which have been connected with his name, beginning with the American Monthly Magazine, afterward merged in General George P. Morris's New York Mirror, and ending with the Home Journal. Here was the familiar rôle of pioneer newspaper work in which his father before him had been so conspicuous, only in his case it was enlarged and individualized by a keener insight, a broader culture, and a readier literary gift. Always reaching out for something novel and attractive, Willis had finally added to instinct an experience which made him easy master in this by no means easy field of writing. "It is a voyage," he says, in speaking of the launching of a new periodical, "that requires plentiful stores, much experience of the deeps and shallows of the literary seas, and a hand at every halyard. . . . No one who has not tried this vocation can have any idea of the difficulty of procuring the light yet condensed, the fragmented yet finished, the good-tempered and gentlemanly yet highly seasoned and dashing, papers necessary to a periodical." It is also interesting to us now to note that he thinks Edward Everett "the best magazine writer living," and considers Crittenden and Calhoun of the Senate capa Willis was himself a consummate illustration of this art, a born magazinist, and able to live up to its most exacting demands. What a fine little specimen of what he calls his "babble "is this! "I was sitting last night by the lady with the horn and the glass umbrella at the Alhambra, I drinking a julep, she (my companion) eating an ice. The water dribbled, and the moon looked through the slits in the awning, and we chatted about Saratoga. My companion has a generalizing mind, situated just in the rear of a very particularly fine pair of black velvet eyes, and her opinions usually come out by a little ivory gate with a pink portico, - charming gate, charming portico, charming opinions! I must say, I think more of intellect when it is well lodged." Willis was often called upon to defend this choice of the lighter tone, about which, he maintained, there was no real choice in the then condition of American literature. His reply to the remonstrance against his "wasting time upon trifles" is still very good reading; and many will agree with him that, in the abundance of encyclopædias and books of reference, "few things are easier or more stupid than to be wise-on paper." One can readily see that it would indeed be less difficult, to quote his own words again and apply them in his own case, "to go to the ship chandler for a cable than to find a new cobweb in a muchswept upper story." Then that little clincher by way by close, that "Parthian fling" from Addison, which he so gayly "tosses under the nose " of his critics: "Notwithstanding pedants of a pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the writings of a polite author as flash and froth, they all of them show upon occasion that they would spare no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they seem to despise." Willis was the first in this country to work that vein of society-writing ' which affects the present literary tone, and was already in vogue in England under the fitting appellation of "polite literature." But with all his easy deference, however, Willis was never blind to the weaknesses and follies of fashion. Society never seemed so dear to him as when he could get away from it and enjoy or criticise it at a distance. See how, upon the first page of his Inklings of Adventure, he could prick the puffball of American aristocracy with the feathery point of his sarcasm! Nor can any one accuse him, with all his social currency of sympathy, with shoddyism or snobbery in any of its forms. His taste here was as fine as his imagination; and however he may sometimes fail in absolute truthfulness to nature, his divergence never endangers a principle. This one may admit without forgetting the comment rife in Willis's lifetime, and even while confessing a certain sympathy with it so far as many of the personal passages in Pencillings by the Way are concerned. But so many distinguished travelers before and since have been guilty of a similar violation of taste that familiarity has somewhat dulled our sensitiveness; while the rapid development of this general tendency in our later journalism has made it sometimes rather difficult for us to understand the storm of indignation Willis's letters encountered in England. The personal element seems almost to have usurped the place of honor in current writing. It is a time of undress, with a constant emphasis upon the confidential and familiar attitude. The gossip of the great, the unblushing chronicle of passing speech, appearance, and opinion, is so far tolerated in almost any literary company as to pass for the most part without either challenge or apology. Where once Willis accorded a hostile meeting to Captain Marryat, in justification of his course in this direction, the luckless correspondent of to-day has only to answer the more prosaic summons of the court. This drawing aside the veil that protects private sanctity has made personal detail the most readily negotiable of all literary wares; and certainly those who indulge and defend the right to this plain speaking can find no better answer to their critics than the sparkling prefaces which Willis put at the beginning of his books. He, at least, was shrewd enough to see that the point at issue was a temporary one, while every year of distance which intervened between the reader and the personages of whom he wrote would necessarily add to the value of the delineation. We can now afford the frank confession that nowhere else is it possible for one to gain so graphic a picture of the writers of his day as from Willis's Pencillings by the Way and Ephemera. Both author and subjects being now dead, no question of taste, happily for us, comes into controversy. With unmixed delight we can give ourselves up to those vivid sittings in Gore House, where Lady Blessington gathered the wits and intellectual wonders of London. Willis was the first literary American ever lionized in England, and, however we may criticise the use he made of his opportunities for distinguished intercourse, they were certainly great. His exceptionally fine address and the fact that he was so thoroughly imbued with the literary spirit made it naturally follow that his pages should become a sort of magic mirror for reflecting the faces of many the world would not willingly forget. The pictures are done to the life; perhaps colored a little too highly |