Nathaniel Parker Willis. Henry A. Beers

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      In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer. It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in time the founder and first president of the University of California, and a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and “Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek.

      Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of 1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same hall—the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed, athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after years—in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.

      Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia—afterwards, with the titular embellishment of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”—happened to be in New Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,” published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:—

      “I also remember two men who graduated in the class of 1827, that were frequently pointed out to me as its most conspicuous members. One was the son of a very prominent statesman, which, in fact, explained the notice he attracted; but there was enough of individuality about John Van Buren to command attention. He had already revealed the traits which distinguished him in after life—easy and careless in manner, bold in character, and of an aggressive turn of mind. His rival in notoriety had no hereditary claims to support him, but he was gifted with a rare poetical talent that had already secured him distinction both in and out of college. His tone and bearing were aristocratic, not unmixed with hauteur, and though admired for his abilities he never commanded the sympathies of his comrades. Such was N. P. Willis, and such he remained to the end of his life. Neither of these graduates, if I remember, bore off ‘honors;’ but Willis was requested by his class, with the approval of the faculty, to deliver a poem at the Commencement of 1827. I was too young to approach these Titans, as I regarded them, and was content to gaze on them with deference as they swept by me in the street. In after years I became intimate with them both.”

      The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of ’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman, were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s counsel, and Willis as a particeps criminis and witness for the plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere, was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.

      Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman, Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church. Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of to-day such a stirring microcosm—with its athletic and social clubs, its regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls, boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.—was all undreamed of. Far from owning a yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown, to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on “necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.

      “The day,” wrote Willis in a freshman letter to his father, “is the greatest of the year at the South, and our Southern students seem disposed to be restless under the restriction of a lesson on playday. There were many of them drunk last evening, and still more to-day. Christmas has always been, ever since the establishment of the college, emphatically a day of tricks: windows broken, bell-rope cut, freshmen squirted, and every imaginable scene of dissipation acted out in full. Last night they barred the entry doors of the South College, to exclude the government, and then illuminated the building. This morning the recitation-room doors were locked and the key stolen, and we were obliged to knock down the doors to get in; and then we were not much better off, for the lamps were full of water and the wicks gone. However, we procured others, and went on with the lesson.”

      Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used, between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.

      New Haven in 1823–27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia” or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor СКАЧАТЬ