Nathaniel Parker Willis. Henry A. Beers

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CHAPTER I.

       1806–1823.

       ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.

       Table of Contents

      Willis was born January 20, 1806, in the little old seaport city of Portland, Maine, celebrated by the “Autocrat” for its great square mansions, the homes of retired sea-captains. The town had already made some noise in literature, as the residence of that wild genius, John Neal; and on February 27, 1807, little more than a year after the date with which this biography begins, it witnessed the birth of its most illustrious citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

      A comparison at once suggests itself between the subsequent fortunes in the republic of letters of these two infant poets, fellow townsmen for some five years. Willis was the earlier in the field. In 1832, when Longfellow, then a young professor at Bowdoin College, began to contribute scholarly articles to the “North American Review,” the former had been five years before the public, and was already well known as a poet, a magazine editor, and a foreign correspondent. When “Outre-Mer” was issued in 1835, Willis had won a reputation as a prose writer on both sides of the Atlantic by his “Pencillings” in the “New York Mirror;” and by 1839, when Longfellow published his first volume of original poetry, “Voices of the Night,” his senior by a year had printed five books of verse. But there is no question as to which has proved the better continuer. Longfellow is still the favorite poet of two peoples; a singer dearer, perhaps, to the general heart than any other who has sung in the English tongue. His brilliant contemporary, after being for about fifteen years the most popular magazinist in America, has sunk into comparative oblivion.[1] This is the fate of all fashionable literature. Every generation begins by imitating the literary fashions of the last, and ends with a reaction against them. At present “realism” has the floor, sentiment is at a discount, and Willis’s glittering, high-colored pictures of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact, have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James.

      Without presuming any native equality between Willis and the Cambridge poet, it is fair to add that the former never found opportunity to deepen and ripen such gift as was in him. His life was passed not “in the quiet and still air of delightful studies,” but in the rush of the gay world and the daily drudgery of the pen; in the toil of journalism, that most exhausting of mental occupations, which is forever giving forth and never bringing in. His best work—all of his work which claims remembrance—was СКАЧАТЬ