Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first Portfolio.He had made himself known by his religious poetry,published in his father's paper,I think,and signed "Roy."He had started the "American Magazine,"afterwards merged in the New York Mirror."He had then left off writing scripture pieces,and taken to lighter forms of verse.He had just written "I'm twenty-two,I'm twenty-two,They idly give me joy,As if I should be glad to know That I was less a boy."He was young,therefore,and already famous.He came very near being very handsome.He was tall;his hair,of light brown color,waved in luxuriant abundance;his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights;he dressed with artistic elegance.He was something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde.There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phxdra,in which the beautiful young man,who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother,always reminded me of Willis,in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the ideal.The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas,but the fresh-cheecked,jaunty young author of the year 1830has long faded out of human sight.I took the leaves which lie before me at this moment,as I write,from his coffin,as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul's Church,on a sad,overclouded winter's day,in the year 1867.At that earlier time,Willis was by far the most prominent young American author.
Cooper,Irving,Bryant,Dana,Halleck,Drake,had all done their best work.Longfellow was not yet conspicuous.Lowell was a school-boy.
Emerson was unheard of.Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive.Not one of the great histories,which have done honor to our literature,had appeared.Our school-books depended,so far as American authors were concerned,on extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett;on Bryant's Thanatopsis,his lines To a Waterfowl,and the Death of the Flowers,Halleck's Marco Bozzaris,Red Jacket,and Burns;on Drake's American Flag,and Percival's Coral Grove,and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,--and not getting very wide awake,either.These could be depended upon.A few other copies of verses might be found,but Dwight's "Columbia,Columbia,"and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine,were already effaced,as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must soon be,by the great wave which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are legible.
About this time,in the year 1832,came out a small volume entitled "Truth,a Gift for Scribblers,"which made some talk for a while,and is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones.The "London Athenaeum"spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk sort of satire."As the author had been a trapper in Missouri,he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners.Born in Boston,in 1804,the son of an army officer,educated at West Point,he came back to his native city about the year 1830.He wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review,"and another on the famous Indian chief,Black Hawk.In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself.It was an incident of a fight with the Osages.
"Standing by my father's side,I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head.Fired with valor and ambition,I rushed furiously upon another,smote him to the earth with my tomahawk,ran my lance through his body,took off his scalp,and returned in triumph to my father.He said nothing,but looked pleased."This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary warfare.His handling of his most conspicuous victim,Willis,was very much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage.He tomahawked him in heroics,ran him through in prose,and scalped him in barbarous epigrams.Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised;hardly any one else escaped.
If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating,some of them gay with prismatic colors,half a century ago,he will find in the pages of "Truth"a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of.I recognize only three names,of all which are mentioned in the little book,as belonging to persons still living;but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others,some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr.Spelling's exterminating onslaught.Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling,who was not without talent and instruction,as he had dealt with our authors.Ithink he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates,some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts.Such,at least,was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.
That was the day of Souvenirs,Tokens,Forget-me-nots,Bijous,and all that class of showy annuals.Short stories,slender poems,steel engravings,on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising establishments,gilt edges,resplendent binding,--to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.The "Scarlet Letter"was an unhinted possibility.The "Voices of the Night "had not stirred the brooding silence;the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert;most of the contributors to those yearly volumes,which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table,have shrunk into entire oblivion,or,at best,hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.
