"abducted" at the stage door; now, going to
Paris and living sumptuously; now, ending
miserably in a debtors' prison.

AN AMERICAN'S WORD FOR AN
AMERICAN WRITER.

"N. P. WILLIS is dead!" The fact is
announced in the fewest words possible. Still it
is something to have one's last illness and death
telegraphed across the ocean, when the price of
gold is so important.

The question of Doré respecting Tennyson,
"Qui est-il donc ce Monsieur Tennyson?" is
still more pertinent here to Mr. Willis. He
has had scant justice, and no generous
appreciation, in England. This has been owing to
peculiarities essentially American, presently to
be considered.

The golden thread of genius was mixed in
the warp and woof of Mr. Willis's nature,
though there was other and less worthful
material in it. If he had been born and trained in
England, he might have emulated Disraeli. He
had too much taste, and too little earnestness,
for political life in America. He was social,
sentimental, convivial. Taste and culture made
him what his countrymen called an aristocrat.
He loved artistic achievement, therefore
he loved England; and the transitional
crudeness of his country, where everything
was being done, and nothing was finished, was
repulsive to the sybaritic side of Mr. Willis.

There is a little poem of his in which he
expresses this phase of himself quite as truthfully
as poetically and humorously.

A man may love wine, and never be intoxicated.
He may love ease and comfort, and
forego both for a higher joy, a more worthy
rest. Though Mr. Willis wrote " Love in a
Cottage," and it was probably a true exposition
of feeling, he still lived in and loved his cottage
home at Glen Mary in the May-day of his life.
He was a practical man as well as a poet, and
wrought out for himself two beautiful country
homes: the one for his first, the other for his
last marriage; and in training flowers and
fruits, and growing a landscape for himself and
his family and friends, to be copied by his
countrymen who had taste enough to profit
by the pattern shown, he still carefully made
his gates " pig-tight:" a precaution very
important where hogs are more intrusive than
boys or burglars. But we must not forget the
poem,

LOVE IN A COTTAGE.

     They may talk of love in a cottage,
          And bowers of trellised vine,
     Of nature bewitchingly simple,
         And milkmaids half divine.
     They may talk of the pleasures of sleeping
          In the shade of a spreading tree,
     And a walk in the fields at morning
          By the side of a footstep free.

     But give me a sly flirtation
          By the light of a chandelier,
     With music to play in the pauses,
          And nobody very near;
     Or a seat on a silken sofa,
          With a glass of pure old wine,
     And mamma too blind to discover
          The small white hand in mine.

     Your love in a cottage gets hungry,
          Your vine is a nest for flies,
     Your milkmaid shocks the graces,
          And simplicity talks of pies.
     You lie down to your shady slumber,
          And wake with a bug in your ear;
     And your damsel that walks in the morning
          Is shod like a mountaineer.

     True love is at home on a carpet,
          And mightily likes his ease,
     And true love has an eye for a dinner,
          And starves beneath shady trees.
     His wing is the fan of a lady,
          His foot's an invisible thing,
     And his arrow is tipped with a jewel,
          And shot from a silver string.

His first wife was a most lovely and charming
English lady. Of her he wrote to his mother on
leaving Europe with his young bride:

Dear mother, when our lips can speak,
     When first our tears will let us see,
When I can gaze upon thy cheek,
     And thou with thy dear eyes on me,
'Twill be a pastime little sad
     To trace what weight Time's heavy fingers
Upon each other's forms have had ;
     For all may flee, so feeling lingers !
But there's a change, beloved mother,
To stir far deeper thoughts of thine:
I come — but with me comes another
     To share the heart once only mine.

Thou on whose thoughts, when sad and lonely,
     One star arose in memory's heaven,
Thou who hast watch'd one treasure only,
     Water'd one flower with tears at even,
Room in thy heart! The hearth she left
     Is darken'd to lend light to ours.
There are bright flowers of care bereft,
     And hearts that languish more than flowers.
She was their light, their very air,
Room in thy heart, mother ! place for her in thy prayer.

With such deep love for mother and wife,
may not Mr. Willis be forgiven by home-loving
Englishmen for some flippant personalities
evincing bad taste, and which have been the
precedent for many more showing bad manners?
Still they are American manners, and hardly to
be judged sternly by English standards.

An American discusses everything but a
prospective addition to his family, and publishes
everything but births. Lords and ladies are
abstract wonders that he would like to see, or
"hear tell of." " Noblesse oblige" to an
imaginative American means that those of noble
lineage are obliged to be rich, beautiful in
person, and graceful in manner. It takes a pretty
large experience to turn this poetry into hard