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 1830 has 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.