Andover, Mass., January 15.
Wednesday evening, 12 o'clock.
My dear Father,-My heart is so overflowing with joy and gratitude and happiness that I could not rest till I had sat down and told you all. We have had a meeting in Allen's room to-night. Mr. Styles was there, and talked so that I thought I could almost see a halo round his head, and expected him to turn into St. Paul come down again from heaven. After meeting Mr. S. told them the meeting was closed, but if any wished to converse with him or the other professors of religion in the room, they might tarry. The room was crowded, body and all, so that you could not have got through, but no one stirred. Sobbing and weeping was heard all round the room. William Adams, Allen, Styles, and I then went round and conversed with them. They all burst into tears immediately, and listened with the greatest eagerness, and when I got up to go to the next one, they held on to me as though salvation depended on my talking with them. Isaac Stuart sobbed aloud the whole meeting time. Joseph Jenkins was in tears, and came down to my room after meeting and asked me to pray for and with him. He said he could not pray himself; he dared not. I gave him the best advice I could and prayed with him, and he is now in his room, as I hope praying for himself. I talked with little Joshua Huntingdon, and told him about his father. He wept, and promised to go home and pray. J. C. Alvord, a member of my class and a fine fellow, was in the greatest misery. He could not sit upon his chair, and took me out of the meeting to go to my room and pray with him. Jno. Tappan of Boston was very deeply affected. I conversed with Darrach of Philadelphia, Carter of Virginia, King of Convers, and several others. They all seemed to feel very deeply, and all begged me earnestly to pray for them. We could not get them away. They stood round weeping and looking for some one to say something to them. Oh, my dear father, what can we render to God for all his mercies! Allen has been down in my room several times to pray for some particular one. There were so many to pray for that we have been on our knees from seven o'clock till now almost all the time. Kennett, my room-mate, is very much affected. He fears to delay repentance, but says his father won't like it when he goes back to Russia, and that there are no Christians in Russia.. Prayer ascends continually, sinners are repenting, and I am as proud as Lucifer. I feel as if I was going to do all myself; as if I could convert a thousand without God, if I only told them the truth. Oh, pray that I may have humility! It is and must be the burden of my supplications.
Of the names mentioned in this letter, that of Isaac Stuart is not unknown to fame. Joseph Jenkins afterwards became Willis's brother-in-law, marrying his sister Mary in 1831. He was from Boston, and was graduated at Yale the year after Willis.
CHAPTER II.
1823-1827.
COLLEGE LIFE.
Table of Contents 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...
