in our day, when we all rule, monarchs of ephemera--was an author whose writings have added to what Doctor Johnson calls ‘the gayety of mankind.’ He believed them better and higher and more philosophical than this; and I believe there was truth and right in his thought.” The “Letters from Under a Bridge” are so heartsome in feeling and so much mellower and more leisurely in style than Willis’s later work, that one naturally speculates, in reading them, as to what might have been the effect upon his literary product had fortune granted his wish, to be allowed to end his days at Glenmary. Would study and the quiet of nature have ripened it to something deeper and richer than anything that he has left? Or would he have grown rusty with absence from the stir of cities and the gay society that had hitherto seemed his congenial element? It is impossible to answer this question with confidence. Undoubtedly his later work would have been other and better than it was if he had had the time to select and condense. He would have written more and scribbled less. But whether he would ever have excelled the best parts of his earlier writings is doubtful. His talent was of the kind which discipline does not always improve. It was the expression of his temperament, fresh, facile, spontaneous, but impatient of continuance. He was best at a dash--a sketch, or a short tale. His gift was of the sort that shows more gracefully in youth than age. _Idem manebat neque idem decebat._ It is not improbable that, even under the most favoring conditions, he would have kept on writing Jottings, Loiterings, Hurrygraphs, etc., lacking, as he evidently did, the power of construction required for a large and serious work. But this speculation is perhaps an idle one. Whether or not it lay in his nature to sing or to say that “something” of which Ben Jonson tells, “that must and shall be sung high and aloof,” fate denied him the proof. His necessities drove him back to the city and the editor’s chair, to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. Possibly the finer work might have shaped itself in silence, but “not in these noises.” Meanwhile his present content found utterance in his “Reverie at Glenmary,”--a single breath of gratitude to God,--the most sincerely devout of all his religious poems, and pathetic when one reflects how soon the sheltered happiness for which it gives thanks was to pass away.