The year 1844-45 was a sad one for Willis. In the preface to “Poems of Passion,” 1843, he had written, “We are accused daily of writing nothing that is not frivolous. These poems are from the undercurrent of our frivolity; and they run as deep, we are inclined to think, as a man ever sees into his heart till it is rent open with a calamity--and calamity as yet, we never knew.” But in March, 1844, he lost that admirable mother whose love had been to him both a stay and an inspiration. His youngest sister, Ellen, had died the month before. And a year later, March 25, 1845, at the Astor House, his wife died in childbirth. “An angel without fault or foible” is the comment which the broken-hearted husband wrote against the record of her death in his note-book. The child, a girl, for whom he had chosen the name of Blanche, was born dead. The labor of editing a daily paper had proved unexpectedly burdensome and, added to the grief of his bereavement, left him greatly exhausted and under the need of breaking away from work for a time. In the early summer of 1845 he sailed on the Britannic for Liverpool, taking with him his little daughter Imogen, and the faithful colored woman, Harriet Jacobs, who had been the child’s nurse during Mrs. Willis’s lifetime. Before starting for England he had gathered up his recent story contributions to the magazines and published them, together with “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Romance of Travel,” in a single large volume, “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” This was divided into three parts: “High Life in Europe and American Life,” “Inklings of Adventure,” and “Loiterings of Travel.” A fourth part, “Ephemera,” was added in 1854. The tales which he had written since 1840, and which now appeared for the first time in book form, exhibited more range and variety of subject than his two previous collections, but a decided falling off in literary quality. Those who had seen promise in some of the earlier stories--such as “Edith Linsey,” “The Picker and Piler,” and “The Lunatic’s Skate”--of a capacity for stronger and graver work were disappointed by these later “Dashes.” None of them was without clever strokes, but they were, as a whole, very light. The “High Life” stories were mostly repetitions of Willis’s favorite plot. Sometimes the hero is a spoiled child of genius, as in “Countess Nyschriem and the Handsome Artist,” and “Leaves from the Heart Book of Ernest Clay.” Sometimes, as in “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” he is a designing villain. Again, as in “Love and Diplomacy,” he turns out to be a very great person in disguise, who flings off his cloak in the _dénouement_ and confounds his adversaries. In “Getting to Windward,” he is a French adventurer, for whom three English peeresses contend--like the Goddesses on Ida. In “Flirtation and Fox Chasing,” he is a Kentucky lady-killer, sojourning at an English country house. In “Lady Rachel,” he is nobody in particular.