Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator, and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses, the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafés, the hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes in equipages, customs, dress. He grew to be a recognized _arbiter elegantiarum_, and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in “Ephemera,” and some little wholes,--like the letter from Saratoga, “To the Julia of Some Years Ago,”--which deserve to be rescued from the oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher; he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares, and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;” and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear brook--a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through the hot summer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a private yacht.”