Willis was forty when the “Home Journal” was begun--an age at which writers who have thought and studied deeply are often no more than ripe, and have their most productive years before them. But his best work was already done. After 1846 he wrote hardly any more stories or poems--none at all of any value. His pen was devoted more and more steadily to editorial duties, to ephemeræ and paragraphs and fragments of all kinds, and his well-wishers lamented that wit and fancy which, if properly directed, might have produced something that would live and delight future generations, were wasted in dissertations upon the cut of a beard or the fashion of a coat. To all remonstrances of his friends over his literary trifling and their exhortations to write for posterity, his invariable answer, in and out of print, was that the public liked trifles, and that posterity would not pay his bills--that he must go on “buttering curiosity with the ooze of his brains.” That this answer satisfied himself, or that he was without those aspirations after a more enduring fame which are natural to all, cannot be believed. It is probable that he sadly acknowledged in his inner consciousness that the best part of his career was over. His talent, as has been said before, was the result of, or was closely dependent upon, his physical temperament. When health began to decay, and youth was over, and his animal spirits had effervesced, life commenced to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writing, too, as we have seen, was always closely related to his personal experiences; and as these grew tamer, he had less and less to report, and his writing grew tame in proportion. With some, mere study and contemplation supply, to a degree, the ravages which time makes upon the freshness of young impressions. But it had been Willis’s misfortune in youth that a premature success had deprived him of the discipline of early rebuffs, and had made a painful self-culture needless. He never drew much inspiration from books, and in later life he read very little. He said that he could not afford to read, partly for want of time, partly from a notion that much reading would be fatal to originality. Neither was it his privilege to command, at this or at any time, the stimulating and bracing association with men of high serious intellects and strenuous aims, such as he might, perhaps, have had if he had remained in Boston. The occasional hasty meetings with men of brains and literary tastes in general society did not at all take the place of that intimate communion with a circle of gifted spirits which has been so stimulating to others. Moreover it should be borne in mind, as accounting largely for the mediocrity of his later work, that for the last fifteen years of his life Willis was a chronic invalid. Indeed, he was never really a well man after his illness of 1845.