In July, 1864, General Morris died. Willis was deeply moved as he stood by his coffin. “My beloved old friend,” he wrote, “looked wonderfully tranquil, and so sweetly noble that I could not forbear giving him a parting kiss, though William sobbed as he looked on. So passes from earth one who loved me devotedly.” After Morris’s death Willis took into partnership a young man named Hollister, who had capital and enthusiasm; but the business management of the “Home Journal” began to fall more and more upon the shoulders of its present editor, Mr. Morris Phillips. The story of the last few years of Willis’s life is a melancholy chronicle of failing powers, and of persistent struggle with disease and narrowing fates. He had long borne up against ill health with the gay courage of a cavalier. His pen faltered, but nothing that it wrote gave signs of bitterness or discouragement. Toward the last his temper, which had been uniformly sweet, sometimes grew irritable and morbid, though nothing of this appeared in his writing. As early as 1852 he had fancied that he had consumption, but his cough turned out to be merely “sympathetic,” and his lungs were pronounced sound. His disease finally declared itself as epilepsy, and resulted at the last in paralysis and softening of the brain. He was subject for years to epileptic fits, occurring periodically, usually on the tenth day. During these attacks, so long as his strength lasted, he was extremely violent, but as he grew weaker, they simply made him unconscious, leaving him greatly prostrated when the fit was over. The true nature of his malady was, for some years, known only to his wife and his physician, Dr. Gray, who feared that it might injure Willis’s business and literary interests if it were publicly understood that his brain was affected, or in danger of being affected. Willis was himself very sensitive on this point, and begged that no stranger might see him during his attacks. Accordingly, the matter was kept secret as long as possible. After Willis’s death, one of his physicians, Dr. J. B. F. Walker, printed some “Medical Reminiscences of N. P. Willis,” in the course of which he said: “Not only was he a martyr to the agonies of sharp and sudden attacks, but he suffered all the languors of chronic disease. With the exception of Henry Heine, there has hardly been a man of letters doomed to such protracted torments from bodily disease.”