Under these trying circumstances he exhibited a persistence in his work which astonished his friends. They had not thought that such endurance was in the man. But from some underlying stratum of character, some strain of toughness inherent in his Puritan stock, he brought up resources of will and stubbornness which resisted all appeals. Though complaining sometimes in his letters that he was “pitilessly overworked,” he declared his intention of dying in harness, and clung to his desk and his lonely lodgings till the doctors pronounced him a dying man. A part of the summers of 1865 and 1866 he spent at Idlewild, but the autumn of the latter year found him still at work in the city. He was now so weak that he often fainted in the street and had to be carried to his rooms. His partner, Morris Phillips, was untiring in his attentions; and finally, early in November, he brought him home to Idlewild, Willis yielding at last to the united entreaties of his wife, his father, and his sisters, and the imperative command of his doctor, to stop work. But he had come home only to die. He kept his room and seldom went down-stairs. During the first month he had some enjoyment of the home associations, taking pleasure in the daily visit of his children, and listening to the reading of poetry, more for its soothing effect than for any intellectual apprehension of it. He soon became helpless and slept much of the time, and when waking lived in continual visions and hallucinations. His recognition of his family was fitful during the last six or eight weeks of his life. He was watched and cared for by his wife and faithful Harriet, and no strange hand ministered to him or marked his failing consciousness. He died on the afternoon of the 20th of January, 1867,--his sixty-first birthday,--so quietly that the single watcher could not say when. He was taken to Boston, and buried in Mount Auburn. The funeral service of the Episcopal Church was read over his body in St. Paul’s Church, by the Rev. P. D. Huntington, the bookstores of the city being closed, in token of respect, while the service lasted. His pall was borne by Longfellow, Dana, Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Dr. Howe, Merritt Trimble, and Aldrich. “I took the flower which lies before me at this moment, as I write,” says Dr. Holmes, in a recent number of the “Atlantic,” “from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad, overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867.”