Grigsby says that this poem took the prize offered by the “New York Mirror.” He also recalls a division-room composition, of a humorous character, read by Willis in the winter of 1824-25, about an old man planting a cabbage on his wife’s grave, which produced great merriment in the class. In the same year verses signed “Roy,” mainly on scriptural subjects, began to appear in the poet’s corner of the “Boston Recorder,” where they jostled the selections from Watts or original contributions from the pens of “Maro,” “Eliza,” and “The Green Mountain Bard.” Some of these _juvenilia_ were too imperfect to merit preserving, and were never put between covers. Others, like “Absalom,” “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” and “The Burial of Arnold,” were among his most successful things. They were widely quoted and admired, copied about in the newspapers, inserted in readers and collections of verse, and have done as much to upbear his memory as any of his later writings. They were not all contributed to the “Recorder.” Some came out in “The Christian Examiner,” “The Memorial,” “The Connecticut Journal,” “The Youth’s Companion,” and “The Telegraph.” It was customary for the editors of weekly and monthly periodicals, who ordinarily paid their contributors nothing, to stimulate Columbia’s infant muse by an annual burst of generosity in the shape of a prize for the best poem printed in their columns during the year,--a device now relegated to the juvenile and college press. Several of these honors fell to Willis’s share. Lockwood, the publisher of an annual gift-book, “The Album,” paid him fifty dollars for a prize poem, and he got unknown sums for his “Absalom,” “prize poem designated by the judges of original poetry in the ‘Christian Watchman,’” as announced in the issue of that paper for March 30, 1827; and for “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” similarly designated by the judges in the “Boston Recorder” for 1826. He was also invited to write for the “Atlantic Souvenir,” published in Philadelphia, Goodrich’s “Token,” and Hill’s “Lyceum” in Boston, Bryant’s new magazine in New York, and a paper recently started in the same city and edited by a brother of Professor Silliman; for the “Bristol Reporter,” a “newspaper in Rhode Island,” and other publications.