“Was a green spot in the wilderness Touched by the river Jordan. The dark pine Never had dropped its tassels on the moss Tufting the leaning bank, nor on the grass Of the broad circle stretching evenly To the straight larches had a heavier foot Than the wild heron’s trodden. Softly in Through a long aisle of willows, dim and cool, Stole the clear waters with their muffled feet, And, hushing as they spread into the light, Circled the edges of the pebbled tank Slowly, then rippled through the woods away.” For the merely literary quality of these poems, independent of their sacred associations, not very much can be said. They were certainly remarkably mature work for a college boy, pure in taste, delicate and correct in execution. But there is a slightly hollow ring to them, as of verse exercises on set themes. The inspiration is at second hand, from books and not from life. As other juvenile poets have gone to their classics for a subject, Willis went to his Bible. He drank at Siloa’s fount instead of Helicon, and tuned the psaltery instead of the lyre. We have evidently not reached the real Willis yet. In general the experiment of paraphrasing the narrative portions of the Scriptures has not been successful. Something is lost when the impressive simplicity of the original is blown out into wordy and sentimental verse. This process of spinning rhetorical commonplaces from brief texts is well illustrated in the following passage from “Lazarus and Mary:”-- “But to the mighty heart That in Gethsemane sweat drops of blood, Taking for us the cup that might not pass-- The heart whose breaking chord upon the cross Made the earth tremble and the sun afraid To look upon his agony--the heart Of a lost world’s Redeemer--overflowed, Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!” This is what Lowell called “inspiration and water.” Alfred de Vigny, a fine spirit and good poet, has tried the same thing in French and succeeded little, if at all, better than the Yankee collegian. The inadequacy of Willis’s Scripture renderings is made more apparent by the fact that his blank verse is not a good vehicle for strong feeling. It is correct and flowing, sometimes musical, but seldom energetic. It favored his tendency to diffuseness and it often degenerates into a kind of accentless _oratio soluta_, which is only verse because it scans, and only blank verse because it does not rhyme. Upon the whole the most genuine expression of Willis’s talent in this early volume was in the piece entitled “Better Moments,” which remains one of his best, because one of his most spontaneous poems.