In the spring of 1829 he entered upon his first serious venture as a journalist, by starting the “American Monthly Magazine,” which ran two years and a half--from April, 1829, to August, 1831. Mr. Thomas Gold Appleton describes Willis’s undertaking as “a slim monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Appleton and his friend Motley, then students in Harvard, were both contributors. For a young _littérateur_, only a year and a half out of college, without capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of a monthly magazine was certainly an enterprise of some boldness. His expectations, however, were modest enough, and his preliminary card, “To the Public,” casts some light on the conditions of literary journalism at that time. He says that he cannot pay much for contributions, like the English magazines which he took for his model. “The difficulties of transmission over such an immense country and the comparatively small proportion of literary readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two, at the farthest.” He had, moreover, “the ebb of a boyish reputation” against him. Notwithstanding he launched upon his voyage with excellent pluck and vigor. He conducted his magazine with little assistance, writing himself from thirty to forty pages of printed matter every month in the shape of tales, poems, essays, book reviews, and sketches of life and travel. Boston was not yet the Boston of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, but it had already as fair a claim to the title of literary metropolis as New York. Everett and Channing were great names. Dana, Pierpont, and Sprague were among its poets. These men were not available for Willis’s purposes, but he rallied to his support a number of younger men, such as Richard Hildreth, the historian, George Lunt, the poet, Park Benjamin, Isaac McLellan, the Rev. George B. Cheever, Albert Pike, afterwards the Arkansas poet and fire-eater, and Rufus Dawes,--then a budding genius, subsequently a preacher of erratic doctrines,--J. O. Rockwell, Mrs. Sigourney, and others whose names have fallen silent. Next to the editor’s own graceful work, the most notable things given to the public through the columns of the “American Monthly” were Pike’s “Hymns to the Gods,” poems of a richly classical inspiration, which have often provoked comparison with Keats’s odes; and which, if their workmanship were equal to their imaginative fervor, would justify the comparison.