The journal with which he had now connected himself--and with whose successors, under different names, he continued to be identified until his death, thirty-six years later--was a weekly paper, published on Saturdays, and “devoted to literature and the fine arts.” It had been founded in 1823 by Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and General George P. Morris, but Woodworth had withdrawn some time before Willis joined it. Morris, with whom Willis now began a business partnership that lasted, with slight interruptions, for the rest of their lives, and a personal friendship almost romantic in its tenderness and fidelity, was the most popular song writer of his generation in America,--a sort of cis-Atlantic Tom Moore, whose songs, adapted to the piano, were on all the music-racks in the land. “Near the Lake where droops the Willow” was a universal favorite in the days of gem-book minstrelsy. “My Mother’s Bible” was dear to the great heart of the people, and the air of “Woodman, spare that Tree” was heard by wandering Americans ground out from every hurdy-gurdy in the London streets. Unless a clever letter in the “Mirror” of March 2, 1839, is wholly a hoax, this last-mentioned song compared in popularity with “Home Sweet Home,” having suffered translation into French (“Bûcheron, épargne mon arbre”), German (“Haue nicht die alte Eiche nieder”), Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; the German version being even introduced by an essay, “Ueber Morris’s Entwickelung, Denken und Wirken.” “The Amaranth” for 1840, an annual, edited by Nathaniel Brooks and dedicated to Morris, contains Greek and Latin renderings of his “Woodman,” as well as of Wilde’s almost equally familiar and far better lyric, “My Life is like the Summer Rose.” Morris was a bustling, affable little man, with a shrewd, practical side to him. He was a good business manager, and as Willis had no talent in that kind, the association was mutually advantageous. Morris’s intellectual stature was not great, and Willis, who loved the man, was unable to admire the poet. He praised his songs in print, but there was more of friendship than critical sincerity in his praise. He had been in correspondence with Morris before, and had contributed occasionally to the “Mirror,” having sent it a poem in competition for a twenty-dollar prize when he was still in college. He now began to decant into its columns a number of his “American Monthly” articles, a circumstance which not only shows how local the circulation of the latter must have been, but sheds a curious light on the methods of journalism at that epoch. The old “New York Mirror” had a reputation for brightness in its time and a circulation then considered large, but as compared with the great magazines of to-day it seems a very primitive affair, with its “Original Essays,” its “Popular Moral Tales,” “Desultory Selections,” and “Extracts from an Unpublished Tragedy,” its poems “For