He was only six when the family removed from Portland to Boston, and he appears to have kept little remembrance of his birthplace. The noble harbor, with its islands, which were the Hesperides of Longfellow’s boyish dreams, the old fort on the hill, the mystery of the ships, the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, the noise of the sea fight far away, and the faces of the dead captains as they lay in their coffins, did not enter into Willis’s experience. Indeed, the period of childhood, which has been to many poets so fruitful in precious memories, seems to have left few deep traces on his mind, if we except its religious impressions. The life of his father’s household, though rich in domestic affections, was probably not stimulating to the imagination. It was the life of a Puritan home, of what is called in England a “serious family,”--that life which oppresses Matthew Arnold with its _ennui_; its interests divided between “business and Bethels;” its round of long family devotions, strict Sabbath observances, catechisms, and visiting missionaries. Dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going were, of course, forbidden pleasures. The elder Willis, though a thoroughly good man and good father, was a rather wooden person. His youth and early manhood had been full of hardship; his education was scanty, and he had the formal and narrow piety of the new evangelicals of that day, revolting against the latitudinarianism of the Boston churches. He was for twenty years deacon of Park Street Church, profanely nicknamed by the Unitarians “Brimstone Corner.” “My recollection of a particular occasion,” says an old member of that society, “when, at a conference meeting in the church, he, as presider, was expounding John xv., is that I regarded it as a memorable illustration of a man’s attempting to expound without ideas. I hear him saying,--more than fifty years ago,--‘v. 4. Abide in me. Abide is to dwell,’ in a most monotonous tone, and the rest in the same manner of appreciation.” His rigidity was, perhaps, more in his principles than in his character, and his austerity was tempered by two qualities which have not seldom been found to consist with the diaconate, namely, a sense of humor--“dry,” of course, to the correct degree--and an admiration for pretty women, or, in the dialect of that day, for “female loveliness.” These tastes he bequeathed to his son, as also a certain tenacity of will, which, latent throughout the latter’s career, came to the surface in an astonishing way during the trials of his last years. This trait is amusingly illustrated in the senior Willis’s correspondence with his son by his allusions to an interminable litigation that he was carrying on in his eighty-fourth year. “I should have written you sooner,” he says, “but that Irishman, Garbrey, has sued me the _fourth_ time about that old drain which he dug up before my front door, in Atkinson Street, that we never knew before was there. He has lost his