Willis published three books while in England. “Melanie and Other Poems” appeared March 31, 1835. It was divided into three parts and included a selection from the three volumes of verse published in America, but unfamiliar to the British public, besides some half dozen new poems, dated, said the author, in his prefatory note, from “the corner of a club [the Travellers’] in the ungenial month of January.” It was introduced by Barry Cornwall, who speaks of the poet as “a man of high talent and sensibility,” and then goes on with some reflections of a friendly nature on American literature and the desirableness of cultivating kinder feelings between England and America. Wilson, who reviewed “Melanie” very favorably in “Blackwood’s,” made Procter’s introduction to it the theme of much elaborate ridicule, in the well-known style of “Maga,” when rending a cockney author. He affected to have gathered an impression from the title-page,--which described the poems as “edited” by Barry Cornwall,--that Willis was dead, and that Procter was performing the office of literary undertaker for “poor Willis’s remains.” “Alas! thought we, on reading this title-page; is Willis dead? Then America has lost one of the most promising of her young poets. We had seen him not many months before in high health and spirits and had much enjoyed his various and vivacious conversation.… But why weep for him, the accomplished acquaintance of an hour?” He goes out on the street and tells the first friend he meets that Willis is dead. “Impossible,” answers the friend; “day before yesterday he was sitting very much alive in the Athenæum Club: here is a letter from him franked Mahon,” etc. Another Scotch professor--Aytoun--who belonged, like Wilson, to the Tory light artillery, was moved to write a parody of “Melanie.” The same humorist also paid his respects to Willis in one of his “Ballads of Bon Gaultier,”--a strenuous piece of North British playfulness, in which Willis and Bryant are represented as sallying forth like knights errant on the Quest of the Snapping Turtle:-- “Have you heard of Philip Slingsby-- Slingsby of the manly chest? How he slew the snapping turtle In the regions of the west?” The two longest and most ambitious poems in this volume were “Melanie” and “Lord Ivon and his Daughter.” The first is the story “told during a walk around the cascatelles of Tivoli,” of an English girl, “the last of the De Brevern race,” who betroths herself in Italy to a young painter of unknown parentage; but at their bridal at St. Mona’s altar a nun shrieks through the lattice of the chapel:-- “The bridegroom is thy blood--thy brother! Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,” and the bride thereupon “sunk and died, without a sign or word.” The stanza and style are taken from Byron’s and Scott’s metrical romances. The very first line-- “I stood on yonder rocky brow”--