"Every one who has a soul for poetry has read the scripture sketches. Hagar--Absalom--the sacrifice of Abraham--Zepthah's Daughter, are all the productions of a rich imagination. They have their faults, we allow, and so has another piece which he has called 'better moments,' and so with many others; but we will {89} take either and all of these, and will plead the splendor of his genius before any tribunal of taste under heaven. Willis's poems have passed through several editions. He also pronounced a fine poem before Brown University. But the fame of Willis, however proudly it may rest on his poetry, is still more widely diffused by his prose. "It was a cold morning in the winter of 1824-5, before sunrise, in a division room of Yale College, that Willis gave the first sample of that mellifluous prose which has since attracted such general admiration. He was then commencing his sophomore year; and the student, who had tried a freshman hand on the translations from the classics, was now called to essay an original composition. We were class-mates, but were not in the same division. It was not our good fortune, therefore, to hear his first composition; but we never can forget the merriment which it produced in college. If we mistake not, the theme of his first essay was the dilemma of an old man who had lost his wife; and was in sad perplexity about the plant which he ought to place at the head of her grave. One suggested that an oak sapling was best; but the old man contended that it would not in its infancy protect the grave from the sun and rain; and when it grew up, it would produce no good fruit, and would, moreover, with its spreading branches, _rot the shingles of his house_. Plant after plant, and tree after tree, were mentioned, the merits of which Willis scanned with great felicity of thought and language. At last, after a due reflection on the useful and the becoming, the old man resolved to plant a _cabbage_ on the grave of his wife. The cold blooded critic, who delights to fasten his fangs on rising merit, may pronounce the theme a very unfit subject for merriment; but fellows of eighteen are no philosophers; and we doubt whether any composition read within the walls of old Yale, ever produced such a happy effect as the one we have just noticed.