THE POEMS, SACRED, PASSIONATE, AND HUMOROUS, OF NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS. NEW YORK: CLARK & MAYNARD, PUBLISHERS, No. 5 BARCLAY STREET. 1866. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by CLARK, AUSTIN, MAYNARD & CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District o New York. ELECTROTYPED BY SMITH & MCDOUGAL, 82 & 84 Beekman-st. ALVORD, PRINTER. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. HOM [THE publishers of the present volume, in compliance with usage and the now universal demand by the readers of poems, add hereto a sketch of the author's life. It is taken from a brief memoir written in Boston, in 1857, to illustrate a portrait of Mr. Willis, given in Ballou's Pictorial journal of that year.] * "Nathaniel Parker Willis was born in Portland, Maine, January 20, 1806, and is the son of the venerable Nathaniel Willis, who in 1816 founded the Boston Recorder-the first religious newspaper in the world—in this city. The future poet received an excellent preparatory education, principally at the Boston Latin School, and then entered Yale College, where he was graduated in 1827. Previously to this he had written and published anonymously some poems of great merit, chiefly of a religious character, and won a prize of fifty dollars--at that time a very liberal one-for the best poem, offered by one of the annuals. Soon after leaving college, Mr. Willis collected and published his poems in a volume, which attracted no little attention Some of the pieces in this collection are not unworthy to rank with the productions of the author's matured genius-the Burial of Arnold,' for instance, which stil frequently reappears in literary journals, and is always read with pleasure. The poems in blank verse on Scrip tural themes, were also deservedly popular from the brilliancy of the images, the melody of the versification and the lofty devotional feeling they breathed. "Mr. Willis's tastes and talents induced him, instead of studying a profession, to devote himself to literature af a pursuit, and soon after his graduation, he assumed the editorship of the 'Legendary,' a series of volumes of tales published by S. G. Goodrich. He next established in this city the American Monthly Magazine, and ra lied around it a circle of talented contributors, whom he inspired with his own ambition and zeal. To the pages of this work he contributed may brilliant papers |