took part against the Nullifiers.  His miscellaneous writings include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines.  He also wrote numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was Atlantis, a Story of the Sea, 1832.  His poems have little value except as here and there illustrating local scenery and manners, as in Southern Passages and Pictures, 1839.  Mr. John Esten Cooke’s pleasant but not very strong Virginia Comedians was, perhaps, in literary quality the best Southern novel produced before the civil war.

When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N. P. Willis, one of the editors of the Evening Mirror, upon which journal Poe was for a time engaged.  Willis had made a literary reputation, when a student at Yale, by his Scripture Poems, written in smooth blank verse.  Afterward he had edited the American Monthly in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published Pencillings by the Way, 1835, a pleasant record of European saunterings; Inklings of Adventure, 1836, a collection of dashing stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and Letters from Under a Bridge, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna.  Willis’s work, always graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of popularity.  During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the Mirror and its successor, the Home Journal, which catered to the literary wants of the beau monde.  Much of Willis’s work was ephemeral, though clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as F.  Smith, The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, Edith Linsey, and the Lunatic’s Skate, together with some of the Letters from Under a Bridge, are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but as society studies of life at American watering-places like Nahant and Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago.  A number of his simpler poems, like Unseen Spirits, Spring, To M——­ from Abroad, and Lines on Leaving Europe, still retain a deserved place in collections and anthologies.