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At a dinner where the talk glanced upon Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief.
Fields's thoughtful note reached the Andover post-office, that miracle of which we read often in fiction, and sometimes in literary history, touched the young writer's life; and it began over again, as a new form of organization. As I look back upon them, the next few years seem to have been a series of amazing phantasmagoria. Indeed, at the time, they were scarcely more substantial.
We went at once to Fields's house on Charles Street, where Mrs. Fields gave Julian the little information already known to them through a dispatch from Franklin Pierce, that his father died during his sleep in the night of May 18, at the Pemmigewasset House, Plymouth, New Hampshire. After this we wandered about Boston, silent and aimless, until the afternoon train carried him to Concord.
It would be both an endless and unprofitable task to recall more of the curious experiences which popularity brought down upon him. There is a passage among Mr. Fields's notes, however, in which he describes an incident during Longfellow's last visit to England, which should not be overlooked.
Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 18mo. The author of these poems is Robert Bulwer Lytton, the son of the eminent novelist. Though still very young, he has reached the honor of being arrayed in Ticknor and Fields's "blue and gold," the paradisiacal condition of contemporary poets; and his works occupy, in words, though not in matter, as much space as Tennyson's.
After she had thrown two towels, the soap and her own small tooth brush back into the tub from which she had lately emerged, and which Charlotte had not yet emptied, she found her means of entertainment at an end. The other toilet articles were all beyond her reach. She gazed out of the window; there was nothing moving to be seen but a row of Mrs. Fields's dish-towels waving in the wind.
I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the office of the 'Nation' newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr. Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last.
I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian. I do not know what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities.
Una and Julian went to the Emersons' in the evening. Read again "Leamington Spa." Inimitable, fascinating. Thanksgiving Day. We invited Ellery Channing, but he could not come. Julian and I went to Boston. When I came home I found my husband looking very ill. Julian has gone on a visit to the Fields's. My husband quite ill. Everything seems sad, when he is ill. I sewed all day.
"Then it looks like you for the mountains to-night instead of for Weber and Fields's," retorted Bucks, reaching for a cigar. "Brown, why have you never learned to smoke?" No attempt was made to minimize the truth that the blow to the division was a staggering one. The loss of Smoky Creek Bridge put almost a thousand miles of the mountain division out of business.
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