What delightful hosts are they—
Life and Love!
Lingeringly I turn away,
This late hour, yet glad enough
They have not withheld from me
Their high hospitality.
So, with face lit with delight
And all gratitude, I stay
Yet to press their hands and say,
“Thanks.—So fine a time! Good night.”
_Eugene Field_
Although born (September 3, 1850) in St. Louis, Missouri, Eugene
Field belongs to the literature of the far West. Colorado and the
Rocky Mountain region claimed him as their own and Field never
repudiated the allegiance; he even called most of his poetry
“Western Verse.”
Field’s area of education embraced New England, Missouri, and what
European territory he could cover in six months. At twenty-three he
became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening Journal_, the rest of
his life being given, with a dogged devotion, to journalism. Driven
by the demands of his unique daily columns (those on the Denver
_Tribune_ [1881–1883] and the Chicago _Daily News_ [1883–1895] were
widely copied), Field first capitalized and then standardized his
high spirits, his erudition, his whimsicality, his fondness for
children. He wrote so often with his tongue in his cheek that it is
difficult to say where true sentiment stops and an exaggerated
sentimentality begins. “Field,” says Fred Lewis Pattee, in his
detailed study of _American Literature Since 1870_, “more than any
other writer of the period, illustrates the way the old type of
literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper.
Every scrap of Field’s voluminous product was written for immediate
newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary
magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made
them up from newspaper fragments.... He was a pioneer in a peculiar
province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process
that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of
letters a mere newspaper reporter.”
Though Field still may be overrated in some quarters, there is
little doubt that certain of his child lyrics, his homely
philosophic ballads (in the vein which Harte and Riley popularized)
and his brilliant burlesques will occupy a niche in American
letters. Readers of all tastes will find much to surprise and
delight them in _A Little Book of Western Verse_ (1889), _With
Trumpet and Drum_ (1892), _A Second Book of Verse_ (1893) and those
remarkable versions (and perversions) of Horace, _Echoes from the
Sabine Farm_ (1893) written in collaboration with his equally adroit
brother, Roswell M. Field. A complete one-volume edition of his
verse was issued in 1910.
Field died in Chicago, Illinois, November 4, 1895.