In the years immediately before the death of Mrs. James T. Fields, on January 5, 1915, she spoke to me more than once of her intention to place in my possession a cabinet of old papers—journals of her own, letters from a host of correspondents, odds and ends of manuscript and print—which stood in a dark corner of a small reception-room near the front door of her house in Charles Street, Boston. On her death this intention was found to have been confirmed in writing. It was also made clear that M

The fact that Henry James, in “The American Scene,” published in 1907, and again in an article which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” and the “Cornhill Magazine” in July, 1915, has set down in his own ultimate words his memories of Mrs. Fields and her Boston abode would be the despair of anyone attempting a similar task—were it not that quotation remains an unprohibited practice. In “The American Scene” he evokes from the past “the Charles Street ghosts,” and gives them their local habitation:

If any familiar face should appear at the front of the procession that constantly crossed the threshold of 148, Charles Street, it should be that of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for many years a near neighbor, and to the end of his life a devoted visitor and friend. Here, then, is an unpublished letter written from his summer retreat while Fields was still actively associated with the “Old Corner Bookstore” of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, and in the year before his marriage with Annie Adams:— Pittsf

The volumes in which Mrs. Fields brought to light many passages from her journals stand as red and black buoys marking the channel through which the navigator of these pages must steer his course if he is to avoid the rocks and shoals of the previously published. In her books it was but natural that she should deal most freely with those august figures in American letters who so towered above their contemporaries as to attach the longer and more portentous adjective “Augustan” to the circle form

When Mrs. Fields wrote the “Personal Recollections” of Oliver Wendell Holmes which appear in her “Authors and Friends,” she quoted, with a few changes prompted by modesty, this passage from a letter received from him at Christmas, 1881: “Except a few of my immediate family connections, no friends have seen me so often as a guest as did you and your husband. Under your roof I have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. But for your hospitality I should never have had the privile

Had anyone crossed the Charles Street threshold of the Fieldses with the expectation of encountering within none but the New England Augustans, he would soon have found himself happily disillusioned, even at a time when there was no Dickens in Boston. As it was in reality, so must it be in these pages, if they are to fulfill their purpose of restoring a vanished scene, the variety of which must indeed be counted among its most distinctive characteristics. The pages that follow will accordingly s

Such a statement about Mrs. Fields as that she “was to survive her husband many years and was to flourish as a copious second volume—the connection licenses the figure—of the work anciently issued,” almost identifies itself, without remark, as proceeding from the same friend, Henry James, whose words have colored a previous chapter of this book. The many years to which he referred were, indeed, nearly thirty-four in number, about a third of a century, or what is commonly counted a generation. Fo