[1] A Shelf of Old Books, by Mrs. Fields (1894), pictures many aspects of the house and its contents.

[2] About two months later, Mrs. Fields wrote in her diary: “Emerson says Hawthorne’s book is ‘pellucid but not deep.’ He has cut out the dedication and letter, as others have done.”

[3] The greater part of this chapter appeared in the Yale Review for April, 1918.

[4] George Tyler Bigelow, of the Harvard Class of 1829.

[5] Harvard festivals were frequently noted. After the great day on which Lowell gave his Commemoration Ode, Mrs. Fields wrote (July 22, 1865): “What an ever-memorable day, the one at Harvard! The prayer of Phillips Brooks, the ode of Lowell, the address of Dr. Putnam and the Governor, and the heartfelt verses of Holmes, and the lovely music and the hymns. But Lowell’s Ode!! How it overtops the whole of what is preserved on paper beside! Charles G. Loring presided. ‘Awkwardly enough done,’ said O. W. H.; ‘It is a delicate thing to introduce a poet, he should be delivered to the table as a falconer delivers the falcon into the air, but Mr. Loring puts you down hard on the table—ca-chunk.’”

[6] This anecdote of the revision of The Last Leaf, written in 1831, is told a little differently in the annotations of Holmes’s Complete Works.

[7] See Yesterdays with Authors, p. 98, and The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers, p. 46.

[8] The Dolliver Romance.

[9] Fields drew upon this paragraph for one in Yesterdays with Authors, p. 112.

[10] Only a month after making this entry, Mrs. Fields wrote in her journal: “A note came from Longfellow saying he had received a sad note from Hawthorne. ‘I wish we could have a little dinner for him,’ he says, ‘of two sad authors and two jolly publishers—nobody else.’”

[11] In Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Memories of Hawthorne the relation between the two households is indicated in a sentence containing the nicknames of Mr. and Mrs. Fields: “My father also tasted the piquant flavors of merriment and luxury in this exquisite domicile of Heart’s-Ease and Mrs. Meadows.”

[12] Thoreau’s younger sister.

[13] In 1865 Alcott printed privately and anonymously the essay, Emerson, which appeared later in his acknowledged volume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an Estimate of his Character and Genius (Boston, 1882). This was evidently The Rhapsodist.

[14] Thoreau’s older sister.

[15] Josiah Phillips Quincy.

[16] An allusion to the controversy over the claims of Dr. Jackson and Dr. Morton to the discovery of ether.

[17] Daughter of the Rev. William Henry Furness, of Philadelphia, and translator of German novels.

[18] One of Lowell’s reminiscences at the Saturday Club, recorded two years earlier by Mrs. Fields, suggests his essential youthfulness of spirit. Apropos of a story told by Dr. Holmes, “Lowell said that reminded him of experiments the boys at his school used to make on flies, to see how much weight they could carry. One day he attached a thread, which he pulled out of his silk handkerchief, to a fly’s leg, and to the other end a bit of paper with ‘the master is a fool’ written on it in small distinct letters. The fly flew away and lighted on the master’s nose; but he, regardless of all but the lessons, brushed him off, and the fly rose with his burden to the ceiling.”

[19] After an evening of high discussion at Mrs. Howe’s in an earlier year, Mrs. Fields wrote in her journal (October 4, 1863): “The talk grew deep, and after it was over, she [Mrs. Howe] recalled the saying of Mrs. Bell, after a like evening, when she called for ‘a fat idiot.’”

[20] If Mrs. Fields had lived to see The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston, 1918), she would have found that I drew from the notes in her own diary a large portion of the memoir of James T. Fields which it contains.

[21] This was in the midst of Aldrich’s occupancy of Elmwood, during Lowell’s two years’ absence in Europe.

[22] The greater part of this chapter appeared in Harper’s Magazine for May and June, 1922.

[23] A few passages from it, relating to Dickens, are included in James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches. When they are occasionally repeated here, it is in their original form, and not as Mrs. Fields edited them for publication.

[24] On this very day Lowell wrote in the course of a letter to Fields: “James tells me you had a tremendous queue this morning. Don’t fail to get me tickets, and for the first night. I should like to see his reception. It will leave a picture on the brain. And why should I not be there to welcome him, as well as Tom, Dick, or Harry?”

[25] Even after Dickens’s return to England, his sayings found their way into Mrs. Fields’s journal; as, for example:—

“July 4, 1868.—J. made me laugh this morning (it was far too hot to laugh) by telling me that Dickens said of Gray, the poet, ‘No man ever walked down to posterity with so small a book under his arm!’”

[26] See Forster’s Life, III, 368, for the same story told by Dickens in a letter to Lord Lytton, without naming Longfellow as the narrator.

[27] In Yesterdays with Authors (see pp. 230-31), Fields made use, with revisions and omissions, of this portion of his wife’s diary.

[28] Mrs. Stowe’s unhappily historic article on “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1869.

[29] On April 20, 1870, Longfellow wrote to Fields (See Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, etc., edited by Samuel Longfellow, III, 148):—

“Some English poet has said or sung:

“I wish Hamlet would be still! I wish I could prove the sweets of forgetfulness! I wish Fechter would depart into infinite space, and ‘leave, oh, leave me to repose!’ When will this disturbing star disappear, and suffer the domestic planetary system to move on in the ordinary course and keep time with the old clock in the corner?”

[30] A contemporary definition of Cincinnati.

[31] Dr. J. Baxter Upham, the moving spirit in the building of the Music Hall and the installation of the organ. He presided at its dedication.

[32] See ante, page 111.

[33] “A Newport Romance,” published in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1871.

[34] Probably Gabriel Conroy and Two Men of Sandy Bar.

[35] See The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers, pp. 73-75.