Dear Mr. Fields:—
The Corner sends me a book directed to me here, but on opening the outside wrapper I read “James T. Fields, Esq., Jamaica Plain, Boston, Mass.” The book, which is sealed up (or stuck up, like many authors), measures 7 × 5, nearly, and is presumably idiotic, like most books which are sent us without being ordered.
Perhaps you have received a similar package which on opening you found directed to O. W. Holmes, Esq., Peak of Teneriffe, Boston. If so, when the weather grows cool again and we can make up our minds to face the title page of the dreaded volume, we will make an exchange.
Always truly yours,
O. W. Holmes
The second letter, written ten years after Dr. Holmes, in moving from Charles to Beacon Street, had made the last of his “justifiable domicides,” strikes a more serious note, revealing that quality of true sympathy so closely joined in abundant natures with true humor. Mr. Fields had died in April of 1881, and Mrs. Fields had applied herself at once to the preparation of her volume, “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches,” drawing freely upon the diaries from which many of the foregoing pages, then passed over, are now taken. The performance of this loving labor must have done much towards the first filling of a life so grievously emptied. Already the intimate and beloved companionship of Miss Jewett had come into it.
294 Beacon St., November 16, 1881
My dear Mrs. Fields:—
I feel sure there will be but one voice with regard to your beautiful memorial volume. If I had any misgivings that you might find the delicate task too difficult—that you might be discouraged between the wish to draw a life-like picture and the fear of saying more than the public had a right to, these misgivings have all vanished, and I am sure your finished task leaves nothing to be regretted. As he was in life, he is in your loving but not overwrought story. I do not see how a life so full of wholesome activity and genuine human feeling could have been better pictured than it is in your pages. Long before I had finished reading your memoir in the proofs I had learned to trust you entirely as to the whole management of the work on which you had entered. All I feared was that your feelings might be overtasked, and that the dread of coming before the public when your whole heart was in the pages opened to its calm judgment might be more than you could bear.