I said farewell and—kept you here.
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
It was not strange that the writer of just such a poem should have seemed to Fields, before his death in 1881, the ideal friend to fill the impending gap in the life of his wife. He must have known that, when the time should come for readjusting herself to life without him, she would need something more than random contacts with friends, no matter how rewarding each such relationship might be. He must have realized that the intensely personal element in her nature would require an outlet through an intensely personal devotion. If he could have foreseen the relation that grew up between Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett—her junior by about fifteen years—almost immediately upon his death, and continued throughout the life of the younger friend, he would surely have felt a great security of satisfaction in what was yet to be. In all her personal manifestations, and in all her work, Miss Jewett embodied a quality of distinction, a quality of the true aristophile,—to employ a term which has seemed to me before to fit that small company of lovers of the best to which these ladies preëminently belonged,—that made them foreordained companions. To Mrs. Fields it meant much to stand in a close relation—apart from all considerations of a completely uniting friendship—with such an artist as Miss Jewett, to feel that through sympathy and encouragement she was furthering a true and permanent contribution to American letters. To Miss Jewett, whose life, before this intimacy began, had been led almost entirely in the Maine village of her birth,—a village of dignity and high traditions that were her own inheritance,—there came an extension of interests and stimulating contacts through finding herself a frequent member of another household than her own, and that a very nucleus of quickening human intercourse. To pursue her work of writing chiefly at South Berwick, to come to Boston, or Manchester, for that freshening of the spirit which the creative writer so greatly needs, and there to find the most sympathetic and devoted of friends, also much occupied herself with the writing of books and with all commerce of vital thoughts—what could have afforded a more delightful arrangement of life?
THE LIBRARY IN CHARLES STREET; MRS. FIELDS AT THE WINDOW, MISS JEWETT AT THE RIGHT
Even as early as 1881, the year of Fields’s death, Miss Jewett published the fourth of her many books, “Country By-Ways,” preceded by “Deephaven” (1877), “Play Days” (1878), and “Old Friends and New” (1879). From 1881 onward her production was constant and abundant. In 1881 also began a period of remarkable productiveness on the part of Mrs. Fields. In that very year of her husband’s death she published both her “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches,” and a second edition of “Under the Olive,” a small volume in which she had brought together in 1880 a number of poems in which the influence of the Greek and English poets is sometimes manifested—notably in “Theocritus”—to excellent purpose. If Mrs. Fields had been a poet of distinctive power, the fact would long ago have established itself. To make any such claim for her at this late day would be to depart from the purpose of this book. It was for the most part rather as a friend than as a daughter of the Muses that she turned to verse, the medium of utterance for so many of that nest of singing-birds in which her life was passed. In 1883 came her little volume “How to Help the Poor,” representing an interest in the less fortunate which prepared her to become one of the founders of the Associated Charities of Boston, kept her long active and influential in the service of that organization, and made her at the last one of its generous benefactors. In 1895 and 1900, respectively, appeared two more volumes of verse, “The Singing Shepherd and Other Poems,” assembling the work of earlier and later years, and “Orpheus, a Masque,” each strongly touched, like “Under the Olive,” with the Grecian spirit. From “The Singing Shepherd” I cannot resist quoting one of the best things it contains—a sonnet, “Flammantis Mœnia Mundi,” under which, in my own copy of the book, I find the penciled note, written probably more than twenty years ago: “Mrs. Fields tells me that this sonnet came to her complete, one may almost say; standing on her feet she made it, but for one or two small changes, just as it is, in about fifteen minutes.”
I stood alone in purple space and saw
The burning walls of the world, like wings of flame,
Circling the sphere; there was no break nor flaw