For nearly six years Mrs. Fields survived Miss Jewett, bereaved as by the loss of half her personal world, yet indomitable of spirit and energy, so long as her physical forces would permit any of the old accustomed exercises of hospitality and friendship. The selection and publication of Miss Jewett’s letters was a labor of love which continued the sense of companionship for the first two of the remaining years. Through the four others there was a failing of bodily strength, though not at all of mental and spiritual eagerness; and in her outward mien through all the later years, there was that which must have recalled to many the ancient couplet:—
No Spring, nor summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
Towards the end there was a brief return to the keeping of a sporadic diary. Its final words, written January 25, 1913, were these: “The days go on cheerfully. I have just read Mark Twain’s life, the life of a man who had greatness in him. I am now reading his ‘Joan of Arc.’ I hope to wait as cheerfully as he did for the trumpet call and as usefully, but I am ready.”
When Mrs. Fields died and the Charles Street door was finally closed, at the beginning of 1915, the world had entered upon its first entire year of a new era. It is an era as sharply separated from that of her intimate contemporaries, the American Victorians, as any new from any old order. The figures of every old order take their places by degrees as “museum pieces,” objects of curious and sometimes condescending study. But let us not be too sure that in parting with the past we have let it keep only that which can best be spared. We would not wish them back, those Victorians of ours. They were the product of their own day, and would be hardly at ease—poor things—in our twentieth-century Zion. Even some of us who inhabit it gain a sense of rest in reëntering their quiet, decorous dwelling-places. As we emerge again from one of them, may it be with a renewed allegiance to those lasting “things that are more excellent,” which belong to every generation of civilized men and women.
FOOTNOTES
[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.”