[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.