C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction
By Eugene Field (18501895)
E
Returning to St. Louis he became engaged in journalism, and was connected with various newspapers in St. Louis, St. Joseph, Kansas City, and Denver, until he finally settled in Chicago. Through his tales and poems he acquired popularity, and in addition to his labors as a journalist and poet he became a favorite lecturer. Of his love of curios his brother says:—
“For years he had been an indefatigable collector, and he took a boyish pleasure not only in his souvenirs of long journeys and distinguished men and women, but in the queer toys and trinkets of children, which seemed to give him inspiration for much that was effective in childhood verse. To the careless observer the immense array of weird dolls and absurd toys in his working-room meant little more than an idiosyncratic passion for the anomalous, but those who were near to him knew what a connecting link they were between him and little children, of whom he wrote, and how each trumpet and drum, each ‘spinster doll,’ each little toy dog, each little tin soldier, played its part in the poems he sent out into the world.”
He was extremely fond of children, and some of his best poetry was written on themes that interest childhood. His numerous lullabies have been set to music by several American composers. He was a devoted student of Horace, from whom he made many translations. Some of these are included in ‘Echoes from a Sabine Farm,’ which he wrote with his brother, Roswell Martin Field, and which was published soon after his death, which took place in Chicago, November 4th, 1895. His last books were ‘My House’ and ‘The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac,’ a series of essays on literary subjects, interspersed with short poems. His other publications include: ‘A Little Book of Western Verse’; ‘A Little Book of Profitable Tales’; ‘Love Songs of Childhood’; ‘A Second Book of Verse’; and ‘The Holy Cross and Other Tales,’ the initial story of which has for its theme the death of the Wandering Jew upon the mountain of the Holy Cross. A complete edition of Field’s works (10 vols., New York, 1896) is enriched with critical and personal estimates of the man and the writer by Joel Chandler Harris, Julian Hawthorne, E. E. Hale, Francis Wilson, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Mr. Stedman says:—