A Little Book of Western Verse | Page 4

would go into the yard and expostulate with
them in a tone of friendly reproach, whereupon, the family affirms,
they would apparently apologize and fly away. Once he maintained at
considerable expense a thoroughly hopeless and useless donkey, and it
was his custom, when returning from the office at any hour of the night,
to go into the back yard and say "Poor old Don" in a bass voice that
carried a block away, whereupon old Don would lift up his own voice

with a melancholy bray of welcome that would shake the windows and
start the neighbors from their slumbers. Old Don is passing his
declining years in an "Old Kentucky home," and the robins and the blue
jays as they return with the spring will look in vain for the friend who
fed them at the window.
The family dog at Amherst, which was immortalized many years later
with "The Bench-Legged Fyce," and which was known in his day to
hundreds of students at the college on account of his surpassing lack of
beauty, rejoiced originally in the honest name of Fido, but my brother
rejected this name as commonplace and unworthy, and straightway
named him "Dooley" on the presumption that there was something
Hibernian in his face. It was to Dooley that he wrote his first poem, a
parody on "O Had I Wings Like a Dove," a song then in great vogue.
Near the head of the village street was the home of the Emersons, a
large frame house, now standing for more than a century, and in the
great yard in front stood the magnificent elms which are the glory of
the Connecticut valley. Many times the boys, returning from school,
would linger to cool off in the shade of these glorious trees, and it was
on one of these occasions that my brother put into the mouth of Dooley
his maiden effort in verse:
O had I wings like a dove I would fly,
Away from this world of fleas;

I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard,
And light on Miss Emerson's
trees.
Even this startling parody, which was regarded by the boys as a
veritable stroke of genius, failed to impress the adult villagers with the
conviction that a poet was budding. Yet how much of quiet humor and
lively imagination is betrayed by these four lines. How easy it is now to
look back at the small boy and picture him sympathizing with his little
friend tormented by the heat and the pests of his kind, and making him
sigh for the rest that seemed to lurk in the rustling leaves of the stately
elms. Perhaps it was not astonishing poetry even for a child, but was
there not something in the fancy, the sentiment, and the rhythm which
bespoke far more than ordinary appreciation? Is it not this same quality
of alert and instinctive sympathy which has run through Eugene Field's

writings and touched the spring of popular affection?
Dooley went to the dog heaven many years ago. Finnikin and Poog and
Boog and the scores of boyhood friends that followed them have
passed to their Pythagorean reward; but the boy who first found in them
the delight of companionship and the kindlings of imagination retained
all the youthful impulses which made him for nearly half a century the
lover of animal life and the gentle singer of the faithful and the good.
Comradeship was the indispensable factor in my brother's life. It was
strong in his youth; it grew to be an imperative necessity in later years.
In the theory that it is sometimes good to be alone he had little or no
faith. Even when he was at work in his study, when it was almost
essential to thought that he should be undisturbed, he was never quite
content unless aware of the presence of human beings near at hand, as
betrayed by their voices. It is customary to think of a poet wandering
off in the great solitudes, standing alone in contemplation of the
wonderful work of nature, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, in the
paths of the forest or on the mountain side. My brother was not of this
order. That he was primarily and essentially a poet of humanity and not
of nature does not argue that he was insensible to natural beauty or
natural grandeur. Nobody could have been more keenly susceptible to
the influences of nature in their temperamental effect, and perhaps this
may explain that he did not love nature the less but that he prized
companionship more. If nature pleased him he longed for a friend to
share his pleasure; if it appalled him he turned from it with repugnance
and fear.
Throughout his writings may be found the most earnest appreciation of
the joyousness and