A Little Book of Western Verse | Page 5

loveliness of a beautiful landscape, but as he would
share it intellectually with his readers so it was a necessity that he could
not seek it alone as an actuality. In his boyhood, in the full glory of a
perfect day, he loved to ramble through the woods and meadows, and
delighted in the azure tints of the far-away Berkshire hills; and later in
life he was keen to notice and admire the soft harmonies of landscape,
but with a change in weather or with the approach of a storm the poet
would be lost in the timidity and distrust of a child.

Companionship with him meant cheerfulness. His horror of gloom and
darkness was almost morbid. From the tragedies of life he instinctively
shrank, and large as was his sympathy, and generous and genuine his
affection, he was often prompted to run from suffering and to betray
what must have been a constitutional terror of distress. He did not
hesitate to acknowledge this characteristic, and sought to atone for it by
writing the most tender and touching lines to those to whom he
believed he owed a gift of comfort and strength. His private letters to
friends in adversity or bereavement were beautiful in their simplicity
and honest and outspoken love, for he was not ashamed to let his
friends see how much he thought of them. And even if the emotional
quality, which asserts itself in the nervous and artistic temperament,
made him realize that he could not trust himself, that same quality gave
him a personality marvelous in its magnetism. Both as boy and man he
made friends everywhere, and that he retained them to the last speaks
for the whole-heartedness and genuineness of his nature.
To two weaknesses he frankly confessed: that he was inclined to be
superstitious and that he was afraid of the dark. One of these he stoutly
defended, asserting that he who was not fearful in the dark was a dull
clod, utterly devoid of imagination. From his earliest childhood my
brother was a devourer of fairy tales, and he continually stored his mind
with fantastic legends, which found a vent in new shapes in his verses
and prose tales. In the ceiling of one of his dens a trap-door led into the
attic, and as this door was open he seriously contemplated closing it,
because, as he said, he fancied that queer things would come down in
the night and spirit him away. It is not to be inferred that he thus
remained in a condition of actual fear, but it is true that he was
imaginative to the degree of acute nervousness, and, like a child,
associated light with safety and darkness with the uncanny and the
supernatural. It was after all the better for his songs that it was so, else
they might not have been filled with that cheery optimism which
praised the happiness of sunlight and warmth, and sought to lift
humanity from the darkness of despondency.
This weakness, or intellectual virtue as he pleasantly regarded it, was
perhaps rather stronger in him as a man than in his boyhood. He has

himself declared that he wrote "Seein' Things at Night" more to solace
his own feelings than to delineate the sufferings of childhood, however
aptly it may describe them. And when he put into rhythm that "any
color, so long as it's red, is the color that suits me best," he spoke not
only as a poet but as a man, for red conveyed to him the idea of warmth
and cheeriness, and seemed to express to him in color his
temperamental demand. All through his life he pandered to these
feelings instead of seeking to repress them, for to this extent there was
little of the Puritan in his nature, and as he believed that happiness
comes largely from within, so he felt that it is not un-Christian
philosophy to avoid as far as possible whatever may cloud and render
less acceptable one's own existence.
The literary talent of my brother is not easily traceable to either branch
of the family. In fact it was tacitly accepted that he would be a lawyer
as his father and grandfather had been before him, but the futility of
this arrangement was soon manifest, and surely no man less
temperamentally equipped for the law ever lived. It has been said of the
Fields, speaking generally of the New England division, that they were
well adapted to be either musicians or actors, though the talent for
music or mimicry has been in no case carried out of private life save in
my brother's public readings. Eugene had more than a boy's share of
musical talent, but he never cultivated it, preferring to use the fine
voice with which he was endowed