November, 1861
. . . Lecturing in Chelsea last night, I spent the night at
their [the Fields] house in Boston for the first time. . . . Nothing could be
pleasanter, more hospitable, and more entertaining than the bibliopole himself.
Such treasures as that house is crammed with. Most of the books there described
I saw and some not mentioned; as, for instance, a Greek book, marked in the
title-page “Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt,” in the latter's hand, but the blank
leaves full of Shelley's notes in pencil-writing, delicate as himself. The
Wordsworth volumes were captivating, with his own later alterations put in with
ink in the neatest way, and showing the delicacy of his literary work. They
have the original engravings from Sir George Beaumont, giving the actual scenes
of “Lucy Gray,” “Peter Bell,” and other poems. Fields described Wordsworth's
reading of his own poems in old age, quite grandly, and his reading Tennyson
aloud also with equal impressiveness; and turning on a silly lady too profuse
in her praise of passages, with “You admire it? But do you understand it?”
A long parlor, in a house on Charles Street like Louise's,
looking on the beautiful river at full tide, and crowded from end to end with
books and pictures. Beautiful engravings of great men, framed with an autograph
below — Addison with a note to a friend to meet him at the Fountain
Tavern; Pope, with a receipt for a subscription to the Iliad; Dickens,
Tennyson, Scott, Washington, etc., each with an original note or manuscript
below. An original drawing of Keats by Severn, his artist friend, in whose arms
he died; given to Fields by Severn, as was also a lovely little oil painting of
Ariel on the bat's back. Two superb photographs, of a wild, grand face, more
like Professor Peirce than any one, with high, powerful brow, long face, masses
of tangled hair, and full black beard; they might be a gipsy or a wandering
painter or Paganini, or anything weird — and they are Tennyson.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 102-3
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