Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Louisa Storrow Higginson, July 1861

You ask about the “Atlantic” — Fields will edit it, which is a great thing for the magazine; he having the promptness and business qualities which Lowell signally wanted; for instance, my piece about Theodore Parker lay nearly two months under a pile of anonymous manuscripts in his study while he was wondering that it did not arrive. Fields's taste is very good and far less crotchety than Lowell's, who strained at gnats and swallowed camels, and Fields is always casting about for good things, while Lowell is rather disposed to sit still and let them come. It was a torment to deal with Lowell and it is a real pleasure with Fields. For instance, the other day Antoinette Brown Blackwell sent me a very pleasing paper on the proper treatment of old age — called “A Plea for the Afternoon.” I sent it to Fields by express and it reached him after twelve one noon (I don't know how many hours after). At seven that night I received it again by express, with Approval and excellent suggestions as to some modifications. . . . Such promptness never was known in a magazine; it would have been weeks or months before L. would have got to it.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 111-2