An American publisher and author; born in Portsmouth, N. H., Dec. 31, 1816; died in Boston, Mass., April 24, 1881. The various publishing firms of which he was partner, with Ticknor, Osgood and others, were of the first rank. He edited the Atlantic Monthly in 1862–70; and was an acceptable lecturer on literary subjects and authors. He published: “Poems” (1849); “A Few Verses for a Few Friends” (1858); “Yesterdays with Authors” (1872); “Hawthorne” (1875); “Old Acquaintance: Barry Cornwall and Some of his Friends” (1875); “In and Out of Doors with Dickens” (1876); “Underbrush” (1881), essays; “Ballads and Other Verses” (1881); and (with Edwin P. Whipple) edited “The Family Library of British Poetry” (1878).

Personal

  I have just heard of the sudden death of my friend Mr. Fields,… and now we all ask, What has he left of all his life’s accumulations? Houses, lands, pictures, literary reputation, all that gone—dreams, things of the past. Had he any treasure laid up in Heaven? I think from my remembrance of him that he had just what Jesus meant by treasure laid up in Heaven. He had a habit of quiet benevolence; he did habitually and quietly more good to everybody he had to do with than common. He favored with all his powers charitable work, and such habits as these are, I think, what Christ meant by laying up treasure in Heaven…. I find many traces of childlike faith in his last pieces…. When a friend is gone to the great hereafter how glad we are that he did believe.

  The conversation of Fields had, even in his boyhood, the two charms of friendliness and inventiveness. The audacities of his humor spared neither solemn respectabilities nor accredited reputations; yet in his intercourse with his friends his wildest freaks of satire never inflicted a wound. His sensitive regard for the feelings of those with whom he mingled was a marvel of that tact which is the offspring of good nature as well as of good sense. When he raised a laugh at the expense of one of his companions, the laugh was always heartily enjoyed and participated in by the object of his mirth; for, indulging to the top of his bent in every variety of witty mischief, he had not in his disposition the least alloy of witty malice.

  Into the darkest hour of my life he came giving light and hope. I can never forget it. Turning to him first because I found help in him—how much else I found! Only those who knew him nearly knew his goodness and his greatness.

  How much better he left this world than he found it! How many a heart was made lighter, happier, each year of his manhood all men know. This vast West world is a great deal better and wiser because he has been. Think how few can have this said of us when all is over, work with all endeavor as we may! To me Mr. Fields’s life seemed the most rounded and perfect of all men’s I ever met. Very beautiful he seemed to me in soul and body, and people loved him truly.

  I shall feel that I was under great obligations to him at a most important time in my life. He was the best and most sympathetic literary counselor I ever had; and I had much opportunity to observe his constant kindnesses to others.

  How many writers know, as I have known, his value as a literary counselor and friend! His mind was as hospitable as his roof, which has accepted famous visitors and quiet friends alike as if it had been their own. From a very early period in my own life of authorship, I have looked to Mr. Fields as one who would be sure to take an interest in whatever I wrote, to let me know all that he could learn about my writings which would please and encourage me, and keep me in heart for new efforts. And what I can say for myself many and many another can say with equal truth. Very rarely, if ever, has a publisher enjoyed the confidence and friendship of so wide and various a circle of authors. And so when he came to give the time to authorship, which had always for many years been devoted to literature, he found a listening and reading public waiting for him and welcoming him.

  His No was as the refusal of Mount Washington to slide down into Casco Bay. I never met a man whose pivot, in a life that seemed to turn so easily, lay deeper in the cup. His good-will to men, his laughter-loving heart, his quaint and curious fancies, and his faculty for glassing all the lights and shadows of a company or a day, made it easy for those who did not know him wholly to imagine he was only what he seemed. He was a man with solemn and sacred deeps of conviction and character such as one seldom finds;—a man with “A correspondence fixed wi’ heaven.” The kindly and sunny heart was strong and sure as the pillars of the world. I have known no man in all my life I could tie to with a more absolute conviction that the rock and ring would hold, no matter about the strain.

  My individual debt to Mr. Fields, in respect to my own work, is one which I cannot and would not omit to acknowledge. He often helped me about my titles, and one of the best ever given to any book of mine—“Men, Women, and Ghosts”—was of his creation. In his fine literary judgment I had great confidence, and would have accepted almost any criticism from him trustfully…. His was a rich life, and his a rare home. There has been no other in America quite like it. Those of us who received its hospitality recall its inspiration among the treasures of our lives. We think of the peaceful library into which the sunset over the Charles looked delicately, while the “best things” of thought were given and taken by the finest and strongest minds of the day in a kind of electric interplay, which makes by contrast a pale affair of the word conversation as we are apt to use it. We recall the quiet guest-chamber, apart from the noise of the street, and lifted far above the river; that room opulent and subtle with the astral shapes of past occupants,—Longfellow, Whittier, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Stowe, Kingsley, and the rest of their high order,—and always resounding softly to the fine ear with the departed tread of Hawthorne, who used to pace the floor on sleepless nights. We remember the separation from paltriness, and from superficial adjustments, which that scholarly and gentle atmosphere commanded. We remember the master of their abode of thought and graciousness, as “Dead, he lay among his books;” and wish that we had it in our power to portray him as he was.

General

  His writings are distinguished for a natural simplicity and elegance, and generally relate to rural or domestic subjects.

  The glimpses of private life [“Yesterday’s with Authors”], the hints of conversation, and the numerous letters thus preserved, are exceedingly interesting, and Mr. Fields’s introductions and narratives are written with excellent haste and judgment. The accounts of Hawthorne and Dickens, in particular, are more delightful than any elaborate biography would be. The letters of Miss Mitford, which conclude the volume, are of less real value, as the kind-hearted lady seems to have looked at everything American through a Claude Lorraine glass, and her constant gush of admiration and affection lessens the value of her opinions.

  In his few poems he shows a delicate fancy and a fine lyrical vein.

  It is not as a literary man, but as a publisher, that Mr. Fields is likely to be remembered. As a lecturer, he was successful mainly because he had already created an audience which was ready and waiting to welcome him. In the same way, subjects were ready to his hand, and he had a gift of expression sufficient to meet the by no means lofty standard of ordinary lecture-audiences. As a publisher, he was one of the first men in this country to see what all successful publishers now recognize as a fact, that the great secret of success in the trade lies in playing the part of a benefactor to men of letters. It is only in the present century that this new type of publisher, of which Mr. Fields was a distinguished instance, has become common or even known…. He was neither a scholar nor a genius, nor was he, as he seems himself to have thought, a humorist, although he had a keen enjoyment and appreciation of humor which brought him to the point of successful imitation; but he was in private life a thoroughly good companion—amusing, cheerful, vivacious, an excellent storyteller, with an immense fund of anecdote. He had, too, the invaluable art of making those with whom he was thrown as much at their ease as he was himself, being able to lead or follow in conversation.

  My dear Mr. James Fields was noted for his goodness to authors, and to him I not only am indebted for numerous delightful letters, but also for treasured gifts of his own poems and essays, his charming “Yesterdays with Authors,” and his “Letter to Leigh Hunt in Elysium,” written in a style remarkably akin to the playful spirit of Leigh Hunt’s own manner.