. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. I heard it from our leading bookseller, andI made no question of it myself. After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, andI lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf toshelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight ofauthors copies, and vohmies invaluable with the auto-graphs and the pencilled notes of the men whose nameswere dear to me from my love of their work. Every-where was some souvenir of the living celebrities myhosts had met; and whom had they not met in thatEnglish sojourn in days b
. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. I heard it from our leading bookseller, andI made no question of it myself. After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, andI lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf toshelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight ofauthors copies, and vohmies invaluable with the auto-graphs and the pencilled notes of the men whose nameswere dear to me from my love of their work. Every-where was some souvenir of the living celebrities myhosts had met; and whom had they not met in thatEnglish sojourn in days before England embittered her-self to us during our civil war ? Not Tennyson only,but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, butCarlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears fromconverse so recent with them that it was as if I heardtheir voices in their echoed words. I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember Iwas afraid of staying too long, and so I am sure I didnot stay as long as I should have liked. But I havenot the least notion how I got away, and I am not cer- 42. JAMES T. FIELDS(About 1870) MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND tain where I spent the rest of a day that began in theclouds, but had to be ended on the common earth. Isuj)pose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city,and partly to recording my impressions of it for thatnewspaper which never published them. The summerweather in Boston, with its sunny heat struck throughand through with the coolness of the sea, and its clearair untainted wdth a breath of smoke, I have alwaysloved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and Ishould have thought it enough simply to be alive in everywhere I came upon something that fed myfamine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and how-ever the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I canonly recall my breathless first sight of the Public Li-brary and of the Athenseum Gallery: great sights then,which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwardseclipsed for mer
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