But Sir Thomas Mallory was not his only diet at this time.  He discovered that the old-book corner of A.C.  McClurg & Co.’s book-store was a veritable mine of old British ballads, and he began sipping at that spring which in a few years was to exercise such a potent influence on his own verse.  It was from this source that he learned the power of simple words and thoughts, when wedded to rhyme, to reach the human heart.  His “Little Book of Western Verse” would never have possessed its popular charm had not its author taken his cue from the “Grand Old Masters.”  He caught his inspiration and faultless touch from studying the construction and the purpose of the early ballads and songs, illustrative of the history, traditions, and customs of the knights and peasantry of England.  Where others were content to judge of these in such famous specimens as “Chevy Chase” and “The Nut Brown Maid,” Field delved for the true gold in the neglected pages of Anglo-Saxon chronicle and song.  He did not waste much time on the unhealthy productions of the courtiers of the time of Queen Elizabeth, but chose the ruder songs of the bards, whose hearts were pure even if their thoughts were sometimes crude, their speech blunt, and their metre queer.  Who cannot find suggestions for a dozen of Field’s poems in this single stanza from “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament”: 

  Balow, my babe, lye still and sleipe! 
  It grieves me sair to see thee weipe: 
  If thoust be silent Ise be glad,
  Thy maining maks my heart ful sad. 
  Balow, my boy, thy mother’s joy,
  Thy father breides me great annoy. 
    Balow, my babe, ly still and sleipe,
    It grieves me sair, to see thee weipe.

Or where could writer go to a better source for inspiration than to ballads preserving in homely setting such gems as this, from “Bartham’s Dirge”: 

  They buried him at mirk midnight,
    When the dew fell cold and still,
  When the aspin gray forgot to play,
    And the mist clung to the hill.

When you have mingled the simple, bald, and often beautiful pathos of this old balladry with the fancies of fairy-land which Field invented, or borrowed from Hans Andersen’s tales, you have the key to much of the best poetry and prose he ever wrote.  The secret of his undying attachment to Bohn’s Standard Library was that therein he found almost every book that introduced him to the masters of the kind of English literature that most appealed to him.  Here he unearthed the best of the ancients in literal English garb, from AEschylus to Xenophon, to say nothing of a dictionary of Latin and of Greek quotations done into English with an index verborum.  More to the purpose still, Bohn put into his hands Smart’s translation of Horace, “carefully revised by an Oxonian.”  In the cheap, uniform green cloth of Bohn, he fell in with Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English,” Bell’s “Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England,” Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History,” Marco Polo’s “Travels,” Keightly’s “Fairy Mythology,” and renewed his acquaintance with Andersen’s “Danish Legends and Fairy Tales,” and Grimm’s “Fairy Tales,” and last, but not least, with one of the best editions of Isaac Walton’s “Complete Angler,” wherein he did some of his best fishing.