His brother Roswell has said that the “curse of comedy was on Eugene,” and “it was not until he threw off that yoke and gave expression to the better and sweeter thoughts within him that, as with Bion, the voice of song flowed freely from the heart.”

I do not think it is quite fair to regard comedy as a curse or a yoke.  Certainly Eugene Field never suffered under the blight of the one nor staggered under the burden of the other.  If there is any curse in comedy, unadulterated by lying, malice, or envy, he never knew it.  He knew—­none better—­that the author who would command the tears that purify and sweeten life must move the laughter that lightens it.  What says our Shakespeare?—­

  Jog on, jog, on the foot-path way,
    And merrily hent the stile-a,
  A merry heart goes all the day,
    Your sad tires in a mile-a.

Eugene Field trod the footpath way to popularity and fame with a buoyant and merry heart.  If there was any abatement of his joyous spirits I never knew it, and I do not think that his writings disclose any sweeter strain, as his brother suggests, in the days when ill-health checked the ardor of his boyish exuberance, but could not dim the unextinguishable flame of his comedy.  The two books that contain what to the last he considered his choicest work—­a judgment confirmed by their continued popularity and sale, “A Little Book of Western Verse” and “A Little Book of Profitable Tales”—­were compiled from the writings (1878-1887) that flowed from his pen when he worshipped most assiduously at the shrine of the goddess of comedy and social intercourse.

I have been tempted into this digression in order that the reader may not be at a loss to reconcile the apparent frivolity of Field’s life and the mass of his writings at this period with the winnowed product as it appeared in the two volumes just mentioned.  Out of the comedy of his nature came the sweetness of his work, and out of his association with all conditions of his fellow-men came that insight into the springs of human passion and action that leavens all that he wrote, from “The Robin and the Violet” (1884) down to “The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac” (1895).

The general character of Eugene Field’s life and writing went through a gradual process of evolution from the time of his arrival in Chicago to the final chapters of “The Love Affairs,” which were his last work.  But it can be safely divided into two periods of six years each, with the turning point at the publication of his little books of verse and tales in the year 1889.  Nearly all that he wrote previous to that year was marked by his association with his kind; that which he wrote subsequently was saturated with his closer association with books.  About all the preparation he needed for his daily “wood-sawing” was a hurried glance through the local papers and his favorite exchanges, among which the New York Sun held first place, with the others unplaced.  He