If I have interpreted the story of “The Good Knight’s” life aright, the reader will comprehend the relation there is in my mind between the scene at the death of the knightliest knight of romance and that of him who moved in our modern life, steeped and imbued with the thoughts, fancies, and speech of the age of chivalry.  For the age of shield, and spear, and tourney, he would have been the unlikeliest man ever born of woman; but with his “sweet pen” he waged unceasing battle for all things beautiful, and true, and pure in this modern world.  That is why his best songs sing of mother’s love and childhood and of the eternal bond between them.  He hated sham, and humbug, and false pretence, and that is why his daily paragraphs gleam and sparkle with the relentless satire and ridicule; he detested the solemn dulness of conventional life, and that is why he scourged society with the “knotted lash of sarcasm” and dissipated melancholy with the unchecked effrontery of his mirth.  And so his songs were full of sweetness, and his words were words of strength; and his last message to the children of his pen was: 

Go forth, little lyrics, and sing to the hearts of men.  This beautiful world is full of song, and thy voices may not be heard of all—­but sing on, children of ours; sing to the hearts of men, and thy song shall at least swell the universal harmony that bespeaketh God’s love and the sweetness of humanity.

And so is it any wonder that when the tidings of his death was borne throughout the land “there was weeping and dolour out of measure,” and that a wave of sympathy swept over the country for the bereft family of the silent singer?

I have often been asked what was Eugene Field’s religious belief—­a question I cannot answer better than in the language of the Rev. Frank M. Bristol in his funeral address: 

I have said of my dear friend that he had a creed.  His creed was love.  He had a religion.  His religion was kindness.  He belonged to the church—­the church of the common brotherhood of man.  With all the changes that came to his definitions and formulas, he never lost from his heart of hearts the reverence for sacred things learned in childhood, and inherited from a sturdy Puritan ancestry.  From that deep store of love and faith and reverence sprang the streams of his happy songs, and ever was he putting into his tender verses those ideas of the living God, the blessed Christ, the ministering angels of immortal love, the happiness of heaven, which were instilled into his-heart when but a boy.

Those who gathered at his house on the day of the funeral and looked upon the form of the “Good Knight” in his last sleep saw a large white rose in one of his hands.  There was a touching story connected with that rose:  On the preceding afternoon a lady, who was a friend of Field’s, went to a florist’s to order some flowers for the grave.  A poorly clad little girl was looking wistfully in at the window and followed the lady into the store.