She gazed at his sporadic hair-- She knew his hymns by rote; They longed to dine together At Casey's table d'hôte; Alas, that Fortune's "hostages"-- But let us draw a screen! He dared not call her Katie; How _could_ she call him "Gene?"
I signed my verses "By one of Gene's Victims"; they appeared in _The Tribune_, and soon were copied by papers in every part of the country. Other stanzas, with the same refrain, were added by the funny men of the southern and western press, and it was months before 'Gene' saw the last of them. The word "Eugenio," which was the name by which I always addressed him in our correspondence, left him in no doubt as to the initiator of the series, and so our "Merry War" ended, I think, with a fair quittance to either side.
Grieving, with so many others, over Yorick's premature death, it is a solace for me to remember how pleasant was our last interchange of written words. Not long ago, he was laid very low by pneumonia, but recovered, and before leaving his sickroom wrote me a sweetly serious letter--with here and there a sparkle in it--but in a tone sobered by illness, and full of yearning for a closer companionship with his friends. At the same time he sent me the first editions, long ago picked up, of all my earlier books, and begged me to write on their fly-leaves. This I did; with pains to gratify him as much as possible, and in one of the volumes wrote this little quatrain:
Death thought to claim you in this year of years, But Fancy cried--and raised her shield between-- "Still let men weep, and smile amid their tears; Take any two beside, but spare Eugene!"
In view of his near escape, the hyperbole, if such there was, might well be pardoned, and it touched Eugene so manifestly that--now that the eddy indeed has swept him away, and the Sabine Farm mourns for its new-world Horace--I cannot be too thankful that such was my last message to him.
Eugene Field was so mixed a compound that it will always be impossible quite to decide whether he was wont to judge critically of either his own conduct or his literary creations. As to the latter, he put the worst and the best side by side, and apparently cared alike for both. That he did much beneath his standard, fine and true at times,--is unquestionable, and many a set of verses went the rounds that harmed his reputation. On the whole, I think this was due to the fact that he got his stated income as a newspaper poet and jester, and had to furnish his score of "Sharps and Flats" with more or less regularity. For all this, he certainly has left pieces, compact of the rarer elements, sufficient in number to preserve for him a unique place among America's most original characters, scholarly wits, and poets of brightest fancy. Yorick is no more! But his genius will need no chance upturning of his grave-turf for its remembrance. When all is sifted, its fame is more likely to strengthen than to decline.