est, we find
Juliet's dark face, Viola's gentle mien,
The dignity of Scotland's martyr'd queen--
The beauty and the wit of Rosalind.
What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes
And sob and gush when we should criticise--

Charmed by the graces of your mien and mind--
What wonder we should hasten to proclaim
The art that has secured thy deathless fame?
And this we swear: We will endorse no name
But thine alone to old Melpomene,
Nor will revolve, since rising sons are we,
Round any orb, save, dear Modjeska, thee
Who art our Pole star, and will ever be._

As originally written by Field, the rhymes in the first four lines of
this tribute fell alternately, the lines being transposed so that they
ran in order first, third, fourth, and second of the poem as it
appears above. For the fifth and sixth lines of his first version
Field wrote:

_What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes
When we are hired to rail and criticise?_

It is a question the reader can decide for himself whether his second
thought was an improvement. His original intention contemplated a
longer poem, but after he had written a fourteenth line that read:

_The radiant Pole star of the mimic stage--_

Field concluded to wind it up with the fourteenth line, as in the
finished version.

Upon the back of the original manuscript of these lines to Madame
Modjeska I find this Sapphic fragment under the line--suggestive of
its subject, "The Things of Life":

_A little sour, a little sweet,
Fill out our brief and human hour,
meet_

He never filled out the blank or gave a clue as to what further
reflections on the springs of life were in his mind.

I never knew Field to be as infatuated with any stage production as
with the first performance of the pirated edition of "The Mikado" in
Chicago, in the summer of 1885. The cast was indeed a memorable one,
including Roland Reed as Koko, Alice Harrison as Yum-Yum, Belle Archer
as Pitti-Sing, Frederick Archer as Pooh-Bah, George Broderick as the
Mikado, and Mrs. Broderick as Katisha. The Brodericks had rich
church-choir voices, Belle Archer was a beauty of that fresh, innocent
type that did one's eyes good simply to look upon, and she was just
emerging into a career that grew in popularity until her untimely
death. Archer was a stilted English comedian who seemed built to be
"insulted" as Pooh-Bah, while Roland Reed and Miss Harrison w