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.

It has been a common impression that Field was attracted to the
old-book corner of McClurg's store by the old and