JSfew Hanifs^hirc Authors.
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��ica. She continues to reside at the Shoals.
JAMES T. FIKLDS.
If Kimball's books have circulated abroad the most of any writer born in New Hampshire, those of James T. Fields are read more extensively' at home. His Yesterdays with Authors" is read with equal pleasure by the learned and the unlearned. It is found alike in the alcoves of the great libraries of the rich and among the half dozen books which make up the libraries of the less favored. It is fertile in anecdote and interesting information about the authors whom the writer has known in his day and generation, told in the simple but pleasing style of which he is a master. Probably no man on the American continent, dead or living, has enjoyed the personal friendship of so many distinguished literary characters, both European and domestic, as Mr. Fields, whose position as a member of the largest publishing house in Boston, coupled with his rare affaliility of manner and conversational talent, gave him peculiar opportunities for acquiring such acquaintances.
Mr. Fields is not a voluminous writer, he having written well rather than much, and his reputation, which in extent is national, has been achieved almost wholly through his "Yesterdays with Authors." Not- withstanding this, he has, amidst a press of other arduous duties, found time to give us brief monographs on Hawthorne, Dickens, and Barry Cornwall, and a collection of miscel- laneous papers under the title of "Underbrush." He has compiled a "Family Library of British Poetry" in one volume.
��Fields was born in Portsmouth in 1820, of parents in the humblest cir- cumstances ; was educated in the schools of his native city ; went to Boston as a bookseller's clerk ; after- wards became associated with George Ticknor in book publishing, under the firm of Ticknor & Fields, which, after undergoing several alterations, is at present represented by Hough- ton, Mifflin & Company. This house has been the avenue through which Agassiz, Bryant, Emerson, Longfel- low, and Whittier have given their immortal works to the world. It was also the authorized publishers of Dickens in America. Fields is not inaptly styled the American Dodsley.
EDNA DEAN PROCTOR.
Another author, whose name is very familiar, has gone forth from the Granite hills, adding to their reputation for producing noble and famous women. I make reference to Edna Dean Proctor, whom malignant tongues linked with the disgraceful Plymouth scandal ; a charge about which there was not a word of truth. Of her life little is known more than that she was born in Henniker, and reared amid the rugged grandeur and picturesque scenery of old Kearsai'ge, which she has embalmed in a beauti- fully worded poem. Her "Russian Journey," in prose, and a volume of poetry, are extensively read, and have been highly spoken of by the review- ers. Some of her poems, which are of various orders of merit, have a peculiar beauty and pathos which one would fain describe. Her residence is at Brooklyn, L. I.
Among other natives of this state whose books, in some instances, have
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