James Thomas Fields (December 31, 1817-April 2, 1881) was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1862-70. His father was a sea captain and died before Fields was three. Fields was friends with William Wordsworth, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and others. He was also a contemporary of Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Edwin Percy Whipple, James Russell Lowell, and Samuel Gridley Howe. After Fields's death, his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called "Auf Wiedersehen" dedicated to him.
In The Captain's Daughter; or The Ballad of the Tempest, written in 1858, James T. Field wrote:
<WE were crowded in the cabin,
Not a soul would dare to sleep,--
It was midnight on the waters,
And a storm was on the deep.
'Tis a fearful thing in winter
To be shattered by the blast,
And to hear the rattling trumpet
Thunder, "Cut away the mast!"
So we shuddered there in silence,--
For the stoutest held his breath,
While the hungry sea was roaring
And the breakers talked with death.
As thus we sat in darkness
Each one busy with his prayers,
"We are lost!" the captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.
But his little daughter whispered,
As she took his icy hand,
"Isn't God upon the ocean,
Just the same as on the land?"
Then we kissed the little maiden,
And we spake in better cheer,
And we anchored safe in harbor
When the morn was shining clear.> 1817JF001
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American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:
1817JF001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). James Thomas Fields, 1858, in The Captain's Daughter; or, The Ballad of the Tempest, st. 5. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 557.