THE ROSE

  Since the days of old Adam the welkin has rung
    With the praises of sweet-scented posies,
  And poets in rapturous phrases have sung
    The paramount beauty of roses.

  Wheresoever she ’bides, whether resting in lanes
    Or gracing the proud urban bowers,
  The red, royal rose her distinction maintains
    As the one regnant queen among flowers.

  How joyous are we of the West when we find
    That Fate, with her gifts ever chary,
  Has decreed that the rose who is queen of her kind
    Shall bloom on our wild Western prairie.

  Let us laugh at the East as an impotent thing
    With envy and jealousy crazy,
  While grateful Chicago is happy to sing
    In praise of the rose, she’s a daisy._

CHAPTER V

PUBLICATION OF HIS FIRST BOOKS

Although the bibliomaniac and collector will claim that “The Tribune Primer,” printed in Denver in 1882, was Eugene Field’s first book, and cite the fact that a copy of this rare pamphlet recently sold for $125 as proof that it is still his most valuable contribution to literature, his first genuine entrance into the world of letters between covers came with the publication of “Culture’s Garland,” by Ticknor & Company, of Boston, in August, 1887.  Whatever may be the truth as to the size of the first edition of the “Primer,” so few copies were printed and its distribution was so limited that it scarcely amounted to a bona-fide publication.  Neither did the form of the “Primer,” a little 18mo pamphlet of forty-eight pages, bound in pink paper covers, nor its ephemeral newspaper persiflage, rise to the dignity of a book.

“Culture’s Garland,” on the contrary, marks the first real essay of Field as a maker of books.  Field himself is the authority for the statement that “Tom” Ticknor edited the book.  “I simply sent on a lot of stuff,” wrote he, “and the folks at the other end picked out what they wanted and ran it as they pleased.”  This is scarcely just to Mr. Ticknor.  Field himself, to my knowledge, selected the matter for “Culture’s Garland,” and arranged it in the general form in which it appeared.  He then delegated to Mr. Ticknor authority to reject any and all paragraphs in which the bite of satire or the broadness of the humor transgressed too far the bounds of a reasonable discretion.  The true nature of this, to my mind the most entertaining of all Field’s books, is reflected in its title page, frontispiece, emblem, tail-piece, and the advertisements with which it concludes.  The full title reads: 

  CULTURE’S GARLAND

  Being Memoranada of
  The Gradual Rise of Literature, Art, Music,
  And Society in Chicago, and Other
  Western Ganglia

  by
  EUGENE FIELD

  With an Introduction by Julian Hawthorne.

The frontispiece is a pen-and-ink sketch of “the Author at the Age of 30 (A.D. 1880),” such as Field frequently drew of himself; the symbolic emblem, which takes the place of a dedication, was a string of link sausages “in the similitude of a laurel wreath,” representing “A Chicago Literary Circle,” and the tail-piece was a gallows, to mark “The End.”