his was written in February, 1885, and though it failed of its
ostensible aim of discrediting Miss McLean's authorship of "The Lost
Sheep," it succeeded in rekindling throughout the exchanges the
smouldering fires of the dispute Field had himself started over that
of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's "Solitude," the relevant verse of which runs:

_Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone,
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air,
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care._

From the day "Solitude" appeared in Miss Wheeler's "Poems of Passion"
in 1883, and so long as Field lived, he never ceased to fan this
controversy into renewed life, more often than not by assuming a tone
of indignation that there should be any question over it, as in the
following recurrence to the subject in July, 1885:

It is reported that Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox is anxious to institute
against Colonel John A. Joyce such legal proceedings as will
determine beyond all doubt that she, and not Colonel Joyce, was the
author of the poem entitled "Love and Laughter," and beginning:

_"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."_

Mrs. Wilcox is perhaps the most touchy person in American literature
at the present time. For a number of years she has been contributing
to the newspaper press of the country, and her verses have been
subjected to the harshest sort of criticism. The paragraphists of the
press have bastinadoed and gibbeted her in the most cruel manner; her
poems have been burlesqued, parodied, and travestied heartlessly--in
short, every variety of criticism has been heaped upon her work,
which, even the most prejudiced will admit, has evinced remarkable
boldness and an amazing facility of expression. Now we would suppose
that all this shower of criticism had tanned the fair author's
hide--we speak metaphorically--until it was impervious to every
unkindly influence. But so far from being bomb-proof, Mrs. Wilcox is
even more sensitive than when she bestrode her Pegasus for the first
time and soared into that dreamy realm where the lyric muse abides.
There is not a quip nor a quillet from the slangy pen of the daily
newspaper writers that she does not brood over and worry about as
heartily as if it were an overdue mortga