Famous Single Poems
credit so much as Archibald Clavering Gunter, for it was the latter who discovered the poem in a newspaper, perceived its merits, and gave it to Mr. Hopper with the suggestion that he recite it. Now this was an extraordinary thing. It is easy enough to recognize a masterpiece after it has been carefully cleaned and beautifully framed and hung in a conspicuous place and certified by experts; but to stumble over it in a musty garret, covered with dust, to dig it out of a pile of junk and know it for a thing of beauty—only the true connoisseur can do that.
That is what Mr. Gunter did when he dug "Casey at the Bat" out of the smudgy columns of a newspaper more than thirty years ago. His novels have fallen into undeserved neglect, for some of them are rattling good yarns—who that met her will ever forget the beautiful flowergirl of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, with her white and red roses? At least let it be remembered that to him the American public owes its introduction to the supreme classic of baseball.
For every one has now agreed that that is what "Casey" is. But classics have a way of being despised or ignored by their contemporaries, and when the poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner nobody hailed it with shouts of joy or suspected that the great Casey was to become immortal. In fact, the Examiner
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