Beautiful Snow
on October 14, 1824, graduated at Columbia College and studied medicine, but drifted into journalism and eventually developed into a writer of sentimental verse and of sensational serials for the popular weeklies. He died in New York, July 18, 1890.
About 1884, a reporter for the New York World discovered that Mr. Watson lived in “a neat brick house on Twenty-second Street,” and secured from him the story of his famous poem. It was written in November, 1858, at the house of Mr. Sam Colt, at Hartford, Conn., and was mailed next morning to Harper’s Weekly. The Weekly accepted it and sent the author a check for $15, which he considered very liberal. In 1868, he sold the copyright to it and twenty-five other poems to Turner Brothers & Co., of Philadelphia, for the sum of $500, and these poems were published in the volume referred to above. The book was very successful and more than 30,000 copies were sold the first year. But various other ventures proved so disastrous that the firm failed, and Mr. Watson’s volume passed into the hands of T. B. Peterson & Co., also of Philadelphia. They, so Mr. Watson alleged, gathered up enough of his poems to make a second volume, altered the title of the leading one, and published them wholly without his knowledge. He knew nothing of the book until he happened
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