Famous Single Poems
combined in the most humiliating and inexcusable form, since the crime is not a crime of necessity, nor of provocation, but of the weakest and most pitiable vanity,” and after pointing out its further serious consequences for her, she asks him to repent of his wickedness, abjure his claim, and set her right before the world; otherwise she will be forced to bring suit against him.
Ball answered in a long letter dated September 6, 1867, in which he expressed himself as delighted at the prospect of threshing the question out in a court of law, and, in order that she might have explicit grounds for the suit, repeats “with an unqualified absoluteness, that you are not, and that you very well know that you are not the author of the poem published by you as your own, entitled ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,’ but, on the contrary, that I am the author, and the sole author, of it; and I am ready to and do avouch it before God and man, here and everywhere, now and always, and in all forms that can give solemnity to statement, and bind the soul for its truth.”
Poor Ball! How far he had traveled since the day when he had ingenuously read some verses to his friends and accepted their plaudits! For his claim was not at all the preconceived piece of villainy which Mrs. Akers believed; it was something into which he had been urged step by step by an Iago who was always at his
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