Famous Single Poems
to Sleep” is very far from being a great poem, but at least it shows rather unusual skill in versification, its lines are smooth and flowing, and each of them possesses the requisite number of feet. There are felicitous passages, a happy use of adjectives, and an avoidance of stilted or artificial phraseology. Mr. Ball’s additional stanzas do not possess a single one of these merits. They are uncouth, ungrammatical, in places almost unintelligible. Here is his last stanza, which Mr. Morse calls “a natural, simple, and harmonious finale to the whole:”
Thus with my loved ones I’ll watch by your side,
Nor weep once again, whatever betide,
Waiting all calmly the coming of those
Holding the signet of death’s cold repose;—
Farewell to sorrow—farewell to all ill—
Whispers are stealing, sad heart be now still,—
With my dear mother, kind watch I will keep.
She charges the angels to rock me to sleep.
Surely no comment upon this is necessary; but with Mr. Ball’s claim resting upon such evidence, there can be only one verdict, and all the affidavits in the world could not alter it. The blood-test proves conclusively that Mr. Ball could never have been the parent of the stanzas claimed by Mrs. Akers.
Mr. Morse, in spite of his laudation of Mr. Ball’s stanzas, seems to have had some dim per-
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