Famous Single Poems
quently gave herself completely away in the following damning stanza in a poem referring to her early widowhood:
Ah, me! the red is yet upon my cheek,
And in my veins life’s vigorous currents play;
Adown my hair there shines no warning streak,
And the sweet meeting which you paint to-day
Seems sadly far away.
How, demands Mr. Morse triumphantly, was it possible for Mrs. Akers to be wrinkled and gray-haired in 1860, and blooming with youth some years later? Here is the conclusive, inescapable proof of the falsity of her high-handed claim to “Rock Me to Sleep!”
Nor is this all. If any one is so pig-headed as to be still unconvinced, there is one proof more. Mr. Ball, it seems, was in the habit of writing a poem to his mother’s memory to celebrate each succeeding Christmas. They were really not poems, just fragments, for Mr. Ball seemed always to have a great deal of difficulty with his material, but the fragments for 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, and 1856 were fortunately preserved and are given in the book, and for good measure certain other of Mr. Ball’s verses are included. Unhappily, one of these poems was afterwards discovered to be a plagiarism from Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, for which Mr. Ball apologized, saying that all uncon-
264
