Rock Me to Sleep
sciously Mrs. Whitman’s poem “became interwoven into my heart and mind, and, years after, found utterance as my own.” The other poems are strangely reminiscent of Goldsmith and Hood, but it would scarcely be fair to characterize them as anything worse than that. All of them are unmitigated doggerel, the sample quoted by Mr. Howells from the effusion for 1856 being a fair specimen.
One can imagine the poor man racking his brain in the effort to satisfy his friends that he was all they thought him, and as a final bit of evidence producing the “original draft” of “Rock Me to Sleep,” with all his subsequent corrections and interlineations. It was a thoroughly puerile performance, but it was gravely examined by a solemn committee of clergymen, doctors, and literary men, among the latter being “Mr. Gilder, editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser.” Their verdict is not disclosed, but, as Mr. Morse points out, there could be no doubt about the date of this interesting document because, as was discovered to its author’s great surprise, a portion of the draft had, by a most fortunate chance, been written upon the back of a “tradesman’s bill rendered to Mr. Ball in September, 1856. Where so many bills are presented and paid as in Mr. Ball’s house, the presumption is that this one was thus used by him, about the time of its presentation.”
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