Famous Single Poems
There remained one more link to be forged in the chain of evidence: it must be shown how Mrs. Akers, who was in Italy during the winter of 1859–1860, got hold of a poem which Mr. Ball had brought back with him from California a year or so before, and which had never been published, or, presumably, been out of his possession. This was decidedly difficult, but Mr. Morse did not falter:
“Mr. Ball himself, with the most naïve benevolence and kindness of heart, asked whether there might not be some occult psychological process by which Mrs. Akers could have possessed herself, unconsciously, of these verses from his mind or manuscript.” Iago does not altogether deny the possibility of this (though Mrs. Akers rejected it scornfully), but he has another and more material explanation.
“Mr. Ball,” he writes, “is very careless of his manuscript poems. When he travels he often carries them in loose sheets of note paper in his pockets. They lie scattered on his table. Formerly he had a clerk, now deceased, who used to copy for himself many of the verses. Mrs. Akers sojourned for a while in New Hampshire, and Mr. Ball’s business often carried him there, though they never met. In a way here hinted at, or in some other, ‘Rock Me to Sleep,’ or part of it perhaps was lost, got into some country newspaper, and floated before the
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