The Lesson of the Water-Mill
told that some of these songs are sung all over the English-speaking world, I cannot help wondering how it is that my books have not paid me enough to keep me supplied with stationery. If I had depended upon my verse for even the plainest living, I should have starved long ago. It is fortunate that ‘poetry is its own reward,’ for I judge that only the more fortunate bards find any other.”
The defense of anthologists will not be undertaken here. It may be pointed out, however, that they are by no means the plutocrats Mrs. Allen supposed, and of late years they have as a class renounced piracy and become almost respectable. Poets are their debtors for two things: it is they who keep alive the single lovely songs which would be lost and forgotten in a mass of “collected works,” and they are indefatigable in running down questions of authorship and in making sure that the person who wrote the poem gets the credit for it—as Mrs. Allen herself had reason to know during the violent controversy which raged in the ’60s and ’70s about the authorship of “Rock Me to Sleep.”
Another dispute, resembling in many ways the famous one between Mrs. Allen and Mr. Ball, and involving the reputation of one of the most distinguished men of Civil War days, still starts occasionally on a fresh round of the
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