Famous Single Poems
press. It was Partridge who remarked sadly of hunger that, no matter how often one subdues it, it always bobs up again; and this is equally true of literary controversies.
Every once in a while somebody happens upon a small volume published privately in Brooklyn in 1870, entitled The Water-Mill, and Other Poems, by D. C. McCallum, and writes triumphantly to the papers that here at last is the solution of a famous mystery. The late Dr. Washington Gladden was one of these persons, and the letter which he wrote to the Ohio State Journal in the fall of 1915, is so typical that it is worth quoting:
You published this morning a little poem on “The Water That Has Passed,” marking it, “Author Unknown.”
Permit me to remove the veil of anonymity. The author was D. C. McCallum, a resident, when this poem was written, of my old home town, Owego, Tioga County, New York. Mr. McCallum, when I first knew him, was superintendent of the Susquehanna division of the Erie Railroad; afterward he was in charge of all the bridge building on that road, and I am not sure that he was not at one time president. He was also, I think, called into the service of the government early in the Civil War. I believe that we learned to call him “General.”
He was a fine, soldierly appearing man, very
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