What My Lover Said
Honesdale, Pa., my heartfelt congratulations and regrets.”
It would seem that a statement so explicit as this would put an end to any controversy, but it takes a long time for the truth to overtake a lie (very often, indeed, it never does), and the verses continued to be printed as the work of Horace Greeley. Various papers even added editorial notes explaining that Mr. Greeley wrote the poem in 1842. Gradually, however, truth did prevail, Mr. Greeley’s name was used less and less frequently, and Homer Greene’s took its place. For a time it was rather the fashion to print the verses with the sub-title, “A charming poem attributed to Horace Greeley, but written in 1875 by Homer Greene of Honesdale, Pa.”
However, the end was not yet. In the winter of 1886 the Philadelphia News published an article about the poem, asserting that it had been written neither by Horace Greeley nor by Homer Greene, but by Colonel Richard Realf, the author of “Indirection” and various other poems, who had committed suicide at Oakland, California, in 1879. Again the controversy was on. Now that they had been reminded of it, there were a number of persons who were quite certain that Colonel Realf was the author of the poem and who wrote to the papers to say so. One of his admirers stated positively
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