Famous Single Poems
that the verses had been written by Colonel Realf while he was city editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial, soon after being mustered out of the Union service at the close of the Civil War.
Fortunately an authoritative answer to this assertion was soon forthcoming from Colonel Richard J. Hinton, Realf’s literary executor.
“It seems to me proper to state,” Colonel Hinton wrote in a letter to the New York Graphic of October 20, 1888, “that Richard Realf was not the author of ‘What My Lover Said,’ either under that title or under that of ‘My Lover and I,’” and he adds that the confusion probably arose from the fact that Colonel Realf did write a poem called “Sunbeam and I,” but that while, in memory, one might suggest the other, there was really no resemblance between them. “There is nothing that I can find in Realf’s poems,” Colonel Hinton concludes, “and I believe that nearly all he has ever written are in my possession, many of them being in the original manuscript, which resembles the poem in dispute.”
With this second claimant thus effectively placed hors de combat, Mr. Greene might well have supposed that his laurels were secure, but he had yet to cope with a feminine aspirant to his wreath—the most persistent of them all, and the one who proved most difficult to dispose of.
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