Famous Single Poems
Yet hands clasped in the orchard path we walked,
And—zoe mou, sas agapo—fondly talked
In the gloaming long ago.
Poor Mrs. Jones! Driven to her last defense, with her back against the wall, she had fallen into the trap which has proved fatal to so many plagiarists—she had tried to prove that she had written something she didn’t write by producing something she did write, with the usual result, which was merely to show her utter inability to distinguish poetry from doggerel. It was too much; her partizans, the New York Sun included, realized that the game was up, and most of them said so. As for Mrs. Jones, she slipped into that peaceful obscurity which she had craved and never afterwards emerged.
In a letter of recent date, Mr. Greene tells of an amusing experience when introduced to a prominent Boston man, some time ago, as the author of “What My Lover Said.” The Boston man regarded him with open incredulity, and informed him that the Homer Greene who really wrote the poem was a well-known business man in New York, with whom a Mrs. Safford, a friend of his in Boston, had collaborated in the writing of the verses. He had this story from Mrs. Safford herself, who had given him complete details concerning the work of
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