There Is No Death
the poem there. It was in the Telegraph that the mysterious Eugene Bulmer saw it. McCreery says that Bulmer lived "somewhere south of Dixon," but he did not know whether the name was a real one or a pseudonym. Anyway, according to McCreery, Bulmer wrote a column-and-a-half article on "Immortality" for the Farmer's Advocate of Chicago, concluding with the poem and signing his name beneath it. Another paper copied it and signed it E. Bulmer, then a third changed the m to w, and the deed was done.
Now it is strange that McCreery should have thought in 1869 that he wrote the poem in 1859 and first published it in his own paper; while twenty-five or thirty years later he decided that he wrote it in 1862 or 1863 and that it first appeared in Arthur's Home Magazine. One may question whether, in 1893, after the lapse of more than three decades, he could really remember so clearly all that he thought about during that long drive. Also there is a certain insubstantiality about Eugene Bulmer; he does not, somehow, impress one as a real person.
But in spite of all this, there can be no reasonable doubt that McCreery wrote the poem—which was destined to be the Frankenstein of his life. In the first place, nobody else has ever claimed it. Whether Bulwer ever specifically repudiated it may be questioned—one would
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