There Is No Death
Child's Prayer," "Usefulness Better than Fame," "Voices of the Soul," "The Voice of Duty," "Lazarus and Dives," "Hearth and Home." There is a portrait of the author at the front of the book, showing a dogmatic and contentious face, typically Scotch-Irish. How it happened that he was a Methodist and not a Presbyterian is a mystery.
Occasionally during his long years of controversy he succeeded in convincing other people of the justice of his claim. His first triumph came in 1875. In 1870, Harper & Brothers issued a series of school readers, using "There Is No Death," and crediting it to Lord Lytton. McCreery took the matter up with the Harper firm, and after five years of effort, succeeded in having the poem credited to himself. In 1889, Lippincott's Magazine ran a series of "One Hundred Questions" concerning various literary matters, and question number eighty was about the authorship of "There Is No Death." After considering the evidence, the editor decided in McCreery's favor. But these were mere evanescent gleams in the darkness, and to the day of his death McCreery continued to see his poem attributed to Bulwer Lytton.
Besides involving him in endless strife and, as he says, killing in him all ambition to write any more poetry "for the public," "There Is No Death" interfered with his life in another
23
