Famous Single Poems
way. In the fall of 1868 some friends of his at Galena, Ill., called upon General Grant, then newly elected to the presidency, to urge him to appoint McCreery as his official stenographer. All was apparently going well until one of the party was so ill-advised as to take a copy of "There Is No Death" from his pocket and read it to the old war-horse. Grant listened with a lowering face and at the end remarked that it might be good poetry—of that he was no judge—but when he became president he would need about him men who understood public business and whose minds would be on that business, while so far as his experience and observation went, a man who was good at making poetry was not good for anything else, and he would therefore have to decline to appoint Mr. McCreery. So the poet had to wait a dozen years longer before he was able to land a government job.
Once settled in this longed-for haven, which he was never again to leave, and freed to some extent from those "bread and butter necessities of life" about which he complained in his "Last Message," he turned with new vigor to poetastry, and in 1883 published his collected verse, Songs of Toil and Triumph. His family thought it worth while to issue a second edition in 1907, the year after his death. It is a book of 143 pages—a dreary waste from end to end.
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