Famous Single Poems
The above facts have been gleaned from the public press. A letter to the Navy Department, asking for some information about the incident, brought the following remarkable response:
"A thorough search has been made of the official files of the department, including Admiral Coghlan's personal jacket, and no record whatever can be found of the incident of which you speak. I should have answered you before this, but we have been diligently trying to trace down some dim recollections of the incident as reported by some of the older persons in the Navy Department. I am sorry to say we have been able to find nothing, however."
Sic transit! Or perhaps Captain Coghlan was not reprimanded, after all!
But neither Wilhelm II, nor the German Ambassador, nor Secretary Hay, nor the Navy Department, nor all of them combined could suppress "Hoch! der Kaiser." That masterpiece had been lifted suddenly into immortality. It had found a fit interpreter at a supremely fit moment, and its fame was secure. Yet nobody knew the name of its author, or where it had first appeared. It was just one of those fugitive poems, those nameless orphans, which drift through the columns of the press, their origin shrouded in mystery, and which gradually fade from sight unless preserved for posterity by some such accident as had befallen this one.
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