A Visit from St. Nicholas
Right in the middle of her forehead,
When she was good
She was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid,
as he walked up and down the garden carrying her in his arms, he would have been aghast had he suspected that these lines were to become more widely known than "Evangeline" or "Hiawatha."
Similarly, when a learned professor of Oriental and Greek literature in the General Theological Seminary of New York City, the editor of a monumental Hebrew lexicon, and a thoroughly grave and learned man, so far unbent as to write some merry Christmas verses for his two little daughters, he would have been indeed disillusioned and impressed with the vanity of human attainments had he foreseen that of all his works this jingle alone was destined to survive. Yet such was the strange fate which befell Clement Clarke Moore.
Stranger still, it has recently been alleged that Dr. Moore did not write the poem, but had it forced on him, as it were, by a curious series of circumstances, and was finally impelled to the moral turpitude of claiming it as his own.
The poem in question is that nursery classic, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which has probably given pleasure to more children than any other
53
