A Rescued Poem
The Scrap Book Resurrects from Distressing Obscurity a Gem
That Might Otherwise Have Been Lost to Posterity.
History records that in 1895 Langdon Smith, at that time connected with the Sunday edition of the New York Herald, wrote the first few stanzas of the following poem. They were printed in the Herald. Four years later, having joined the staff of the New York Journal in the interim, Mr. Smith came across the verses among his papers, and, reading them over, was struck with a sense of their incompleteness. He added a stanza or two, and laid the poem aside. Later he wrote more stanzas, and finally completed it and sent it in to Arthur Brisbane, editor of the Evening Journal. Mr. Brisbane, being unable to use it, turned it over to Charles E. Russell, of the Morning Journal. It appeared in the Morning Journal—in the middle of a page of want “ads”! How it came to be buried thus some compositor may know. Perhaps a “make-up” man was inspired with a glimmer of editorial intelligence to “lighten up” the page.
But even a deep border of “ads” could not smother the poem. Mr. Smith received letters of congratulation from all parts of the world, along with requests for copies. The poem has been in constant demand; and it has been almost unobtainable. Here for the first time it is given to the public in a suitable position, with proper recognition—proof once more that the true spark cannot long remain hid under a bushel.
Mr. Smith has caught a note of deep interest. He has linked evolution to the theory of soul-transmigration—has translated Wordsworth’s ode on immortality into the terms of science. “The glory and the dream” come, not from another world, but from the Paleozoic period, in which existed the most ancient forms of life of which traces still remain. And the author gives us glimpses of man in several geological periods, showing him, finally, as the cave man of the Stone Age; whence it is comparatively a short jump to the twentieth century—and Delmonico’s.