University of Virginia Library

I may be exposing my memory (not that it will greatly trouble me) to unfriendly if also well-meant criticism in reprinting this sonnet, in which America, during the period of her non-intervention in the late European War, was reproached for the neutral attitude which we must now suppose her to have afterwards believed it either her duty or her interest to abandon. But as my appeal to her is said, with every appearance of authority, to have influenced many serious minds in the United States, where it was undoubtedly read by countless multitudes, and where it called forth in many quarters such bitter retort as sufficiently proved it to have been a letter which reached its address, there can be no reason other than a merely capricious one, on my part, for seeking to efface all memory of it now. It may be permissible for me to add that if anyone regards this poem as convicting me of anti-American bias, I think more than enough printed evidence can be brought forward to justify my acquittal on that charge.