University of Virginia Library

The poem was suggested by the sight of a figure well known to Bostonians, that of Major Thomas Melville, “the last of the cocked hats,” as he was sometimes called. The Major had been a personable young man, very evidently, and retained evidence of it in

“The monumental pomp of age,”

which had something imposing and something odd about it for youthful eyes like mine. He was often pointed at as one of the “Indians” of the famous “Boston Tea-Party” of 1774. His aspect among the crowds of a later generation reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and spreading their foliage all around it. I make this explanation for the benefit of those who have been puzzled by the lines,

“The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring.”

The way in which it came to be written in a somewhat singular measure was this. I had become a little known as a versifier, and I thought that one or two other young writers were following my efforts with imitations, not meant as parodies and hardly to be considered improvements on their models. I determined to write in a measure which would at once betray any copyist. So far as it was suggested by any previous poem, the echo must have come from Campbell's “Battle of the Baltic,” with its short terminal lines, such as the last of these two,

“By thy wild and stormy steep,
Elsinore.”

But I do not remember any poem in the same measure, except such as have been written since its publication.

The poem as first written had one of those false rhymes which produce a shudder in all educated persons, even in the poems of Keats and others who ought to have known better than to admit them.

The guilty verse ran thus:—

“But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
So forlorn,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
‘They are gone’!”

A little more experience, to say nothing of the sneer of an American critic in an English periodical, showed me that this would never do. Here was what is called a “cockney rhyme,”— one in which the sound of the letter r is neglected —maltreated as the letter h is insulted by the average Briton by leaving it out everywhere except where it should be silent. Such an ill-mated pair as “forlorn” and “gone”

could not possibly pass current in good rhyming society. But what to do about it was the question. I must keep

“They are gone!”

and I could not think of any rhyme which I could work in satisfactorily. In this perplexity my friend, Mrs. Folsom, wife of that excellent scholar, Mr. Charles Folsom, then and for a long time the unsparing and infallible corrector of the press at Cambridge, suggested the line,

“Sad and wan,”

which I thankfully adopted and have always retained.

Good Abraham Lincoln had a great liking for the poem, and repeated it from memory to Governor Andrew, as the Governor himself told me. I have a copy of it made by the hand of Edgar Allan Poe.