Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/146

 and the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs, their songs are imperishable! Oh, friend, what moots it to them or to us who gave this epic or that lyric to immortality? The singer belongs to a year, his song to all time!”

Which would be all very well but for the fact that there are always a lot of pirates sailing the literary seas ready to spring upon and claim as a prize any poem whose author is unknown. It was so in this case, and the question of the authorship of “If I Should Die To-night” was soon inextricably confused—a confusion which has persisted to the present day. The latest edition of Granger’s Index to Poetry and Recitations attributes it to Robert C. V. Meyers, of Philadelphia, on what authority does not appear. Mr. Meyers died a few years ago, and has no discoverable representative to whom an appeal for further information can be made; but he was not born until 1858, and was consequently only fifteen years old in 1873. “If I Should Die To-night” is, indeed, juvenile—but it is not as juvenile as that!

Mr. Meyers was not the only claimant—if he really was a claimant. It was at various times attributed, among others, to Alice Cary and Father Abram J. Ryan, but the most persistent aspirant was Irvine Dungan, of