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 But the next morning the quatrain recurred to her at the breakfast-table, and she recited it to her host and hostess, telling them at the same time the story of the young widow. Both of her hearers were enthusiastic, and the host remarked that if she could keep the remainder of the poem up to the epigrammatic standard of these first four lines she would produce something really worth while.

Two nights later, on coming home from a theater-party, she told her friends that she was going to sit up and finish the poem, and did so in a very short time after getting to her room. When, next morning, she took the poem down to breakfast with her and read it aloud, she warned her hearers that she felt she had not kept up to the standard of the first lines, but, she adds, “I can still see the look on the very handsome face of the Judge as he listened with increasing interest, and I can still hear his deep voice lifted in quick spontaneous praise, in which his fair young wife joined.”

She sent the poem to the New York Sun and received five dollars for it. The Sun published it February 21, 1883, and it was then added to the “Miscellaneous Poems” needed to fill out Poems of Passion.

Almost at the same time with Poems of Passion, a man by the name of John A. Joyce had published a volume of reminiscences entitled