Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/247

 You” among them, and telling the following story of how this particular poem was written.

In January, 1863, when he was twenty-one years old and adjutant of the Twenty-fourth Kentucky regiment, at that time camped at the “Oaklands,” near Louisville, Ky., he secured a forty-eight hours’ pass and went in to Louisville to call on George D. Prentice, the editor of the Louisville Journal, whose poem, “The Closing Year,” Joyce says he considered the finest in American literature. Joyce had had some correspondence with Prentice, who had published a few of his poems, so he proceeded to the Journal office, introduced himself and indulged in some cheap wit which he faithfully records.

“Do you drink?” Prentice asked.

“Never,” Joyce replied, like a flash, “except when alone or in company.”

Uplifted by this brilliant exchange, the two proceeded to the Gait House and were ushered into a wine-room back of the bar where Prentice was very much at home, and where Major Silas Miller, the proprietor of the house, and two or three friends joined them. Two bottles of Piper Heidseick were ordered by Prentice and presently two more by Joyce, who was unusually rich with four months’ back pay in his pocket, and the talk was so clever that Joyce says he imagined himself “at the club with Johnson, Garrick, Beauclerc, and Goldsmith.”